Ubuntu, launch problem with Nvidia GeForce (GTX 590?)

I experienced serious difficulties in launching my Ubuntu live distribution. In particular, both the 11.10 and the 12.04 versions did not recognize any keyboard (PS/2 or USB, it was the same), and halted during the startup phase.

The interesting part is that on a completely identical computer, except the video card, everything worked correctly.

Googling around, I realized that it could be due to my dual-GPU Nvidia GTX 590, that may be not correctly supported by the open source driver, Noveau. The workaround is to use the "nomodeset" flag under the "other options" menu.

Once installed, you can set Nvidia's proprietary driver, which works in a seemless way.

HOWTO fix shared Google calendars not showing up in Android

Google calendar is a simple and useful tool for sharing informations about events and tasks with colleagues. The nice part is that you can gather many calendars and sum them up in a single view. The even nicest part is that everything flows into your android mobile, so you can have a collaborative real-time calendar in your phone.

So, what's the matter? Well, the web-based calendar runs perfectly, but sometimes Android messes up: some calendars, which are correctly shown in Google Calendar, do not appear in Android. Repeating the synchronization does not fix a thing, you have to get dirtier than this.

Go to Settings > Applications > Manage Applications > Running > Calendar storage

Then, click "Clear data" and "Force stop". The first one wipes out the local cache; the latter forces the calendar to restart and download the calendars again from the internet.

A bit messy, but it works.

Realizzi di esser stato d'aiuto quando...

...trovi il tuo blog linkato nelle dispense di due università americane (Central Florida e Central Connecticut). Nice!

Il mio post sul workaround per far funzionare Dev-CPP sotto Vista (dio maledica Microsoft per le sue trovate balzane) è diventato un po' il fix de facto in giro per internet, e ha portato più traffico e commenti delle altre centinaia di post che ho realizzato, anche quelle probabilmente più utili come l'implementazione di Aho-Corasick in PHP (la prima open-source, afaik).

Quest'ultima è un fenomeno interessante, in quanto mi ha provocato solamente un'ondata di spam pornografico nei commenti... in giapponese. Qualcuno deve aver linkato il post su un sito del sol levante (che non riesco a recuperare), e da lì è partito un assalto che, dopo quasi un anno, non accenna ad arrestarsi.

IE - object does not support property or method

Have you ever experienced the error message I wrote in the title? Are you hitting the walls with your head wondering what the frak it means? This post might be useful to you!

I wrote a page that worked seemlessly inside every know browser but Internet Explorers. Well, nothing new under the sun, web developers' work consists mainly in making things run inside that shit.

Anyway, I was surprised by the nature of the error message: "object does not support property or method", raised during a getElementById call:

foo = document.getElementById("foo");

Element "foo" was a DIV placed in the middle of the page.

So I asked to myself: "what is IE trying to say?". If it really meant that a method wasn't supported, therefore it had to be the getElementById() function, because no other method was involved. But I'm pretty sure that document object HAS a getElementById method. 

The other possibility is the lack of support for the property... but which one? The foo variable?? Yay man! The correct answer is this: you cannot give a variable the name of an element's id. By renaming the variable everything works correctly.

baz = document.getElementById("foo");

Here we go. Do you think this is nonsense? Well, so do I. 

• First, there's no reason why an HTML element should interfere with javascript variables. 
• Second, the error raised is totally incomprehensible and misleading. 
• Third, it's incredible that in 8 versions of IE Microsoft did not think of fixing this.

Inline-block and Internet Explorer

I use to collaborate with the press office of the University. In particular, I was asked to develop a sort of enhanced, multidimensional, collaborative "address book" that they use as a database of journalists.

During the development process they often changed requirements, with the result that the project grown way too much. In order to keep the user experience pleasant I did my effort to allow high interactivity to the operators, giving them a very intuitive interface. I do think that one of the best interfaces for contacts collection and relationships definition remains the Facebook's one. In particular, I love the way it displays collection of items as set of icons, in a web 2.0 fashioned way.

To obtain this kind of representation, I used HTML lists and set items' display property as inline-block. Bad idea: Internet Explorer (even the 8!!) does not understand it. Well, the latest release (that is supposed to be CSS 2.1 compliant) actually understands it, but only if the object is natively an inline, which is weird.

So, here comes the workaround:

display: inline-block; 
zoom: 1;
*display: inline;   

This fixes everything.

Reload a page with javascript

There's a lot of ways for completely reloading a web page via javascript.

Only a few permit to clean up any selection done to option forms.

Moreover, it turns out that there's only one robust way to do it, without weird confirmations popups (Internet Explorer) or strange behaviours (Firefox):

window.location.href=window.location.pathname;

Of course, works seemlessly in Chrome.

Vista and Dev-Cpp

For unexplicable reasons, Dev-Cpp does not compile correctly under Windows Vista.

It seems that Microsoft's OS messes up with environment paths, or something.

After a morning of swears and curses, I found a post on SourceForge's forum, featuring a workaround.

All you have to do is:

1. go in "tools > compiler options", move on "directories" tab and add "C:\Dev-Cpp\libexec\gcc\mingw32\3.4.2"
   
2. go in "programs" ad put "C:\Dev-Cpp\bin\" before any executable name

Naturally, put no quotation marks and eventually replace C:\Dev-Cpp\ with your Dev-Cpp installation folder.

This seems to work. Upsetting anyway.