William's Workbench

Oracle breaks Sun DTD links, Glassfish java.io.FileNotFoundException

June 2nd, 2011

At work today we got bit by a DTD URL change. Thanks Oracle.

One of our web applications would not deploy, giving a�java.io.FileNotFoundException for a DTD at this url:

http://www.sun.com/software/appserver/dtds/sun-ejb-jar_3_1-0.dtd.

A little bit of Google sleuthing turned up a working URL for this DTD at this url:

http://www.sun.com/software/dtd/appserver/sun-ejb-jar_3_1-0.dtd

Update

It appears that a lot of DTDs are changed. There is a list of current DTDs here:�http://www.sun.com/software/dtd/appserver/

Tags: dtd, glassfish, java, xml
Posted in Programming, Ramblings | 1 Comment »

Printing in Google Sketchup

April 20th, 2011

I use the free version of Google Sketchup for a lot of my CAD work. Something that has always been a pain is trying to print to scale. SU insisted on putting a small part that would easily fit on a pge on 4 pages, with a corner of the part on each of the pages. A big of Google sleuthing turned up this solution, which was paraphrased from this blog post.

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Inspiron 1521 Windows XP drivers

April 13th, 2011

I had to look high and low for these so I’ll put them here for next time.

http://support.dell.com/support/downloads/driverslist.aspx?os=WW1&osl=EN&catid=-1&impid=-1&servicetag=&SystemID=LAT_D531&hidos=WLH&hidlang=en

Update (found a forum post with driver file names):

Chipset:
Ricoh – Driver
Applies to:
R5C833
(R141246.exe – for SD/MMC card reader)

Communication:
Conexant – Application
Applies to:
D330,HDA,MDC,v.92,modem
(R148605.exe – Digital line detection – warns you if you connect to a digital switchboard. Useful if you travel but not vital for home use. For driver see below)

Mouse & Keyboards:
Dell – Driver
Applies to:
Touchpad / Pointing Stick
(R155586.exe)

Network:
Broadcom – Driver
Applies to:
440x 10/100 Integrated Controller
(R149798.exe)

Dell – Driver
Applies to:
Wireless 1395 WLAN MiniCard
Wireless 1505 Draft 802.11n WLAN Mini-Card
Wireless 1490 Dual-Band WLAN MiniCard
Wireless 1390 WLAN MiniCard
(R174291.exe)

You can find the remaining drivers in the download list for the Lattitude D531:

Audio:
SIGMATEL – Driver
Applies to:
STAC 92XX C-Major HD Audio
(R171789.exe)

Chipset:
AMD – Driver
Applies to:
Processor Driver
(R135384.exe – Support for AMD PowerNow! and Cool�n�Quiet)

ATI – Driver
Applies to:
SMBus / Chipset Driver
(R134875.exe)

Communication:
Conexant – Driver
Applies to:
D330,HDA,MDC,v.92,modem
(R147115.exe – This is the actual driver for the modem)

Video:
AMD – Driver
Applies to:
Radeon Xpress 1270
(R163694.exe – This complained that .Net was not installed when I first tried so I suggest installing everything else first and running Windows Update to get all the .Net 1.1, 2.0 and 3.0 updates before running this)

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Roomba battery

February 24th, 2011

Several years ago I got a good deal on a used Romba Discovery. A good cleaning and an AC adapter from the parts bin later it worked fine. The battery didn’t have much life in it after a few months of use so I bought another on eBay and all was well.

Fast forward a couple of years and the little robot had fallen into disuse but still sat patiently on its charger. Upon trying to start to use it again the battery gave out. After a charge it would give anywhere from 1 to 30 seconds of run time before flashing red and crying pitifully that it needed a charge. Some internet searching and forum reading led to a battery conditioning technique that is recommended by the manufacturer. I also took this opportunity to finally build a serial interface for the Roomba (more bits from the parts bin = $0 cost). Thanks to a few lines of Perl to parse the serial output and gnuplot I have pretty graphs of the battery charging cycle (that is currently 52 hours into the recommended 72 hours).

Click on the graphs to embiggen.