Except when I need to add a new contact. For some reason there isn’t a way to set the contact’s group in Gingerbread and previous versions. After I add a new contact on my phone they get lost in limbo and I have to remember to set their group the next time I’m on a computer. It’s been fixed for Ice Cream Sandwich, but my phone isn’t going to be getting that upgrade.

I managed to find a way to set contacts’ group in Gingerbread with an application from  Android MarketGoogle Play: DW Contacts. I often forget the exact steps to finding the groupless contacts though, so I’m writing them down here.

Instructions

First the contact has to be found. The search option in DW contact’s Toolbox tab searches through all contacts, not just those on the phone. Once you find the contact, long press their name and select the “Set group for contact” option. Finally check the appropriate groups and presto. How it’s taken until Honeycomb/ICS for this to be a native feature of Android’s contact management is beyond me.

Back to the two space after a period issue. After “discovering” this habit I read up a little and was surprised to find there are still proponents of it. I chalked up my dislike of it to just being another pet peeve of mine; double spaces after a period don’t really affect text, after all. Then the other day I noticed this:

From the Diaspora* blog

Take a look at that third line. It looks horrendous and is going to be the irrefutable proof that typing two spaces after a period is evil which I will refer to forever more. In the meantime I’ll get back to sperging over other typographic crimes.

I need to think up a post just so I can link XKCD's great regex strip.

One of the first things I missed when I started to use Ubuntu was this window management. After some trial and error, trying out different Compiz plugins, I managed to simulate the Windows experience.

The Compiz plugins I use are “place” and “grid”. These are the settings for grid. Hopefully I won’t have too much trouble getting it to work again when I inevitably lose my configuration after updating Ubuntu some day.

I wanted to check the HTTP headers the URL was returning, to make sure we were in fact setting the MIME type. Firebug shows the headers in the console and net tabs. In this case they weren’t being displayed though, as the URL was initiating a download. Slightly stumped, I thought for a minute and then remembered cURL.

I’ve never used cURL, but have read much of it. I guessed it could maybe do the trick, so I set about finding out. After a cursory search I found out that

 $ curl -I -H http://URL

Would return the headers for the requested URL. The URL I was trying requires cookie-based authentication, though. After reading the manual I managed to log in via cURL, save the cookies in a text file, then request the file using the cookies to authenticate:

First I POSTed to the login form’s action URL with the necessary parameters, while saving the generated cookies to a text file. Then, using the text file as a source for cookies, I requested the file URL and, voilà, got what I needed.

$ curl -c cookies.txt -L -d "username=<USER>&pass=<PASS>" http://URL/login.php
$ curl -c cookies.txt -b cookies.txt -L -I http://URL/file.pdf

My reaction. There were fireworks and bangs and colours and it was just amazing.

Resources

• Check HTTP headers with cURL

Initially I thought the backup script had gone crazy and relabeled all the tapes with the same GUID: it complained about tape 1 being in the drive whereas it expected tape 2. Tape 2 was in fact in the drive. Same happened with our other tapes.

After poking around ntbackup and the RSM I noticed that the tape drive had a big red X next to it under the “Libraries” container in Computer Management -> Storage -> Removable Storage. That made me realise that the GUIDs hadn’t actually been overwritten, just that the last tape’s GUID (and that would be tape 1) had been cached in the RSM’s database from before the red X appeared.

After inspecting the backup script’s log I noticed the date it stopped working was close to the date I had removed the server’s virtual machine snapshots (in a very roundabout way due to constrained disk space, I ended up with a new virtual machine). That made me realise that I hadn’t added the tape drive to the new snapshot-free virtual machine’s configuration. A couple of clicks after and the backups are working again, yay!

ENTER ~ .

Source: Terminate a a frozen SSH session

Compose-key ^ .

Note: it’s the circumflex character, not the control key.

Sending of message failed. Unable to sign message. Please check that the certificates specified in Mail & Newsgroups Account Settings for this mail account are valid and trusted.

First I tried adding the Certificate Authority that had signed my SSL certificate into Thunderbird’s Certificate Manager, under the Authorities tab. Thunderbird complained about it already being in the list though. So I searched the list for it (why the hell isn’t it filterable? There’s tonnes of Authorities ugh) and after quite a while —I wasn’t sure whether it was going to be listed under the SSL cert’s OU, the CA’s OU or the root CA’s OU— I finally found the cursed CA under the root CA’s OU. Along with the root CA.

Upon clicking “Edit” on both CAs I got a lovely window with three unchecked options:

• This certificate can identify web sites.
• This certificate can identify mail users.
• This certificate can identify software makers.

I guess that’s why Thunderbird wasn’t able to sign my test email. Checking the second one fixed my problems.

Just as well Thunderbird didn’t ask me whether I trust the CA (and its parent CA) that issued my SSL cert when I added it. It might have been a painless experience.

This post brought to you by

Some UX superhero or something?

]]> http://maian.org/blog/2011/05/thunderbird-and-smime-certificates-fixing-unable-to-sign-message-error/feed/ 1 http://maian.org/blog/2010/08/date-formatting-not-working-after-installing-qtranslate/ http://maian.org/blog/2010/08/date-formatting-not-working-after-installing-qtranslate/#comments Tue, 03 Aug 2010 15:01:36 +0000 johnny http://maian.org/blog/?p=207 Continue reading →]]> I just installed qTranslate to have multilingual entries. It’s a really good internationalization plugin, I’ve used it on other WordPress installations before with great results.

After installing it with WordPress 3.0.1 though, the date format for posts wasn’t being parsed, showing instead the raw format:

Posted on %e de %B de %Y by johnny

I found a solution for this on the qTranslate forums:

• Edit qtranslate_utils.php, line 143 from this:
  $date_parameters[] = '#%#'; $strftime_parameters[] = '%%';
  to this:
  $date_parameters[] = '#%#'; $strftime_parameters[] = '%';

It seems the extra percentage sign makes it so the percentage sign in the format gets interpreted as literal percentage signs and therefore they don’t get parsed by strftime().

The formatting in Spanish and Catalan isn’t completely fixed though, spurious “02UTC” strings are being added after each date component.

Resources

• Forum post regarding incorrect date format with qTranslate containing solution.

Instead what I had was two Excel spreadsheets, and it ended up taking much more time than I would have liked.

I wanted to “join” the spreadsheets based on a common email column. I thought this would be easy: there must be a built-in Excel wizard to do just that, right? Seemingly not, and the solution I ended up finding was to treat Excel like some Frankenstein SQL database.

At first I thought the “Consolidate” feature would accomplish what I needed. I wasn’t managing to make it do what I wanted after looking at a few “How to use Excel consolidate” guides though. The guides I was finding were very “point-here, click-that, there you go—magic”, without explaining what pointing here and clicking that actually did. I gave up on it.

Then I tried searching for “join tables excel” and got a lot of relevant add-ons that did exactly that, but they all cost money.

Finally I stumbled across a Microsoft article explaining how to do exactly what I wanted with Microsoft Query.

The only problem(s) with the article are:

• It is aimed at mail merges in Word.
• I wasn’t able to add more than one Excel file as a data source, as they are able to do in the article.
• It’s a ten year-old article. Also it seems the Microsoft Query interface hasn’t been updated since Windows 3.1.

It took me some back-and-forth between the article, Excel and Microsoft Query to get the results that I needed so I’m documenting the steps for posterity.

Get the data in the same place

All the data has to be in the same spreadsheet; I didn’t find a way to add more than one spreadsheet to Microsoft Query.

In my case, I was trying to end up with the rows from Spreadsheet 1 whose email was the same as in Spreadsheet 2. I just copied the email column from Spreadsheet 2 into Spreadsheet 1.

Define names to use as tables

Microsoft Query uses names defined in Excel to create its “tables”. I needed two of these “tables”: one for Spreadsheet 1′s information (id and email) and one for Spreadsheet 2′s information (email, which I’d pasted into Spreadsheet 1).

To create the first table I selected the two columns I wanted and then clicked “Define Name” in the “Formulas” menu, “Named cells” panel. I called it “emailsall”.

The second table was created the same way, except selecting the “emails” column that I had pasted in from Spreadsheet 2, and naming it “emailsshort”.

Query the “tables”

To get the results of the faux join I wanted I created a new Excel spreadsheet and then clicked on the “Data” menu, then on “From Other Sources” inside the “Get External Data” panel, and finally “From Microsoft Query”.

At the “Choose Data Source” screen I selected “Excel Files” and opened Spreadsheet 1. In “Choose Columns”, I added the two “tables” that had just been created. When clicking “Next” the Wizard complained about not being able to join the tables itself and they had to be manually joined. I clicked “OK” and in the Microsoft Query window clicked the little “SQL” button.

In the SQL window I edited the query to do an inner join and got the results I needed. The query went something like this:

SELECT emailall.id, emailall.email
FROM emailall emailall
INNER JOIN emailshort on emailall.email = emailshort.email

Finally go to the “File” menu -> “Return Data to Microsoft Excel”

Resources

• 10 year-old article on “How to Use Microsoft Query to Merge Two Excel Files“