Monday 27 September 2010

Hair washing robots

As you know, Japan develops a lot of robots. They do so because the country has a rapidly ageing population and the idea is to have robots do chores and help out elderly, etc with as many tasks as possible.

So now, they've come up with a hair washing robot.

Meanwhile I'm still trying to put together my washing machine.

-P

Wednesday 22 September 2010

Back on Linux! And how to get Citrix ICA Client on Linux 64bit...

I was finally able to switch my laptop to Linux. Windows 7 was too problematic and I really didn't like it. However I must say that it was better than Vista. I still had some of the issues with W7 as I did with Vista, but it was at least 64 bit and more stable.

I'm still getting everything setup on my system since so much depends on Windows specific processes, software and one of these is that being able to get into our Windows Terminal Server was starting to become a little problem. I needed to install the ICA Client on my laptop but I installed 64 bit Ubuntu. (Why use a 32 bit OS now-a-days?)

Well, I found that Citrix doesn't have a 64 bit client and it turns out that getting the 32 bit client running on here wasn't hard to do, just hard to find the solution. Amazingly, the information is actually on the Ubuntu website, but whenever I searched, nothing linked to it.

I'm posting this information to make it easier for people to find the solution.

The link to the Ubuntu instructions is here. And basically what I did was:

I downloaded the 32 bit Citrix tarball. I ran the installer:

sudo ./setupwtc

This installed the software in /usr/lib/ICAClient. You are then suppose to run from that directory a program called wtcmgr.

However it failed because it was missing libmotif3 which if you apt-get install, you get the 64 bit libraries. You therefore need to install the 32 bit version by download the 32 bit version and installing it manually.

I downloaded the package from Ubuntu's site and then I extracted the files and copied them over to the 32 bit lib directory.

sudo dpkg -x libmotif3_2.2.3-4_i386.deb /tmp
cd /tmp
sudo mv usr/lib/lib* /usr/lib32/.
sudo ln -s /usr/lib32/libXm.so.3.0.2 /usr/lib32/libXm.so.4

Then I went back into the ICA Client directory and ran the file.

Tada! Things work.

I love Linux!

-P

Update April 06 2012: I just re-installed on my machine so I could totally remove the Window 7 install. When I came to do the Citrix installation bit I was happy to discover that version 12.0 of the ICA client comes in a 64 bit deb package. Though I still had to do a thing or two. I had to manually install nspluginwrapper which installed a bunch of stuff and then the ICA client installed ok. It was great though because it worked as soon as I completed that. I didn't even have to restart Firefox (however I had copied my profile over from my backup so that may have had some info already setup.)

-P

Wednesday 8 September 2010

Excited to see my stuff is still around...

When I started this blog, I didn't think that most of the stuff I would write about would be of use to anyone.

However, it seems I was wrong. I've found that several of the things that I've put together in these measly pages are of use!

I also checked out some of the graphics I've made (not great, but useful ones) on OpenClipArt.org and found that they're of use too!

I created some server racks in a previous job because I couldn't find any that worked in inscape without any modification. I also wanted them to be easy to use and allow me to add servers and hardware that would fit neatly. I made each U 12 pixels high and made them available. I made them in June 09 and as of today they've been downloaded over 3500 times!

Cool! Now, what else can I make and have you thought of contributing?

-P

Friday 3 September 2010

Another great feature from Google GMAIL team...

Google enabled "Email Priority" on my accounts and I got to say, it's AWESOME!

I wish were using Google Apps where I'm working now so that this feature is available. Basically by learning which emails you consider important (because you reply to those people, you read most of their emails, etc) GMail now will mark emails from those sources as "important" - meaning you see those at the top of your inbox. Below you get starred emails and below that "the rest" which includes the ones that are priority.

Love the new feature!

-P