Linux Girl

21 Oct, 2006

So, every once and awhile Amarok decides that it wants to constantly crash.

After digging around, and Googling for the exact error message ([doria@localhost ~]$ Don't run gdb, valgrind, etc. against this binary! Use amarokapp. QLayout: Adding KToolBar/mainToolBar (child of QVBox/unnamed) to layout for PlaylistWindow/PlaylistWindow kio (Scheduler): FATAL: BUG! _ScheduleJob(): No extraJobData for job!) I stumbled across this page, explaining my exact problem and how to fix it. http://telin.ugent.be/~slippens/drupal/node/127

Just in case you don't RTFA, he basically explains that the problem is with the cover manager (shows you little picture of the album cover) and the connection between the cover art and Amazon.com and the file that is affected is .kde/share/apps/amarok/collection.db which also holds all of the stats for each song (ranking, how many times it's been played, &c.)

It worked exactly the way the kind gentleman who posted said it would. Amarok runs, and I still have all my statistical data.

Unfortunately, the last time this happened (exact same error message), I did not find that site and resorted to completely deleting my collection.db file

This is why I absolutely adore open source software. If you don't find the problem the first time it happens, if it happens again someone else will have had the same problem and found a way to fix it. Which is especially helpful to me because I would have no idea how to fix it.

I am assuming that because this is the second time I have had a problem with it that it may be ongoing and could have to do with expiry on the album art thumbnails. But, who am I to conject.

31 Aug, 2006

I've got a new kernel! Aren't we all excited?! The most exciting parts are that my wireless card works, my boot time is much shorter, and I haven't run into any problems. Though, in the Kernel's defense, i never really have too many problems when I update my kernel, it's usually when I update X that I have huge issues.

Anybody know of any problems that I should look out for?

20 Aug, 2006

My sister, Chelsea, called me and told me that she had to get a new hard drive from Dell because hers was hosed. She had expressed previous interest in using Linux and she asked me if she should just install Mandriva on her new hard drive and not install Windows at all.

I explained to her that it wouldn't be a good idea to not install Windows.

It sucks that I had to tell her that. The main reason being that it just isn't possible for a college student to use Linux exclusively.

Yeah, openOffice.org is great, and it really is awesome that you can save in Microsoft Office formats, but writing papers isn't the only thing that college students have to deal with these days. If it was, I would probably just use my typewriter.

The advent of the Internet has made the process of educating students much more complex. We have Web articles we have to read, Web applications we need to use for taking tests, course management tools for leading classes over the Internet. For example, there is no way to upload files in WebCT with any browser other than Internet Explorer.

Browser compatabilty is a big issue to Linux users, but a student can't just be a zealot and say "Well, if it doesn't work in I won't just won't use it." Student zealots get failing grades.

And that doesn't even touch on the fact that sometimes shit is gonna break in Linux and then what? What happens if it's finals week, you can't boot into Linux, have no idea why, and the one person that you know that is a Linux guru is on a plane to Japan? Seriously, what then? Then you are screwed. It happens, trust me.

17 Aug, 2006

So, I have been trying to do an rss feed for tokyobogue.com but it just doesn't seem to like me.

It will parse just fine in aKregator, which is an awesome rss reader that comes stock (at least I think it does) in Kontact.

But I just tried to load it in the Sage extension for Firefox in Windows (yeah, I know, but I need to use windows at work) and I get an XML parse error.

Now, usually, this has to do with my love of using ampersands (or andasands as my sister calls them) all over the place instead of & and that usually does create problems with aKregator, but I fixed the problem a couple days ago when I updated the feed.

I know very little about XML and even less about rss, and when I made the feed all I did was copy and paste the XML from someone else's feed and reworked it.

I just ran the file through a validator and it came back with a bunch of problems. The biggest of which is that I am doing a php include() of the html file that contains all the text. It doesn't like

tags apparently.
line 54, column 1: Undefined description element: p (87 occurrences)


Any suggestions on how to get around the

tag problem? Do I have to do something special with XML so that it recognizes the tag?

I can't fix anything from here because I can't get fish:// access in windows, at least not that I am aware of.

I will take another look at it when I get home and see if I am able to fix it. If I can't I will post the code and see if I can get some feedback.