Entries by Filip Van Raemdonck

While I did not aim for it, it was a little disappointing to learn that I got soooooo close to hitting #350000.

Not sure that I have enough of it, but I can try anyway. Here's one for the unlucky administrators who have an Exchange server amidst their server farm.
If a windows server running Exchange 2003 logs the following error event in the System log when it is restarted:

Access denied attempting to launch a DCOM Server. The server is:
{9DA0E106-86CE-11D1-8699-00C04FB98036}
The user is SYSTEM/NT AUTHORITY, SID=S-1-5-18.

then one possible cause is that the Microsoft Search service is missing a startup dependency on the Exchange Information Store – which is not obvious from anything in the event message or the surrounding ones. Searching the web does not list anything relevant at first either, you have to check lower ranked results to find the solution listed in the post by user "zeeshan_xt" in this message board thread. Hopefully this post helps it move up a bit.

Last evening when I left work it was snowing but only lightly, what fell did not really stay lying on the roads. I decided it was safe enough to still drive home by motorcycle.

A few kilometres further, suddenly thick flakes started falling out and soon I had to open up my wind shield because I could not keep up wiping it my hand to remove the snow that stuck on it. Off course, even at 30 km/h it is not exactly funny to get icy snowflakes into your eyes. What was worse, by the time the snow started falling seriously I had gotten onto the highway and I could not immediately turn around or get off.

Since it was snowing steadily and heavily, a several cm thick carpet started building. After another few kilometres I had to pull aside because I could no longer keep my bike on track and I called for an uncle who owns a van to come and pick me up. So he did; when we drove off it turned out that only one or two kilometres further along the road it had hardly been snowing and a carpet had not started building up yet.

To make up for the annoyance of yesterday evening, this morning the sky looks beautiful.

Trying to build the unofficial Sarge DVD images for AMD64 today, jigdo-lite could not find several packages on the regular mirrors. Next it tried to fallback to amd64-cdsnap.debian.net, which I believe is a mirror listed in the jigdo template, but still failed to find them over there. Browsing the port pages, I found out that the Sarge release for amd64 is hosted on amd64.debian.net rather than that -cdsnap location. It seems those jigdo templates need an update...

It so happened that my ibook had a 8GiB free space area at the end of the hard drive, and therefore I decided to wanted to use that for MacOS X instead of the 2GiB partition that was used for it before. Trying to avoid problems with bad partitions, I booted from the OSX installation/rescue CD and opened Disk Utility.

To play safe, I locked the existing OSX partition for editing and then assigned the 8GiB free space area to a new hfs+ partition. When I committed, suddenly the existing partition label went blank. WTF??? Had Disk Utility decided it should format what that partition as well? Great, now I'd have to reinstall anyway instead of copying things over.

I rebooted to check partition numbers in linux, but instead of the yaboot prompt I got an alternating question mark / happy face, and after a couple of seconds it booted from the rescue CD again which was still in there. Apparently my bootstrap partition got messed with too. Not funny.

I powered off and inserted a bootable linux CD to chroot into the existing system and rerun ybin. However when I tried to mount the linux root partition it would not want to do so. I checked the partition numbers with fdisk and suddenly my stomach felt like it was tied into a knot: instead of using only the free space as told, Disk Utility had wiped the entire drive and created a 2GiB partition at the beginning and assigned the remaining 28GiB to the new partition instead.

So now I'm left with a ibook shaped paperweight for the time being. Luckily I did not keep anything really important on the laptop, but I did lose some uncommitted programming work, and some of my wife's old mail. Not to mention the time I'll lose by being unable to use it the first few days and having to reinstall it instead. So people: never trust a tool tailored for dummies to something as important as disk partitioning. And to Apple: FIX THE FUCKING PROGRAM SO IT DOES AS IS IT TOLD TO DO AND NOTHING ELSE!

There has been a lot of wedding going on Planet Debian and Planet GNOME over the last couple of months, almost like another meme. Or maybe I am just seeing more of it than I normally would because I am getting wed myself today.

The weather is cloudy, but it's not raining at the moment. For the time being, that's better than it has been for most couples over here who wed in spring and summer this year: it has been raining a lot, only the past few weekends have been really good. Obviously I still hope the sun comes through though.

People have been asking me a lot lately if I was nervous about it. I wasn't, and I'm not now either. I am rather excited however, a lot more than I had expected to be. I do not even know why really; just the idea of finally being joined together, and announcing it to everyone, I think. One thing I do know for sure, which is that I'll enjoy every moment.

Say Miguel, how cross platform is your .NET? Funny to see these applications mentioned underneath that banner.

Don't get me wrong, I have nothing against Mono (or Novell), in fact I use and like the two applications that I've tried of the above — beagle and f-spot — very much. I just don't think that poster message is appropriate given the projects mentioned in the post.

Matthew, what kind of zebra are you and your wife driving then?

As I do not have feedreaders installed on every computer I use, and I'm too lazy to type in a few more characters, especially those outside the regular alphabetic range (and in addition I'm rather obsessive about having as few bookmarks as possible), I often visit Planet Debian by using Google.

Until recently, the first result when entering (without the quotes) "planet debian" was actually Debian Planet instead; but since a day or two, Planet Debian has overtaken it. Yay!

In an effort to convert a GnomeUIInfo based menu to a GtkUIManager one, I ran into a few annoying holes in the GTK+ documentation. First and foremost, the GTK+ tutorial itself is completely silent about GtkUIManager. Thankfully there is a migration whitepaper in the API reference, but it is still missing a lot of info too. For example, it does not say what the signature of the callbacks for various action entry types look like, let alone give an example how such callbacks could work. And the API reference for GtkActionGroup, which lists the various action entry types does not specify callback signatures either. Only on the GtkAction, GtkToggleAction and GtkRadioAction pages the signatures are listed. Likely because that is where the signals they connect to are documented, but neither from the migration paper nor from the GtkActionEntry page one can find this out.

Another issue is that there apparently is no replacement for the gnome_app_install_*_menu_hints calls. I'm not sure if such method should be in GTK+ itself, and if so, where it should go. Perhaps added to GtkStatusbar, or to a new higher level widget on top of GtkStatusbar (rather than an "application" type widget, I think). Or maybe simply added to gnome-app-helper as an interim solution.
But given the lack of such replacement method, a bigger problem is that no useful documentation is available on how to extract the tooltips from the gtk action entries and set them manually. The connect-proxy signal for GtkActionGroup does mention menuitem tooltips, but that's it. Perhaps I've simply missed a thorough explanation, but if there is one, shouldn't the migration paper link to it?

And finally, something which is more of a problem with the API itself, there's a lack of placeholder macros like the GNOMEUIINFO_MENU_*_ITEM ones. It's easy enough to replace them by fully written action entries, but all of a sudden menus cease to be translated as the translation strings are now part of the application rather than an underlying library. And worse, this is a setback in providing consistency, both for menu names, associated tooltip texts, and translations of both of these. (As for translations, there is a gtk_action_group_set_translate_func method, but it is not clear or explained how to use it)

Enough about this — back to coding.