can’t connect to all Yahoo! accounts on Kopete

The problem started as far back as June this year.  Yahoo users trying to connect to the said network through Kopete could not.  Several people were quick to notice it.

A quick fix was to override the default server for logging in to something else. But this was a temporary fix.  Eventually it didn’t work anymore.  Not wanting to use any other 3rd party messenger, I opted to log on to the messenger service through Yahoo Mail.  It works fine even on Linux versions of Firefox although Yahoo does warn you that the operating system you are using has not been tested.

Months after, I went back to using Kopete for Yahoo after I upgraded my desktop.  It appears that the newer versions has the fix for the Yahoo problem patched into it.  Currently I am using Kopete version 0.80.2 on KDE 4.3.2.  What is strange is that I can’t login to all my accounts.  I have 3 Yahoo accounts.   Out of the 3, only 2 are able to connect successfully to the Yahoo servers. The other one can’t connect and there are no apparent error messages except for,

Object::connect: No such signal ClientStream::disconnected()
Object::connect:  (receiver name: 'yahooclient')
Transfer ACCEPTED by: LoginTask
Transfer ACCEPTED by: LoginTask

If you are experiencing a similar problem drop me a note on how you fixed it.  If you still haven’t found a solution, we can go report a bug @ bugs.kde.org to make it official. I am guessing that this might not be a Kopete problem, but it won’t hurt if the developers are made aware of this weird behavior.

In the meantime, I’ll keep on searching for fixes.  Oh by the way, the one account that could not connect wasn’t like this all the time.  It was able to connect once, and that was the one time only, then after that it wouldn’t anymore.

ADSL connections on Kubuntu 9.04

What Does NOT Work

KNetworkManager can’t manage ADSL connections.  Don’t waste your time searching the web for solutions. It’s not worth it in the end.

WIDC won’t work.  I never understood what WIDC was supposed to do.  It endlessly scanned my machine and got nothing.  The configuration options is a mess as well.  It doesn’t really provide any clear options and you will just end up as confused as to how to configure your ADSL connection with KNetworkManager.

What Works

pppoeconf works out of the box most of time. Unless if your ISP really has a weird ADSL setup, then chances are, your connection won’t work if configured through this app.  The chances are slim.

The program pppoeconf should be accessible under /usr/sbin/pppoeconf on Kubuntu 9.04 and should be used with administrator or root privileges.  So use sudo on this command. By the way, this is an application that should be run on the terminal.  Get konsole or, for me, yakuake, on the ready.

Just go with the defaults.  It works fine. Once you’ve got it configured you’re good to go.

pon dsl-provider – to turn ON the  ADSL connection

poff dsl-provider – to turn OFF the ADSL connection

Again, both commands above should be used with administrator or root privileges.  Sudo is your friend!  But you shouldn’t be using these commands at all.  If everything goes right, Kubuntu Jaunty Jackalope should remember all of you your settings on the next session.  You don’t have to add anything to have your connection start automatically on boot.  Everything should already be set correctly.

Have fun surfing the web!

problem connecting to Yahoo! using Kopete?

Since last week I have had trouble connecting to Yahoo! using Kopete.  I guess the same holds true for those who are using Pidgin.  At first I thought my Amarok was just eating up too much bandwidth since I was streaming party music from Cool Streams.  So I didn’t really bother connecting to Yahoo, exiting it (Kopete) after it was unable to login to my account.

Today I tried connecting to Yahoo again.  This time Amarok wasn’t streaming.  After some time I still didn’t see any buddy icons in the list.  Strange.  I checked the connection status and it said, “Connecting.”  I tried changing the status from offline to online several times and waited several minutes without any success. Just to be sure that Kopete wasn’t doing anything stupid, I added my Google Talk account.  It connected fast after the setup!  Ok this calls for some google-ing!

I Googled for any news that was affecting Kopete from connecting to the Yahoo! message service.. .  And there it was! A lot of people using Kopete, and Pidgin as well, were having the same problems.  Here is a link to the bug that was reported to bugs.kde.org.

So for a quick and temporary fix, they suggested to change servers.  From the default scs.msg.yahoo.com you should change your server to either of the following:

(1) cs101.msg.mud.yahoo.com
(2) cs102.msg.mud.yahoo.com
(3) cn.scs.msg.yahoo.com

You can change this by going to Settings > Configure > Accounts.  Then select your Yahoo! account, press Modify Account.  Change to the Account Preferences tab.  Check Override default server information then edit to either of the ones above.

The port is still 5050.

Both servers 1 and 2 didn’t work for me, though some people confirmed that it worked for them.  Only server 3 allowed me to connect.

Try it out and welcome back online!

the pattern (\n|.)* and PHP Segmentation Fault

the pattern:

(\n|.)*

what it does:

this is a nice regular expression pattern that spans multiple lines.

example:

pattern used – <label>Address:(\n|.)*<label>Website:

<div id=’cominfo_hdr_div’>Company Information</div>¶
¶
<label>Address:</label><br>¶
33rd Flr. PBCom Tower, Ayala Ave., Corner Herrera St.<br>Makati City, Metro Manila <br><br>¶
<label>Website:</label><br>¶
http://www.example.com <br><br> ¶
<label>More Information</label><br>¶

—

this is very useful for parsing text from data with a repeating pattern.  just queue up the data source in a loop, run the regular expression pattern through it and you should have that particular text you want in no time.  yes?

Nope!  at least for me it didn’t. it got me something else instead.

from my repeated manual tests using patterned strings spanning multiple lines similar to the example above, this regular expression would work.  however, when i started feeding the actual data for parsing in a loop, i got a PHP Segmentation Fault at some point. the data source isn’t that huge.  about 15 – 30 KB each in size, and close to a thousand.  sometimes it went through once or twice without an error, but after several iterations in the loop it always went down to a Segmentation Fault.

what seems to be the matter?

How to make OpenOffice.org go faster

this has been around for a while.  i’m posting this on my blog because i keep on forgetting the steps.  at least i don’t have to search the web for it now.  and i’m spreading the `love` too!  hehe.. .

here are the three (3) easy steps to make your OpenOffice.org start up faster.  many people find OpenOffice.org a bit slow and heavy.  this is very noticeable when you start it up.  while there is a quickstarter applet for this, i never liked to use it. it’s only eating up valuable memory.

note: before you do this, start OpenOffice.org and try to observe how fast (or slow) it initializes.  then compare the start-up time after you’ve done these steps.

Step 1 > Open up the Options dialog box. You can do this by clicking on Tools, then selecting Options from the menu as shown below.

Step 2 > Select Memory from under OpenOffice.org.  There are like 5 things you can set under Memory.  Copy the ones shown in the image.  These are the advisable values.

in other How To sites, they recommend to enable the QuickStarter applet.  i don’t recommend this. in fact, i never use that applet.  i don’t know if it’s still packaged with the newer OpenOffice.org versions. it seems like that is in the older versions of OpenOffice.org.  the Memory  Options in the newer versions of this wonderful office suite doesn’t have that quickstarter option.  you won’t see it anymore.  i’m using OpenOffice.org 3.0 as packaged with Kubuntu 9.04.

Last Step (3) > Go to Java Options. Make sure the checkbox is not checked.

After you’ve done these steps, click OK and you are good to go!  Exit OpenOffice.org.  Start it again and see the difference these 3 simple steps make.

you may want to read this post too >> http://www.zolved.com/synapse/view_content/28209/How_to_make_OpenOffice_run_faster_in_Ubuntu

non-KDE app filechooser trick

did you ever get annoyed of that non-KDE application using KDE’s native file chooser taking up the entire width of your screen whenever it is opened?  this seems to be a common and persistent problem for non-KDE applications that use the KDE file chooser to open or save files.  a good example of this is OpenOffice.org.  here is a simple trick to solve that problem.

Step 1 > Click on the file chooser icon as shown in the image below.  Or you can click on the File menu and then selecting Open.

Step 2 > When the file chooser dialog box is already out, resize it to your preference.

Before.  Notice how the file chooser box occupies the entire length of my screen.

After.

Step 3 > Click on the window menu that is usually at the icon located at the top left corner of the window.  Then select Advanced, and then selecting Special Window Settings from its sub-menu.

Step 4 > On the Special Window Settings dialog box, check on Size and select Remember from the drop down menu to its right.  This will tell it to remember the size of the file chooser dialog box to its current width and height (when you resized the box in Step 2).This will not only remember the size of the file chooser dialog box on this session, but also in future sessions.

Step 5 > Don’t forget to click OK once you’ve done all these steps.  Close everything.  You don’t have to close the application (OpenOffice.org in this example).  Open the file chooser dialog box again and notice that its dimensions are now set according to how you wanted it.

Note that this trick will only remember the size of the file chooser dialog box to the application you’ve configured it to.  I’m sure there are ways to tell KDE to always set the file chooser box to a certain width and height.  That’s gonna be another topic later on.  Enjoy!

FireCrash or FailFox? you choose.

for something so advanced a browser as Firefox, it certainly fails at handling javascript exceptions/errors.  it crashes a lot in its Linux version.  Konqueror, on the other hand, informs you that a certain javascript app is causing some kind of error and let’s you choose to disable it or continue. 

Kudos Konqueror!

i love Firefox. but for some reason i have been very dismayed that it is doing so poorly on javascript-heavy sites.  i’ve had recurring Firefox crashes upon loading websites such as the new Yahoo! mail or Facebook, to name a few.  at some point it has crashed continuously  for 5 times when i opened such sites, that i was forced to try it on Konqueror.

well what do you know?  Konqueror warns you that a javascript is causing the application to be unusable should you continue with it, and let’s you abort the execution of such code.  superb!  but no, it doesn’t end there.  Konqueror goes on to load the site. and everything seems to be fine. sadly, i don’t like how Konqueror renders a website. it gets most of it, but some details are not.  there are some other things that Konqueror is lacking on, but i will not mention these anymore. it is still a good application.  oh well, it’s not a very popular web browser ater all, sorry to say this.  in an Apache log one would hardly see Konqueror in there.

so while there may be such a mechanism in Firefox not enabled by default (pardon my ignorance) they should just make it smart enough to auto-enable itself.  and why not?  repeating crashes for 5 times, or more, is really annoying!  on to educate myself and find this in the Firefox configuration.  who knows, it might be there?

presto!

it does boot fast!

that was my reaction after Presto got to the desktop in a few seconds. well that was the only thing i really wanted to see.. . if it would really live up to its hype. so far it does and i’m a wee bit impressed. haven’t gotten to test all the features. not that there’s anything new. i’ve use most Linux apps in there, so it doesn’t surprise me. what i wanted to try was the Application Store. but the PC i used to test Presto out didn’t have an internet connection. Boo! perhaps i might try it again later at home? Quite certainly!

oh, it might just be me but the initial boot seems to have taken longer than the subsquent ones. perhaps its Linux trying to adjust to the hardware? but i swear the boot times that came after were really fast.

seems like you did a good job Xandros! hurray for more user-friendly Linux desktops!

http://www.prestomypc.com/

today, the dream comes true!

KDE 4 is the forthcoming series of releases of the K Desktop Environment. The first version (4.0) of this series is scheduled for release on 11 January 2008.^[1]

The new series includes updates to several of KDE’s core components, notably a port to Qt 4. It will contain a new multimedia API, called Phonon, a device integration framework called Solid and a new style guide and default icon set called Oxygen. It will also include the new desktop and panel user interface tool, called Plasma, which will have support for desktop widgets, similar to SuperKaramba or Apple’s Dashboard widgets. The port to Qt 4 will facilitate support for non-X11-based platforms, including Microsoft Windows and Mac OS X. One of the overall goals of KDE 4 is to be more easily portable to different operating systems.

source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KDE_4

if mozilla-mplayer doesn’t work on Feisty.. .

i was not able to watch the cool trailers on apple.com/trailers tonight. bummer! i’ve already installed (via apt-get) the plugin to fix this.. . no luck! googled for a fix and i find out in a matter of seconds that i’m not the only one with this problem. this one even goes way back in Edgy Eft, and Mark Shuttleworth (no offense dude!) only knows how many Ubuntu releases before. what seems to be wrong?

anyone care to try to answer this? or maybe let’s just settle for a quick fix. who cares why it works and why it doesn’t?! i just wanna watch that Iron Man trailer.

chances are, you installed the mozilla-mplayer plugin via apt-get or that GUI frontend. if it didn’t work then you’re not alone. but cheer up dude, it’s not that bad. Firefox is still the coolest browser around and Linux/Ubuntu users can still go to apple.com and definitely watch the trailers!

the fix: you’ve already installed mozilla-mplayer right? go to these places:

/usr/lib/mozilla-firefox/plugins

/usr/lib/firefox/plugins

you should have one or both directories. inside you will see the plugins required for you to play the media streams. the files under this directory on my Kubuntu are:

libunixprintplugin.so

mplayerplug-in-qt.so

mplayerplug-in-rm.xpt

mplayerplug-in-wmp.xpt

mplayerplug-in-dvx.so

mplayerplug-in-qt.xpt

mplayerplug-in.so

mplayerplug-in.xpt

mplayerplug-in-dvx.xpt

mplayerplug-in-rm.so

mplayerplug-in-wmp.so

what you really need are the ones (obviously) that start with mplayer. now copy these files to your .mozilla directory, specifically:

/home/USERNAME/.mozilla/plugins/, where USERNAME is your username (again, obviously).

restart Firefox and start watching!

works on SLED 10 and SUSE 9.3 as well, although i did compile from source and installed on my .mozilla/plugins directory. no more RPM or DEB package hassle.

i’m gonna clean up those redundant mplayer plugin files on different locations soon enough. but right now i just wanna watch the trailers.