The eflow blog

Ever since upgrading to Firefox 3, I’ve been without my beloved LastTab.  It was but a simple extension: it allowed me to control-tab back and forth between tabs that I was working on.  With the many (many) tabs I like to keep open, well, being able to control-tab back through them in the order I last saw them was a real time saver.

Something better has finally come along: ctrl-tab.  It is as simple as LastTab…only prettier.  It apparently is slated to be included in Firefox 3.1.  Very nice.

(It appears that LastTab has been upgraded to work with 3.0 finally.  I’m a little disappointed I’m only finding out about this now.  I had added the writers blog to my Reader with the sole intent of being able to get the updated extension on its release date…but no!  No announcement was made by Timothy Humphrey on this blog.  For months now I’ve been reading his mumbo jumbo posts for naught!  Bah!)

This is in the babble category tagged as extension, firefox

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Meghan’s laptop hard drive recently died.  It was a painful death.  One consisting of much clicking and clacking with no data retrieval.

Of course she didn’t have any backup solutions, so it was looking like her data was gone forever.

She cries, “Unacceptable!”

I retort, “But its expensive!”.  I cry.

So I do some googling for hard drive recovery reviews and companies.  I call a few and they all say it’ll be in the thousands of dollars.  So I turned to my trusty friend, ebay.  I found one company called Hard Drive Savers offering invasive recovery it for only $300.  (I had taken the top off my drive already and saw it was a hardware problem, so I knew I needed invasive).

I was skeptical, so I did some more googling to get some background on HDDSavers.  I found relatively few comments on them, but all were good.  So off went Meghan’s hard drive.

Lo and behold, a week later a dvd arrived with the contents of the folders she needed!  John over there at hddsavers came through!  I highly recommend them for anyone needing to recover data from a dead hard drive.

Disclaimer for all you doubters out there:
I am in no way affiliated or obligated to hddsavers.com.

Feel free to contact me via the comments (won’t be published) if you want any more information.

This is in the babble category tagged as hard drive, hdd, review

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This week most of the OpenMRS developers converged on Durban, South Africa for our third annual conference. We combined with a few other informatics groups from South Africa that are part of HISA. There were almost 400 attendees and OpenMRS made up the majority of them, so I’m estimating we could have had somewhere close to 250 people at this conference. This is continuing our Moore’s Law -esque style of doubling every year. (Cape Town 2006 had around 75 implementers and Cape Town 2007 had 150.) I’m not sure how we’ll increase by as much for next year, but I’m pretty sure that’s what CPU designers have been saying every year for decades!

I managed to steal some bandwidth at the hotel at 2AM a few nights ago and posted my pictures from the safari to Hluhluwe that James Egg, Jacob Brauer, and I went on.

We’re sitting in the lounge in Johannesburg now (thanks Paul!), I promise to post a few more thoughts from the conference over the next few days.

(As a side note while I’m thinking about it: The new logo is really growing on me. Chris Seebregts made heavy use of it at the conference. He even made up some pretty slick black t-shirts using it that he gave away to all the attendees.)

This is in the babble, openmrs category tagged as conference, durban, hisa, south africa

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I’m in the middle of moving OpenMRS’s web presence from a shared virtual machine to a new dedicated box.  The only trouble I ran into was with the mysql python module (again).

For posterity’s sake, I’m going to write my solution here.

easy_install mysql-python

I received this error when trying to install the MySQLdb-python module into python on centOS:

_mysql.c:2808: error: expected declaration specifiers before ‘init_mysql’
_mysql.c:2886: error: expected ‘{’ at end of input
error: Setup script exited with error: command ‘gcc’ failed with exit status 1

The fix I remembered.  I just had to install the python development packages:

yum install python-devel

I then had another very odd and strangely familiar error:

In file included from _mysql.c:35:
/usr/include/mysql/my_config.h:15:28: error: my_config_i386.h: No such file or directory
error: command ‘gcc’ failed with exit status 1

Googling around gave me nothing helpful…in fact the results looked strangely familiar as well.  I couldn’t remember the solution to this one though.

Eventually, I actually read the error message and realized that our new vm isn’t an x64 box.  For some reason there was a my_config_x64.h file in /usr/include/mysql but there wasn’t a my_config_i386.h.  Luckily, that file was present on the old server. Copying that file from /usr/include/mysql on the old box to the new was the cure.

This is in the babble category tagged as centos, gcc, mysql, python

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…are the shortcuts.

I’ve been using control-shift-t extensively since Darius first showed it to me a few months ago.  It will let you quickly find and jump to a java class across your current workspace.  (There is also an Open Type button by default in eclipse that you can use.)

I’ve always wanted a way to do the same except with our jsp, xml, and properties files.  I know most of the names of files and know where they are, I’m just lazy.  I want to be able to jump to them without having to expand the whole tree.

Well, Open Resource to the rescue!  Control-shift-r works just like the Open Type except with nonjava files.  Woot!

This is in the babble category tagged as eclipse

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