At work, a colleague is struggling to get his pc up and running for a few days now. To add insult to injury, he also lost some of his Microsoft Outlook back up emails.
Seeing what happened to him, I shall back up my files and emails too.

I use Mozilla Thunderbird (2.0.0.22), and I found a very nice tool to back up the emails (a.k.a profile). It’s called MozBackup.

I thought I should share this with others who use Thunderbird too.

UPDATE Log
SET Username = u.Username, Name = u.Name
FROM Users u
Where u.Id = userid

Source: codesnippets.joyent.com

Occasionally, I need to reset the value of the identity column in MS SQL database. I keep forgetting how to do this, and have to search all the time.
So here is a note to myself:

DBCC CHECKIDENT (TableName, RESEED, 0)

Warning: this guide is only a personal note to remind myself when I have to restore Grub again.

In my previous post, I had just installed Windows 7 as a dual boot with Debian on my Toshiba laptop. The following describe the steps taken to restore the Grub boot loader so that Debian can be started again.

I booted the laptop with Ubuntu Live CD, then open a Terminal. To get the partition tables, as a root execute the fdisk command:

# fdisk -l


In my case, / and /boot reside in /dev/sda6. Once the device has been identified, I need mount it using mount command:

# mkdir /mydisk
# mount /dev/sda6 /mydisk


Next use chroot command to start interactive shell with special root directory.

# chroot /mydisk


Now, we can reinstall grub with grub-install command:

# grub-install /dev/sda


In my case, I have a SATA drive, so the device is sda. If you have an IDE drive, it should be /dev/hda.

Reboot the system. I saw the Grub menu again, and I can boot to either Windows 7 or Debiain.

Credit: Restore Debain Linux boot loader

I just finished installing Windows 7 64-bit Ultimate edtion on my 1+ year old Toshiba laptop. The model is Satellite A200-*****.

The installation went smoothly, well almost. On the first boot, the graphic card driver, the finger print reader were automatically updated with Windows update. The only two devices which weren’t detected are: unknown device “ACPI\TOS6205″ (bluetooth) and the Texas Instrument 5-in-1 card reader. The 64-bit driver for the bluetooth can be downloaded from: http://aps2.toshiba-tro.de/bluetooth/ thanks to this post at Toshiba Laptop forum.

Unfortunately, I haven’t found the place to download the driver for the card reader yet. Oh well, it doesn’t bother me that much; so I’m just gonna leave it for now.

What’s next? I have to restore Grub bootloader so that I can boot back into Debian.

Suppose we have the following code sinppets:


private BlogDataContext db = new BlogDataContext ();
...

article.Created = DateTime.UtcNow;
article.Modified = DateTime.UtcNow;

db.Articles.InsertOnSubmit(article);
db.SubmitChanges( );

The ID of the article is automatically generated. How do we get the Id of the newly inserted record?

It turns out that the article is updated with the value of Id after the method SubmitChanges( ) is invoked. So, we can just get the Id this way:


int id = article.Id;


Credit: Read inserted Id from LINQ

There are probably a gazillion ways to do this. I use FAAC, Freeware Advanced Audio Coder, to do this job.
It works very well:


faac originalfile.wav -o outputfile.m4a


While reading Linux Journal Issue 181 today, I stumbled upon a section explaining about running Ruby on Rails on Apache using an Apache module called Phusion Passenger, also known as mod_rails.

To install Passenger, I followed the instruction provided in the magazine:

sudo gem install passenger

Unxpectedly, I got the following error:

Building native extensions. This could take a while...
ERROR: Error installing passenger:
ERROR: Failed to build gem native extension.

Gem files will remain installed in /usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/fastthread-1.0.7 for inspection.
Results logged to /usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/fastthread-1.0.7/ext/fastthread/gem_make.out

What’s happening? What did I do wrong?

According to a blog post by Al Hoang, a Ruby dev package needed to be installed. Well, I wouldn’t have a clue about this!

So, to FIX this, I need to install ruby1.8-dev:

$ sudo apt-get install ruby1.8-dev
...

Now, I’m ready to install Passenger gem:

$ sudo gem install passenger
Building native extensions. This could take a while...
Successfully installed passenger-2.2.4
1 gem installed
Installing ri documentation for passenger-2.2.4...
Installing RDoc documentation for passenger-2.2.4...

Credit: Fixing ‘mkmf’ load error Ruby in Ubuntu

Warning: The following is for personal note only, and is not meant to be a tutorial or guide.

On Debian server at work, we have /home reside on /dev/hda6 and I want to move to a new hard disk /dev/hdb.

First, I need to format /dev/hdb using fdisk. Then use dd to copy the content from /dev/hda6 to /dev/hdb1, the newly createdd ext3 partition.

# dd if=/dev/hda6 of=/dev/hdb1 bs=1024

The above commands instruct dd to read the content from /dev/hda6 and write it to /dev/hdb1. bs=1024 sets the block size to 1024 bytes.

dd takes a while depends on how big is your hard disk. Then, there is one final step to do — to re-size /dev/hdb1 to its maximum capacity.

# e2fsck -f /dev/hdb1

Now we can resize the file system in /dev/dhb1 partition. If we don’t specify the size, then resize2fs will assume the largest:

# resize2fs /dev/hdb1

# fsck -n /dev/hb1

Aaaahhh… I fixed the Pidgin problem with Unknow protocol just 5 minutes after the previous post was made. I’m going to write how I found out the problem and how it has been fixed. If you’re interested, keep reading.

In the previous post, I mentioned that I would removed the Pidgin package completely including its configuration file (# apt-get –purge remove pidgin.) I did and followed by re-installation of Pidgin, unfortunately, it didn’t fix anything.

Then I checked the About dialog (Help -> About), and I noticed the libpurple 2.5.4 under Pidgin 2.5.6. This must be the source of the problem! But I remember libpurple has been upgraded to 2.5.6 and it said so in Aptitude. So what could be possibly wrong?

A while back, I have installed Pidgin from source code, however I was quite sure that it has been properly removed — I went into the Pidgin source and execute # make uninstall.Well, according to this Bug #385639, libpurple is still present in /usr/local/

kenno@san7:/usr/local/lib
$ ls
finch                      libpurple.so.0      pkgconfig  site_ruby
gnt                        libpurple.so.0.5.4  purple-2   xemacs
libpurple-client.so.0      perl                python2.4
libpurple-client.so.0.5.4  pidgin              python2.5
kenno@san7:/usr/local/lib

So, I need to remove these unwated libraries manually:

kenno@san7:/usr/local/lib
$ sudo rm libpurple*

Now, let’s run Pidgin again…and… that’s it. The problem has been fixed!

For the record, I have upgraded Pidgin to 2.5.8 (unstable package at the time of this post is written) and everything works as expected. Now, I’m back to a happy Pidgin user.