Facebook lost my data!

I received an email 10 minute ago. The mail body is below

Unfortunately, the settings that control which email notifications get sent to you were lost. We're sorry for the inconvenience.
To reset your email notification settings, go to:
http://www.facebook.com/<wbr>editaccount.php?notifications
Thanks,
The Facebook Team

I was surprised very much with this. I thought that it is a phishing email but I see the sender and I logged in to my account and found this message.

Oh! it's real! I don't know what's happen at Facebook.(wait for news) but it made the image of facebook look bad. The very big website lost their member data. How about backup system?
There is no backup for the data?
After I googled about this issue, many bloggers have commented about this too. Really I love facebook more than other social networking websites. I wait for the news to know what happen to the Facebook now?

Emesene crashes during logging in

I use emesene 1.0 on Debian. It usually works great and I prefer it to pidgin.

But there are a few bugs. Emesene crashed during logging in. It'll crash everytime after it occurs the first time. I don't know why. It hardly occurs and it crashed unexpectedly. I used to see this bug a few times in the past. My friend found it too and has already found the solution. Deleting all the files in ~/.config/emesene1.0/[your_account] is the solution but you have to sacrifice your config files and preferences.

I got it crashed again. But this time I found the better solution. I digged in the file and found that deleting the PersonalMessage.conf in ~/.config/emesene1.0/[your_account] is enough.

The file contains you personal message. After I deleted it, emesene can logging in and online again. The preferences still be but only personal message not.

I took experiment something. I set presonal message to the previous personal message that's in the PersonalMessage.conf before It's deleted. It contains Thai and English word in mix. It crashed immediatly. I run it and set it again. It crashed. This time I set the personal message to only English message like "test". It didn't crash. Now I can set the previous message and crashing haven't occured anymore.

Maybe this is the clue of this bug. I'll report it to the bug tracker later.

Time conflicts in Dual-boot, UTC or Local time in BIOS?

I'm surprised that I've used dual-boot many times but I've just found this problem. There is a problem about time between Windows and others such as Debian.

The problem is
Debian (or unix-like) uses time in BIOS as UTC time
but
Windows uses time in BIOS as local time.

So the problem shows out. I'm in Thailand so my timezone is +7. If UTC time is 10:00, I boot to Debian then the time in BIOS should be 10:00 and Debian shows 17:00 as a time. Then I switch to windows , it shows the time 10:00 as my time. The time is in the past. I adjust to the right time 17:00 and windows sets it in BIOS too. If I switched to Debian again, it will show the time is 00:00 (17:00+7 hours). That's it.

The root of the problem is each OS treat time in BIOS in different ways.
So the question is "Which time should be in BIOS? UTC or local time?"

UTC - more standards and every systems can treat it in their way. It makes sense.
Local time - After I googled , why windows does it like that, there are reasons. First is backward compatibility. The former windows system such as MS-DOS or Windows 3.1 do this way so they have to do the same way to remain compatibilites and can dual-boot between Windows' family. Last is to avoid confusing on BIOS time itself. If you're in the BIOS setting and you've to set the BIOS time. Which time will you set? your local time or UTC. It makes sense that you will set it by local time. If BIOS asks you UTC time, it's a bit strange.

So I still don't know the answer of this question. But there are some workarounds to fix this problems
You need to do only one of these.

In Linux :

Edit /etc/default/rcS
by set UTC=Yes to UTC=No

or

In Windows:

Add the registry
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE System CurrentControlSet Control TimeZoneInformation RealTimeIsUniversal
and set its value to 1.
Uncheck the "Automatically synchronize with an Internet time server" in Date and Time Properties.

*I don't recommend this way because I found many people told about few following problems.

but I still don't know why I didn't found this problem when I was dual-booting Ubuntu and Windows. OR Didn't I notice this problem?

Gumstix-OE Connex on QEmu

I'm newbies to Gumstix and OpenEmbedded platform so I try to emulate it for working easier and more safety with my experiments.

From this and this tutorial , those're for verdex , you can change a bit for you connex easily.

First you have to install qemu (version 0.9.1 or later) to you system. I'm using Debian so do this way.

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install qemu

Second you need to find the 3 file for creating the qemu image. These consist of

1. 
   U-boot
   This is the boot loader for you gumstix. You can build your own from source or get the pre-built file from the gumstix webstie here.
   Example is "u-boot-connex-400-r1604.bin".

   
   



2. 
   Kernel Image
   It's the kernel for your system. It's usually start with 'uImage'. Of course you can build your own via this tutorial or pick the right pre-built image from gumstix website here. About the difference between glibc and uclibc you can googling to find out yourself.
   Example is "uImage-2.6.21-r1-gumstix-custom-connex.bin".

   
   



3. 
   Filesystem Image
   It's the files for your gumstix including many packages installed. You can built it your own from the same tutorial above or pick it here.
   Example is "Angstrom-gumstix-basic-image-glibc-ipk-2007.9-test-20080512-gumstix-custom-connex.rootfs.jffs2".
   

Now you can create the qemu image by this way.

dd of=flash.img bs=128k count=128 if=/dev/zerodd of=flash.img bs=128k conv=notrunc if=u-boot-connex-400-r1604.bindd of=flash.img bs=128k conv=notrunc seek=2 if=gumstix-basic-image-gumstix-custom-connex.jffs2dd of=flash.img bs=128k conv=notrunc seek=120 if=uImage-2.6.21-r1-gumstix-custom-connex.bin

The italic have to be changed according to your files. The bold are those difference from the reference tutorial. Because of memory, the verdex has 32 MB flash memory but the connex has only 16MB. So 256*128k changes to 128*128k. The kernel is on the end of the memory (Size -1MB) so (256-8)*128k changes to (128-8)*128k.

Now there will be a "flash.img". This is your qemu image file.
You can run it by

qemu-system-arm -M connex -m 289 -nographic -monitor null -pflash flash.img

And see it booted. But my problem now is I can't exit the qemu. -_-" Ctrl+A x doesn't work.

I think buildroot platfrom can do this method too. Because it builds to the 3 files as above and then use the same method to emulate it.

How to make BCM4318 (with Acer wireless button) works in Debian!

My laptop model is Acer 5021. I have a problem with the wireless , in particular the acer wireless button that's in front of the body can't lid up to enable the wireless just like in Windows. In the past I got it work by installing ndiswrapper and acerhk. But after the Edgy came out , it haven't worked anymore.

Now I switched from Ubuntu to Debian and found the same problem. But I see the suggestion message while it's booting. Something likes

[ 59.267579] b43-phy0 ERROR: Firmware file "b43/ucode5.fw" not found or load failed.
[ 59.267588] b43-phy0 ERROR: You must go to http://linuxwireless.org/en/users/Drivers/b43#devicefirmware and download the correct firmware (version 4).

So I went to the url in the message. It told me to do this

sudo apt-get install b43-fwcutter

Now I reboot and the error message disappeared. But I still can't use the wireless because of the Acer wireless button. I googling more , go to acerhk website. And found that acerhk is stopped and got into the main kernel development (names acer_acpi) that's the good news. and now acer_acpi is moved to acer_wmi.

if you have the kernel>= 2.6.25 , it might have the acer_wmi in the kernel already and be detected to load automatically. You can check this by

lsmod | grep acer

you would found acer_wmi.

so the rest is easy. Due to this useful (and hidden) document , you can

To read the status of the wireless radio (0=off, 1=on):cat /sys/devices/platform/acer-wmi/wirelessTo enable the wireless radio:echo 1 > /sys/devices/platform/acer-wmi/wirelessTo disable the wireless radio:echo 0 > /sys/devices/platform/acer-wmi/wirelessTo set the state of the wireless radio when loading acer-wmi, pass:wireless=X (where X is 0 or 1)

and It works!!!

I wonder this method also works with the other Acer models which have the problem with the wireless button in front of it.

good luck.

How to Fix Firefox always keeps showing "Restore Previous Session".

Today, my ubuntu crashed while I was using firefox. I rebooted and everything seem fine except one thing. Firefox show "Restore Previous Session" dialog everytime I open firefox.
Even though I've shut it down properly , the dialog keeps showing.

I googled around but I had no luck. I think that the problem is firefox config files may be some corrupted because of the crashing. So I went around in ~/.mozilla and try out some way and PONG! It's fixed! :)

Here is the solution.

1. $ cd ~/.mozilla/firefox/fwegtctl.defaults (you may change this to your firefox profile directory)
2. $ mv sessionstore.js sessionstore.js.bak
3. Restart the firefox.

Just simple. I guess that sessionstore.js saves the data about session (its filename tells that. HAHA) and firefox on opening will see whether this file exists or not.
Good Luck!
UPDATE : I've just found that there is another problem. The problem is the location bar doesn't update anyway. It's still stay blank or some url and when you change the tab it's doesn't effect. The location bar search feature also off. I don't know this problem and previous problem if it's an consequence. I spent a hour finding out the solution in the .mozilla/ (yes, again!)
at last, the solution is right down.

1. $ cd ~/.mozilla/firefox/fwegtctl.defaults (you may change this to your firefox profile directory)2. $ mv places.sqlite places.sqlite.bak
3. $ mv places.sqlite-journal places.sqlite-journal.bak

I hope that these soulutions will work for you.

Practice English By a Song.

It's my little project. I came up with this idea while I was on the car. In Thailand, English teacher sometimes comes in the class with the radio. Then she will give students a paper. The paper is a lyric but it's not a complete lyric. There will be many blank field on the paper. She will turn on a song and She has students to fill in the blank to complete the lyric. I think it's a good idea for practice listening by a song.

So I will do it in a same way but on the internet. :)

check out this.
http://www.teerapap.net/EnglishByMySong/start.html

Thanks for "Yael Naim - New Soul" that's a sample song because I like this song very much. Actually I use this song on the website arbitrarily.

Firefox 3 beta 5 lags on ubuntu 8.04

I upgraded from Gutsy to Hardy last week. It comes with the new Firefox 3 beta 5. After I had used for a few days, I found that firefox lags very much. When I switch the tab or scroll the page or just leave it , it start to lag the system and then system sometime freeze after that. In the system monitor, firefox process was interruptible. I noticed the harddisk light always show or blink fast but I'm not sure it's the same case.

At first I though that it resulted from upgrade process that it's not a fresh install. Maybe some configs file are not upgraded correctly. After few days passed, I felt very annoy. I started to find out what it is.

I found this bug. It's the same. In the bug page they give a method to solve this bug temporarily
There is an easy workaround.

This workaround is successful:
1. Open Firefox 3
2. Disable phishing/attack detection in the security section of the Preferences
3. Close Firefox
4. Make hidden files visible (Locations - Personal folder - View - show hidden files)
5. Delete /home/user/.mozilla/firefox/blahblahblah.default/urlclassifier*.sqlite
6. Open Firefox.
7. There is no next step. You're done. :-)

Greetz, Pjotr.

I follow this instruction. It works!!

I like the bug report system too much. haha

I hope that the patch will be published very soon. I wait for it.

Switch input language by Caps Lock

Since birth, I've used Grave Accent(`) for switching input language.
Just recent years I changed to alt+shift key instead in order to type (`) key
in unix command. I found it's not quite convenient but have to used it.
Then I found that , in ubuntu, I can set to using the caps lock key as a hotkey to switch input language. The caps lock key was useless for me long time ago. So I changed it and found that it' so easy to use and happy about moving finger.
So I'm going to set caps lock as a hotkey in Windows too. But the Windows don't allow me to do that. I spent a few hours (yes, a few hours) to find the way but rarely found. I found the closest way is to change the caps lock to grave accent key.
(Only advanced user or sure to do)
Below is how to do that.
1. Open regedit (via Run-> type regedit -> Ok).
2. Go to the (My ComputerHKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESSYSTEM
CurrentControlSetControlKeyboard Layout) key.
3. Add new key name "Scancode Map" as binary value type.
4. Double click this key and Fill the value.
"00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 02 00 00 00 29 00 3a 00 00 00 00 00"

(In this picture my value is
"00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 03 00 00 00 29 00 3a 00 3a 00 46 00 00 00 00 00"
because I add another keypair to remapping the Scroll lock key to work as a caps lock key.)
5. Change key setting in Control Panel->Regional and Language Options as below

6. Restart the computer!!
7. It works!

Thanks to Remap the Keyboard in Windows XP. :)

Google makes me smile

Today is Valentine's day. It's not special to me really. I visit google.com as normal. The google's logo on valentines day is so cute. It's makes me smile and I think people around the world that see this picture smile too.

I think it's so cool that just changes some small picture makes people around the world SMILE! :)
Thank you, Google.

Microsoft Office 2007 disable Acer wireless button

Today's morning, I found that my acer aspire 5021 can't use the wifi. The wireless button in front of the case didn't work as normal. Regularly when press the wireless button, the button turns orange and the green 'Wireless Device Enabled" appears on screen. But now nothing happened.

I'm very upset with this. I tried to press the button many times or restart the Windows but it didn't work. I wondered that the root of problem is software related to driver but I had installed Broadcom drivers and Launch manager and it used to work as well.

I tried to reinstall Broadcom driver and Launch manager. It didn't work.

I think of last night. I installed Microsoft Office 2007 before go to bed. It' seem no involvement between Office 2007 and wireless. But I don't know what to do , so I give it a try.

I uninstall the Office 2007 and It's work!!!

It's weird and I don't know why.
I may find the reason about this if I have times.