Unwanted knowledge

As the days go by, more and more I realize that there won’t be enough time for me to learn everything I wish to know. The irony is that this is the one thing I wish I didn’t know.

Link

Get Tunnelblick to work with Mountain Lion

If you use Tunnelblick for your VPN access you may find that the stable version doesn’t work on Mountain Lion. You can use the beta version of Tunnelblick instead.

This guide helped me out.

Water: A Worthy Cause

I found this on Twitter and thought I should spread the word. It is a charity campaign to fund clean water on developing countries.

You can read Alyssa Milano’s tweet here: http://twitter.com/Alyssa_Milano/status/11476551942012928

Help Alyssa reach her goal. Even if you can’t donate, you can help by spreading the word.

http://mycharitywater.org/Alyssa38BDay

Peace.

A Brief Guide to World Domination

If you feel like you’re stuck and you need to change your life in a significant way maybe you should read Chris Guillebeau’s manifesto. I found it very inspiring and thought-provoking.

I highly recommend it.

A Brief Guide to World Domination

Read more about Chris and his incredible travel goal here.

DB2 Control Center on Linux shows blank window

Man, I hadn’t posted anything in a while.

Anyway, I was having trouble getting the DB2 Control Center (db2cc) to work on Ubuntu 8.04 (Hardy.) Whenever I tried to run db2cc all I was getting was a blank gray window and found that setting the following variable makes it work:

AWT_TOOLKIT=MToolkit

You can set this automatically by adding the following to your .bashrc or .profile file:

export AWT_TOOLKIT=MToolkit

By the way, I found this quick solution on this forum. Hope this helps.

Updating RubyGems on OS X

I just took a peek at the Ruby on Rails site and version 2.2 is almost out. Since I haven’t been using Ruby or Rails in a while I’ve noticed a lot of changes, so I think I’m gonna start playing with it again – specially since version 2.2 includes i18n, which is what I’ve been waiting for.

So, according to Rails’ creator, I need RubyGems 1.3.1 so I can start playing with Rails 2.2 RC2. Ok, I don’t have a problem with that. Let’s update RubyGems:

$ sudo gem update –system
Updating RubyGems
Bulk updating Gem source index for: http://gems.rubyforge.org/
Nothing to update

Hmm. I’m pretty sure I don’t have the newest version, but I’ll check anyway just in case.

$ gem -v
1.1.1

I thought so. So how come I can’t update? After doing a google search I found I had to try this:

$ sudo gem install rubygems-update
Bulk updating Gem source index for: http://gems.rubyforge.org/
Successfully installed rubygems-update-1.3.1
1 gem installed

$ sudo update_rubygems
…
RubyGems installed the following executables:
        /usr/local/bin/gem
If `gem` was installed by a previous RubyGems installation, you may need
to remove it by hand. 

Let’s just do a quick check:

$ gem -v
1.3.1

There we go! Now we’re ready for Rails 2.2 RC2.

Radiohead Live

If you, like myself, are not one of the lucky people who attended the Radiohead show in Santa Barbara last August – and even if you did – then you should check out this story.

You can listen to the whole show online or download it if you subscribe to a podcast. So naturally I had to post this.

Enjoy!

DB2 on Ubuntu: “Database is damaged” error

If you installed DB2 Express-C 9.5 on Ubuntu and can’t create any databases because of the following error:

SQL1034C The database is damaged. All applications processing the database
have been stopped. SQLSTATE=58031

Try adding the following to the /home/db2inst1/.bashrc file:

export LC_ALL=C

This happened to me running Ubuntu in Spanish and the above environment variable fixed the problem. I can now create and use databases.

By the way, I found this solution here.

No grep in Windows? No problem.

Just a quick tip. I’ve always complained that Windows doesn’t have the grep command but you can use the Windows find command the same way.

For example, in Linux you can do:

$ cat /etc/services | grep “http”

The equivalent in Windows would be:

c:\> type \Windows\system32\drivers\etc\services | find “http”

Try it.

The Story of Stuff

A friend of mine sent me a link to a very interesting video clip on consumerism. The clip is only about 20 minutes long and I highly recommend it.

Here’s a teaser:

You can view the entire video online at The Story of Stuff website.

You can also download it here or order a DVD.

And if you want to know more about the topics discussed or want to learn about things you can do to contribute they have a resources page that can help you learn more.