Archive for the ‘Tech’ Category

If you are using Flex Builder on Windows, you may run into an error where Flex Builder says it is unable to find the executable for Flash Player. The error will look something like the one below.

Flash Builder cannot locate the required version of Adobe Flash Player. You might need to install the FLash Player or reinstall Flash Builder.

Do you want to try and run your application with the current version?

This will give you an attempt to continue dialog with a yes or no option. If you click yes then you would get another error similar to the following.

Cannot run program "C:\Users\chris\Desktop\flashplayer_11_sa_debug_32bit.exe": CreateProcess error=2, The System cannot find the file specified

You can fix this by following the steps below.

1. Go to the Adobe website and download the standalone Flash Player Debugger edition.

2. Open up Notepad and insert some text (literally, anything).

3. Save the file as dummy.swf on your Desktop.

4. Open your Desktop and right click on the file. Select “open with…”

5. Browse to the location of the Flash Debugger you downloaded and select it, making sure to tick the “always open these types of file” option.

From now on, you should be able to run the application from Flash Builder.

Over the years, the Worfolk Online network has run a lot of technical websites. Dozens and dozens of them. Each one had a selection of interesting and useful content, which for one reason or anther has since been closed down.

So, we decided to rescue them.

The result is that we’re currently working on importing articles from a number of old websites from our network.

It’s stretching our remit a little further than we already do – most of the articles are about web development and programming, but we thought it would be better to put them on here then for them to be lost forever – though that’s probably a big claim given how old the content is in some of them – it’s things we haven’t been doing for a decade!

Never the less, you may notice that our archives now date back to before the site was even founded in 2005. This is as a result of the new content we have brought on board and with articles dating back to 2002, we are now pulling together resources from the past decade!

Need to uncompress a .tar.gz file from the terminal? No problem.

tar xvzf filename.tar.gz

Hello everyone! I just wanted to post a quick update on what the status of the site was now.

We first acquired Hardware Tutorials back in 2005, but since then there hasn’t been much content added to it – and indeed the content that was posted back then wasn’t exactly amazing quality. But for prosperity sake, we have kept it.

Never the less, it has always been an ambition to develop the site further and one thing I constantly find myself doing at work is googling for solutions to problems, usually when I’m trying to install something, usually on CentOS. Though that isn’t to say I don’t have my fair share of problems dealing with OS X, Windows 7 and Fedora too.

Rather than just leaving the solutions I eventually find for these problems, Hardware Tutorials seems a reasonably appropriate place to post such solutions – a lot of it isn’t strictly hardware, but as I said in my opening post six years ago, we would almost certainly be straying from that criteria anyway.

So please enjoy the new and updated Hardware Tutorials. Hopefully, you will be seeing a lot more regularly updated content from now on.

Following on from my previous post about installing Git on CentOS 4, CentOS 5 is a whole different story. This is because you actually can get the RPM for Git on Cent OS – but cPanel doesn’t make it quite easy enough to do it.

You see, cPanel likes to take control of a lot of it’s own stuff, so it has a long list of packages which it won’t update automatically, because it will end up breaking itself if it does. As Git has two dependencies from the Perl libraries, this causes a problem.

But we can easily fix that.

cd /etc/
vim yum.conf

Remove perl* from the exclude line, then save the file. Now you should be able to run the command.

yum install git

It will gather all the dependencies and install Git. Final step, go back into the YUM configuration and put the exclude pack in to protect cPanel from its malevolent self.

vim yum.conf

If you’re trying to install Git on CentOS with cPanel, you’ll probably be running into the problems where you can’t get hold the RPM because cPanel excludes all Perl modules. But that is a whole different problem to if you are running CentOS 4.

CentOS 4 doesn’t actually have the RPMs for Git at all. But luckily, it’s actually really easy to install on a cPanel server because cPanel should come will all the dependencies you need.

So, all you need to do is head over to the Git website, download the latest source (I tried it with v1.7.8.1) and compile it – no problems, no worries.

wget http://git-core.googlecode.com/files/git-1.7.8.1.tar.gz
tar xvzf git-1.7.8.1.tar.gz
cd git-1.7.8.1
./configure
make
make install

Eight years ago, I was outgrowing my current hosting package, and needed to find pastures new. So I headed over to a web hosting forum and found a post about a company named Real Value Hosting. They seemed to have everything I needed, and a reasonable price, so I decided to give them a go and sign up.

Little did I know at the time, but I was actually their second customer to sign up!

Eight years later and I’m still a happy customer. There have been a few glitches over the years as you would expect with any host, but overall I am more than satisfied and their support response times have always been reasonably quick and consistent, which is probably the biggest concern when selecting a hosting company.

As I’ve now migrated my entire online portfolio onto the LAMP stack, I’ve recently retired my reseller account with them, but I would highly recommend it to those looking for a Windows hosting provider.

No, this isn’t another ridiculous situation at Sainsbury’s, I’m talking about the “please confirm you are ana adult” boxes that are constantly popping up on my iPhone, 4OD and BBC iPlayer.

I understand that such apps probably need to confirm that I am over 18 for legal reasons. The problem is that they ask me every time. I’m sure that my date of birth is somewhere in my profile, and even if it wasn’t, the app could prompt me to enter it once and then have done with it.

But it doesn’t, my 4OD app continues to prompt me to confirm I am old enough every time I open it.

Now, even if you accept the idea that a child could steal my iPad and decide the first thing they want to do is watch some video that isn’t appropriate for them on 4OD and hence they need to confirm it every single time, why can they broadcast such shows on TV without requiring such a mechanism.

The answer is the Watershed. After 9pm at night you can broadcast much more filth on TV. But if you’re going to argue down that line, given my device knows what time it is, why can the app not stop prompting me between 9pm and 5:30am?

Having recently upgraded to iOS 5, I thought great! I’ll be able to use iCloud to send the photos from my iPhone straight to my laptop using Photo Stream and that will be the end of it.

No more will I have to connect my phone up using my cable, then open iPhoto, then import the photos into iPhone, then select the photos and click “Show in Finder.”

But of course, it isn’t actually as simple as that.

I opened up iPhone, the one that comes with my Mac and didn’t know anything about Photo Stream. Turns out you have to get the new version of iPhone, and that costs £10.49. I reluctantly did, and then found the Photo Stream option and turned it on.

But no photos appeared.

I waited a day or two in case it only synced once every twenty four hours. Still no photos appeared.

So in the end I plugged my iPhone into my Mac and imported the pictures into iPhoto manually. Then I went to right click on the photos to go to “Show in Finder” so I could get them. But that option seems to have disappeared.

In fact, the only way I seemed to be able to get them out was to connect my gMail account to iPhone and email them to myself.

Good work there Tim, I would like my £10.49 back.

I recently updated my MacBook Pro to the new version of OSX, Lion.

So far, I’m not overly impressed. Firstly, when I upgraded Finder totally broke itself. It added a number of documents to the devices bar on the left, which I couldn’t click on, but because they had a long filename they would expand the devices bar all the way over, so every time I opened a Finder window I had to drag it back.

They’ve also got rid of Spaces which allows you to have multiple desktops. They’ve replaced this with Desktops, which is basically the same thing, except that you can only tile them horizontally, whereas before you could set up a grid and scroll each way. Desktops is quite good because you you can gesture from one to the other, but I Miss my grid.

They’ve also taken Dashboard and moved it onto it’s own Desktop which is annoying because the only time I use Dashboard is when I need a calculator, and I need it as an overlay because I want to input some figures which I’m currently looking at.

Some of the new gestures are quite nice, but I now need to use five fingers to show my desktop, which is quite a difficult gesture to perform. I’ve also noticed that it’s just not quite as fast as Snow Leopard and the new full screen apps system just isn’t as seamless as it is in Microsoft Windows. Finally, there are just a few bugs too that need working out, especially with the new scrolling system.

Other than that, it has some quite nice features. I haven’t used Launchpad or Mission Control so I’m not too fussed about those, but gesturing between Desktops is good and being able to turn wi-fi on and off without being prompted for the admin password is good. Unfortunately, if that is all I have to say about a brand new version of an operating system, it’s a bit of a poor show.