Mícheál Halpin
My thoughts on lots of random things,ranging from Sys Admin and Programming, through to Travel and Lifestyle.
January 20, 2012 by Mícheál

Why not to use Fadas in Windows user names (or other non-standard accents)

My new laptop arrived earlier in the week (I’ll do a review at some stage later), and while setting it up I chose a user name with an English spelling, because of issues I had previously on my old laptop.

Originally on my last machine I had a user name with “Mícheál” as the user name (for non Irish speakers the accent over the “i” and “a” is called a fada. Alt Gr + “i” give the “í”, Alt Gr + “a” give the “á”). And while this caused no problems 99% of the time , there were 2 times it caused hassle:

  1. some apps would install apparently correctly but would have problems with paths
  2. dialling in remotely would cause problems if I didn’t have a keyboard configured as Irish on the remote side.

I could porbably work around the second point if I could rememeber the French version (the acute I believe, might need to check there are no accents needed for that!) of the letters. But it was the first point that caused the most hassle.

I use the SpringSource Tool Suite as my IDE for Java, which is based on Eclipse. But I eventually figured out that a lot of weird issues were arising from the fact that Eclipse (or in some cases Maven), were having issues in reading file paths with the fadas (ie c:\user\Mícheál). While some locations would show fine, others would render with garbage characters in place of the Irish characters, and in some places the characters were just stripped out completely (eg c:\users\Mchel).

Anyway, I’m sure there are proper work arounds (I just created a c:\sts folder and installed into that), but prevention being better than  a cure this time I just created a user with all English characters.

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January 9, 2012 by Mícheál

WordPress, Google Analytics and Plugins

Today I spent a little bit of time adding Google Analytics in to the site, and found a few things that took some digging to set up. Setting up a Google Analytics account is easy, and all you have to do is add some javascript similar to this (obviously the account and domain name will be different:

<script type="text/javascript">

  var _gaq = _gaq || [];
  _gaq.push(['_setAccount', 'UA-28114660-1']);
  _gaq.push(['_setDomainName', 'michealhalpin.com']);
  _gaq.push(['_trackPageview']);

  (function() {
    var ga = document.createElement('script'); ga.type = 'text/javascript'; ga.async = true;
    ga.src = ('https:' == document.location.protocol ? 'https://ssl' : 'http://www') + '.google-analytics.com/ga.js';
    var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(ga, s);
  })();

</script>

Basically this code is used by Google to track the visitors to your site. On a self-hosted wordpress site like this one it’s very easy to add, I simply added this in to the header.php file. Simples!

But since I have 2 blogs, this one which runs WordPress.org software, and my cycling blog which is hosted on wordpress.com I thought I would add the functionality to the cycling blog. Because they both run WordPress I thought they would be identical: I was wrong.

Basically wordpress.com is used to host and deploy wordpress sites rather quickly. Basically it’s an all-in-solution.

WordPress.org however is different in that this is the CMS engine that you use to run your own site, on a different host. It’s more basic out of the box, and needs more to get it up and running. But the difference is that it’s a lot more customisable.

Probably one of the biggest differences is that .org sites all you to add in plugins, but the .com do not. Also you can’t edit the php files (although I stand to be corrected, I only looked at this for a few minutes earlier). (Plugins are basically small pieces of code used to add functionality to a site. For example I use the code snippet plugin to display code like the Google examples on the page. It’s a lot easier than coding the HTML manually!)

So, long story short if you want to use plugins on your wordpress site a standard wordpress.com site won’t do you, either have to get someone to host it (or host it yourself) or upgrade your wordpress account to VIP (sounds expensive)

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January 4, 2012 by Mícheál

New Hardware for 2012

For the last 4 years I’ve been using a HP Pavilion tx2130ea laptop as my primary home laptop, and now it’s time for an upgrade.

What’s wrong?

At the time I selected it the main features that interested me were it’s size and portability. Plus it had the novelty of being able to convert to a tablet, but to be honest it’s not something I’ve ever used it for. At the time it was a decent spec (upgraded to 4GB, got a 12 battery), but lately it’s just crashing more and more, due to overheating issues. 2 years ago I had to send it off for a replacement motherboard, which I believe was also caused by over-heating, and for the last month or so it’s shutting off on a regular basis due to overheating.

There is always good air flow and I’ve even throttled the CPU back to 75%. But it is now crashing even if it’s only running one site (admittedly Adobe Connect is heavy on usage, but CPU isn’t hitting 100%). So when I have a replacement in place I’ll retire this one to just a backup for web surfing. I’m worried I’ll lose some work at some stage, thankfully due to dropbox and github I haven’t lost much… yet!

What I’m looking at

Because I’m looking to do more development (java and front-end) I initially considered the MacBook Air 13″. It’s light, portable and seems to be powerful enough for 99% of what I want it to do. Plus it doesn’t seem to overheat! But there are 2 drawbacks. The main one is the cost, it’s coming in at over €1500. And the other is that it’s not Windows.

I’m actually very interested in getting a Mac, mainly to see what all the fuss is about. And I know everything I need to run on it is available (STS, Apstana, Football Manager :-) ) but given that I’m going to be fairly busy working on projects and learning new skills as I go, a new OS is one variable I could do without.

So I looked at some Ultrabooks, and while some seem to be better than others, ultimately none of the first gen machines match the MacBook Air. So this got me thinking, do I need an Air/Ultrabook? 95% of the time the laptop is my house, either on the desk, kitchen table or I use it on the couch. And since I ordered an iPad (see below) portability becomes less of a factor. So why not bite the bullet and just get something with a bit more horsepower, for less money?

With that in mind I started doing some research, and the current front runner is the Samsung 7 series. It has an i7 processor (as opposed to i3 or more commonly i5), 8 GB of RAM and runs the same OS I’m already running, so compatibility shouldn’t be a problem. The big question mark at the minute is down to the touchpad/keyboard. So I’m going to do a bit more research, possibly look at an external keyboard and docking station. But given the price (currently less than €1100) it’s about €500 cheaper than the MBA I was looking at, I think it’s more than likely that I will order within the next week

iPad 2

I ordered an iPad 2 16Gb wifi today, the justification is that I hope to use it as part of my Masters project. But I also hope to use it a bit when travelling. I’ve used iPod touchs and a few iPhones, so I’m very familiar with iOS and have a stable of apps already built up, so it should be useful. Plus I found an interesting blog on a programmer who swapped his MacBook for iPad and the cloud. While his workload was very suited to this set-up it won’t work for everyone. But I’d be interested in seeing how much I can actually do using just an iPad. I was very tempted to start buying every accessory on the Apple Store, but given a tight budget the only thing I’ve bought is an Otterbox Reflex case (from Amazon), which can also be used as a stand. I’ve used Otterbox cases before on my iPhones, so this seems like a good choice. As time goes on I’ll decide if I actually do need anything else, but I’m not going to spend €70 on an Apple keyboard if I don’t actually need it!

I also have one of the original Samsung galaxy tabs which I bought last September (about €250 new on eBay), which I had originally intended to use more for the coursework (watching lectures with Adobe Connect, reading eBooks and papers etc), but haven’t used it as much as I thought. It’s much heavier than I expected, and I find Android disappointingly buggy. Apps crash frequently, and the wifi will often present as disconnected to apps trying to use it, even when on screen it shows as connected. In fairness it is the first gen, and I did get it cheap, but apart from checking email and some social network stuff I don’t use it as often as I thought I would. The same apps on my iPhone are much easier and slicker, so I can see the iPad being used a lot more.

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January 1, 2012 by Mícheál

First Post!

I have been working in IT for the last 8 years, and since it’s January 1st I thought it was as good a time as any to finally getting around to setting up a blog.

In my day job I’m a sys admin and FoxPro developer in a Windows environment. But I’m also studying for a Masters in Cloud Computing in CIT. So as well as posting on things relevant to my day job I’ll also be posting on work around my masters.

My Masters project will (hopefully) involve deploying a web app on Amazon Web Services (AWS), so I should be posting on things relevant to this, as well as front-end (HTML/CSS/JavaScript) and Java/Spring MVC as well. And since the target client device will be an iPad I’m going to use Mobile jQuery to make it a bit flashier.

At some stage as well I’d like to tweak the colours in the theme, but that’s only for a quiet day!

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