SVN Tip for Sakai

When your working on a checkout of Sakai and editing files across multiple projects it can be handy to see what you have changed, svn status is normally the way todo this but due to the number of external definitions in Sakai it produces allot of output which can't easily be suppressed. Piping this through egrep and tr can clean things up.

svn status | egrep -v "^(Perform|X)" | tr -s "\n"

Gives a nice concise output as though those externals didn't exist. Aliasing this to something like svnst makes it easy to get back to.

NoMachine Client in Fullscreen

I have recently discovered the machine that is NoMachine and am using it to connect to my work computer from outside the office. So far it seems to work really well. The only thing is that I like to run it in fullscreen mode and was struggling to find out how to return to my local desktop. Eventually I found this post about NX which provided all the solutions. In summary the options are:

Clicking on the top right pixel

Minimises the NX Client and returns you to your client desktop.

CTRL-ALT-M

Same as above

CTRL-ALT-T

Brings up a popup asking if I want to terminate the session or just disconnect from it.

Now if only they had a client of Mac OSX which supported fullscreen mode.

Sakai Sessions and UsageSession

Having just been looking at these for a little while I thought I'd document them a little. The basic setup is that the Sakai Session is your session with the application and is very similar to a HttpSession. Your Session is setup for each request by the Sakai RequestFilter. The UsageSession on the other hand is your logged usage of the application amd is mainly there so that you can enumerate all the active UsageSessions. The UsageSession is actually store in the Session and is mainly used for presence.

However just to confuse things a little the UsageSessionService (manages UsageSessions) has some very important methods, login() and logout(). These setup and destroy your Session and UsageSession at the same time. Login tools in Sakai should call UsageSession.login() to setup the Sakai session with the authenticated user details.

Formatting with Styles

There is a very clear post from darcusblog about how having a good UI can encourage people to use styles in their document. Unsurprisingly the company with the good UI is Apple, but it shows that a good UI can guide users into good practices.

More Kerberos Puzzlers

Ok so when trying to kerberos enable another machine for ssh connections things were almost working (getting offered kerberos for authentication by sshd) but connections were always failing with the following error message in the logs:

Jul 17 12:33:46 machine sshd[5020]: debug1: An invalid name was supplied\nHostn
ame cannot be canonicalized\n

Now after looking through pages of google it seemed to be that there was something wrong with the hostname but looking on other machines they had very similar setups and were working correctly. The reason for this message was that I think that kerberos was using the hostname for kerberos and couldn't find an entry for the hostname in DNS. The reason it couldn't find a hostname was the there wasn't a search entry in /etc/resolv.conf specifying the domain to look in, adding search oucs.ox.ac.uk to /etc/resolv.conf fixed the problem and everything worked fine.

Hopefully this post might help someone else from scratching hole in their head. But it would have been much easier to debug if the invalid hostname was logged in the message.

svn_load_dirs.pl and Ubuntu

I need to do some vendor drops with Subversion and the documentation seems to point to svn_load_dirs.pl as being the best place to start. So I install subversion and subversion-tools onto my Ubuntu system only to find that I don't seem to have a svn_load_dirs.pl installed. After a little bit of digging it seems that svn_load_dirs.pl was removed from the Debian package (which the Ubuntu one is based) due to licensing concerns although this isn't very clear as the changelog doesn't explain that this was one of the affected files. So it looks like I need to get myself a copy of the source distribution.

Ethiopian Food in Amsterdam

Had some really nice food in Amsterdam last night, after a drink we ended up at an Ethiopian Restaurant suggested by Adam. I had some Gored Gored but we all ended up sharing as it came on a big plate. Good company and good food.