When you make the Mac go to sleep but it just stays on with the screen black, you can use the

pmset -g

to display you current power management settings and see the entry for sleep that will tell you the problem causing process PID

If you have SSO enabled on SAP CRM, you can sometimes get stuck with your user on your computer’s certificate and you can’t get out of it with logout, delete cookies, no auto-login etc. But what you can do is add

?sap-user=DIFFERENTUSER

at the end of your usual sap/bc/bsp/sap/crm_ui_start/default.htm URL and the login dialog will prompt. Try it in conjunction with ‘Clear SSL state’ button in the Content tab of Internet Options

It was kinda off putting with my new iPhone 4S to find out that Apple makes SMS alerts ring twice (once on receive and one reminder) instead of having an LED light for alerts like in Android or Blackberry. Kind of a workaround rather than a real solution to the problem of how to find out I have alerts pending when I missed the first alert. Apple operates on a push principle and Google/RIM operates on pull.

Anyway, if I have reason to miss the first one, I most likely won’t notice the second one. It’s also misleading when it rings twice because you’d think there’s 2 messages.

To turn that functionality off, go to Settings->Notifications->Messages->Repeat Alert->Never.

If you tried to load an entreprise email account in the Email.apk app and the Exchange server enforces a minimun password, it could be pretty annoying. To get around it, you can start by getting a modified version of the app from shafty023 onto your rooted phone. Copy the app to your SD card. Then run

su
mount -o remount,rw -t yaffs2 /dev/block/mtdblock3 /system
mv /sdcard/Email.apk /system/app/
chown root /system/app/Email.apk
chgrp root /system/app/Email.apk
chmod 644 /system/app/Email.apk
reboot

I started off looking for a request time compiler of LESS for Django and initially found django-css which seems to serve the purpose great. Compressing static files on the fly is definitely a nice added bonus as well. It does so by containing a fork of django_compressor. But on further inspections, I jumped ship. The original project, django_compressor, sees a more regular update and is now Django 1.3 ready while the ‘successor’ isn’t. Funny thing is django_compressor supports compiling any CSS formats compilable via command line. With a better documentation overall, seems like the original has beat the sequel.

In the official Django logging docs, it wasn’t very clear about how to log to files. As you can understand, Django can use any Python logging classes that are all listed here. One of them is FileHandler. To use it, just add this to your settings.py

LOGGING = {
    ...
    'handlers': {
        ...
	'file':{
	    'level': 'DEBUG',
	    'class': 'logging.FileHandler',
	}
    },
    ...
}

But the FileHandler class constructor needs more parameters. To add them, you have to add the parameter name key with its value into the dictionary.

LOGGING = {
    ...
    'handlers': {
        ...
	'file':{
	    'level': 'DEBUG',
	    'class': 'logging.FileHandler',
            'filename': 'debug.log',
	}
    },
    ...
}

Got a Logitech Performance MX on “special” at Best Buy this weekend (80$ for a mouse… what a slaughter) because I just have a laptop mouse and am tired of not having anything to rest my palm on. At first, it’s great. Looks like a race car, good performance, nice receiver, rechargeable on the fly etc. Then, something feels off… something uncomfortable. I turn the mouse over and the fatal flaw. The sensor isn’t placed at the center of the mouse but almost under your thumb…

Then I reconfirmed my discomfort. Since the box says that it’s the best mouse the “mice experts” came up with after making a billion mice, I figured I must be able to use it at the zenith of comfort. I closed my eyes and made the most natural horizontal draw (ie, rotate around a point on the wrist which is placed on the table such that the instantaneous motion of the mouse is the tangent of the arc I’m drawing). I look and the cursor is moving diagonally on the screen.

In order to produce the intended horizontal move, I had to either lift and move my wrist (very uncomfortable) or continuously extend and retract my wrist (very uncomfortable as well). You can also resolve this if you hold the mouse differently. If instead of putting the thumb into the intended groove, you rotate the mouse to compensate for the vertical move, you can also draw horizontal lines at the cost of having a gap under your palm.

Overall, it’s a sexy sleek black mouse but not necessarily ergonomically superior to the 2$ mouse you can get at any random stores. In other words, if you want to pay 100$ for it, you’d have to be willing to buy the different look, not rationalise it with ergonomics.

A quickie:

import ipdb; ipdb.set_trace()

This puts a breakpoint in the code using ipdb. It has the advantage of having better formatted output, tab completion etc over the vanilla pdb

If you load a GIF file with PIL via Image.open(‘giffile.gif’) and then try to look at its pixels, you would get integers instead of tuples since the GIF pixels refers to one of the 256 colours in the GIF colour palette. The palette would then contain the RGB value of the pixel.

To avoid all this hassle and just get RGB tuple directly:

gif = Image.open('giffile.gif')
rgbimage = GIF.convert ('RGB')
rgbimage.getpixel((0,0))
>>>(231, 10, 54)

Used a NumPy array. Doesn’t work if the diagonal+1s are white of course.

import Image
from numpy import array, zeros, uint8
 
line = Image.open('wire.png')
# third dimension is for colours
a = zeros((100, 100, 3), dtype=uint8)
 
step = array([0, 1])
position = array([0, 0])
count = 0
 
# continue until when the next spot expected to be unfilled is filled
while not max(a[tuple(position)]):
	# paint colour
	a[tuple(position)] = array(line.getpixel((count, 0)))
 
	# if reached a wall
	if max(position + step) > 99 or min(position + step) < 0 or max(a[tuple(position + step)]):
		# change direction
		step = (abs(step) ^ 1) * (-step[0] if step[0] else step[1])
 
	# advance
	position += step
	count += 1
 
# convert to image
Image.fromarray(a).save('swirl.jpeg')

a = array((1, 2, 3))
print a
>>> array([1, 2, 3])
tuple(a)
>>> (1, 2, 3)

Pretty lame right?

This tutorial will help you use ABAP to connect to any web service and process the resulting output. ABAP has native support for XML so it will be easiest to get your information in XML format rather than JSON and others. For this example, I will use a CBC’s news feed but it can be Digg top stories, Twitter, anything. The XML should look something like the picture below where each news article is enclosed in <ITEM> tags.

First, you need to use cl_http_client to create an instance of if_http_client for your get.

DATA client TYPE REF TO if_http_client.
 
CALL METHOD cl_http_client=>create
  EXPORTING
    host          = 'rss.cbc.ca'
    service       = '80'
    proxy_host    = 'my.proxy.com'
    proxy_service = '8080'
    scheme        = 1
  IMPORTING
    client        = client.

Use proxy_host/proxy_service if you have a proxy server you need to go through. Scheme = 1 indicates HTTP, 2 is HTTPS. Next, you would set some parameters of the client.

client->request->set_method( if_http_request=>co_request_method_get ).
client->request->set_version( if_http_request=>co_protocol_version_1_1 ).
cl_http_utility=>set_request_uri( request = client->request uri = '/lineup/topstories.xml').

which puts your request as a GET method, sets the protocol to use HTTP 1.1 and sets your destination address. Then you perform your actual request and get the response synchronously:

client->send( ).
client->receive( ).
 
DATA bin TYPE xstring.
bin = client->response->get_data( ).

This gives you a response in binary format. The next steps converts it into string:

DATA conv TYPE REF TO cl_abap_conv_in_ce.
DATA response TYPE string.
 
conv = cl_abap_conv_in_ce=>create( input = bin ).
conv->read( IMPORTING data = response).
 
client->close( ).

Now your XML response is in the response variable. Now to turn the XML into a series of ABAP objects. To do so, we will make use of ABAP’s CALL TRANSFORMATION keyword. It is well documented in the help documentations and makes use of a XSLT (or XSLT-like depending on the method you choose) template to transform XML into ABAP objects and vice versa. 2 native methods exist. You can either use the XSLT method in which case ABAP makes an identity transformation of ABAP into pseudo-XML which you can then manipulate into XML using your XSLT template. This results in a 2 step operation and is not symmetric. You can also use SAP’s proprietary Simple Transformation method where you define a XSLT-like template which makes the direct transformation between XML and ABAP objects. For this example, I will use the Simple Transformation method. Looking at the XML, there are some header tags for the feed, then there are news articles each in a <ITEM> tag with its own properties. My objective will be to get the title and description of each article. For it, I first create a structure in ABAP to match my desired data.

TYPES: BEGIN OF news,
  title TYPE string,
  description TYPE string,
END OF news.
 
DATA: feed TYPE TABLE OF news,
      article TYPE news.
 
CALL TRANSFORMATION z_cbcnews
  SOURCE XML response
  RESULT root = feed.

after setting up the variables and types for the news, I call CALL TRANSFORMATION. Double clicking z_cbcnews will let me define my Simple Transformation template.

<?sap.transform simple?>
<tt:transform xmlns:tt="http://www.sap.com/transformation-templates">
 
  <tt:root name="ROOT"/>
 
  <tt:template>
    <rss>
      <channel>
        <title>
          <tt:skip/>
        </title>
        <link>
          <tt:skip/>
        </link>
        <description>
          <tt:skip/>
        </description>
        <language>
          <tt:skip/>
        </language>
        <lastBuildDate>
          <tt:skip/>
        </lastBuildDate>
        <copyright>
          <tt:skip/>
        </copyright>
        <docs>
          <tt:skip/>
        </docs>
        <image>
          <title>
            <tt:skip/>
          </title>
          <url>
            <tt:skip/>
          </url>
          <link>
            <tt:skip/>
          </link>
        </image>
        <tt:loop name="news" ref=".ROOT">
          <item>
            <title>
              <tt:value ref="$news.title"/>
            </title>
            <link>
              <tt:skip/>
            </link>
            <guid>
              <tt:skip/>
            </guid>
            <pubDate>
              <tt:skip/>
            </pubDate>
            <description>
 
              <tt:value ref="$news.description"/>
            </description>
 
          </item>
        </tt:loop>
      </channel>
    </rss>
  </tt:template>
</tt:transform>
</tt:transform>

Following the XML format of the CBC news feed, I first ignored all the header elements. Then I looped into variables of type news in which had a tag. Then the <ITEM>’s and <DESCRIPTION> are matched into attributes of the news structure. Since the CALL TRANSFORMATION is call to output a table of news (feed), I end up with an internal table of news which I can then manipulate with ABAP such as:

LOOP AT feed INTO article.
  WRITE: / '=================================================================='.
  WRITE: / article-title.
  WRITE: / '==================================================================', /.
  WRITE: / article-description, /, /, /.
ENDLOOP.

The end result should look something like this

On most virtualisation software like VMWare’s etc, the guest machine’s hotkeys which requires ctrl-alt (such as ctrl-alt-f1 etc for tty change in Linux) can be blocked because ctrl-alt is used to release mouse/keyboard with the VM software. If you use it only occasionally, you can first temporarily disable the release hotkey by pressing ctrl-alt-space then your intended hotkey such as ctrl-alt-f1

Source

Trying to install VMWare tools from packages.vmware.com/tools repository in Ubuntu but getting a error while installing packages? There seems to be package dependency going back to open-vm-tools-kmod-generic but it doesn’t exist. When you try to install the next level of package, it would say

“PreDepends: vmware-open-vm-tools-kmod-… but it is not installable”

Unfortunately the VMWare Installation Guide isn’t clear on this matter whereas the Ubuntu documentation is much better. It shows that you can either use the open source version directly available via apt-get or you can build the kmod (kernel mods) from source using the source files in the VMWare repository.