ZuniSoft

I thought I would make a quick comment on the knowledge base articles I have posted over the last couple of years. Someone recently asked why I would post an article on setting the JAVA_HOME environment variable in Ubuntu.

Like many Linux distributions, each one can have a slightly different way of doing something simple such as globally setting an environment variable. When I found the answer, I was going to put it in Tomboy. I thought, why not share my answer by adding it to a special category in my blog instead. In the past, I have found answers to technical questions on the web by others willing to share their knowledge. I decided to return the favor.

Some of my KB articles can be a little on the terse side, verging on being half-baked brain dumps to more useful step by step instructions on how to accomplish something. I hope some of you find them useful nonetheless!

XAMPP SSL Configuration on Ubuntu Linux. Read the rest of this entry »

To recursively remove .svn directories from the current working directory directory (Unix only):

rm -rf `find . -name .svn`

Guide for setting up NetBeans with the Zend Framework on Ubuntu Linux. Read the rest of this entry »

After playing around with BlogEngine.NET for the last couple of months, I have decided to retire it and go back to WordPress. The bottom line is the software is not quite ready for Mono and Linux. There always seemed to be some minor issue to overcome whether it was installing a plugin or figuring out why your session was expiring unexpectedly. Most of these problems were related to subtleties in Mono’s implementation of .NET and while they were not show stoppers, they always seemed to get in the way of using the tool for its designed purpose.

I might have stuck with BE however, the project lacks any sort of unit or integration testing which would help with the quality of the releases. There appeared to be a number of bugs and discussion topics related to regression failures which confirmed this is a problem that could be mitigated through some sort of testing discipline.

I would like to thank the BlogEngine developers for creating a feature packed open source tool.  Please consider taking a test driven approach with future versions of BE and you will have a winner!

The past month has been an in depth investigation of developing .NET applications on Ubuntu using Mono. The experiment was quite simple, use Mono and MonoDevelop to create a simple ASP.NET application. The test application was built using Mono 1.9.1 and MonoDevelop 2.0 from the SVN repository (trunk).

The application makes use of master pages and the membership API. I used the membership providers from the BlogEngine.NET project to save time. Putting the application together with MonoDevelop was not difficult however, it would have been nice to have a shortcut for adding page events to the code-behind instead of from memory or the API documentation. If this functionality exists, perhaps a reader could kindly point out how to use it.

After a couple of hours I have this little test application that serves pages to authenticated users with role based authorization. I am feeling pretty good at this point and I am ready to move to the next part of my evaluation, unit testing. This is where MonoDevelop’s warts start to surface and although I am using an alpha version of the IDE, the problem encountered has been reported in the past on the Mono mailing lists and Novell’s Bugzilla. Read the rest of this entry »

Here is a short example of a recursive stored procedure.  It returns the nth piece of a delimited text string using recursion.  There are better performing methods for doing this type of task, however, I found it an interesting exercise none the less. Read the rest of this entry »

Here is a stored procedure that I find useful for generating a data dictionary on the fly for a SQL Server database.  The core of the procedure was pieced together from other scripts I found on the web.  This stored procedure should run without modification on SQL Server 2000, 2005 and 2008.  The only required parameter is the name of the schema to document. Read the rest of this entry »

I started creating Cactus unit tests for a number of servlet filters in openEPRS.  I didn’t get far before encountering a number of strange problems.  For the life of me I could not get the cactifywar ant task to add a FilterRedirector to my project’s web.xml.  I posted a number of questions to the Cactus user’s mailing list and although I received excellent support from Petar Tahchiev, we could not determine what was causing the problem.  I decided to RTFM and to make a long story short… Read the rest of this entry »

Since upgrading my ancient Gateway 6400 server to Ubuntu 7.10 (Gutsy), the system has experienced a number of random lockups. I have been working on trying to resolve the problem for a solid week with limited success. I hope this article may be of some use to those experiencing similar problems with the latest Ubuntu server distribution. Read the rest of this entry »