I’ve looked for the correct wget command to download a directory remotely, but couldn’t find the right one. This one, however, worked for me:

wget -r --level=3 -np -nH "<URL of Directory>"

where

r – recursive download (download recursively looping through sub directories

np – no parent directories (without this command, you get some weird results from the recursion working for the parent directory as well)

nH – no host (get rid of the host name – without this, your folder will be created with some weird name that includes the host/url

level=3 -upto what level/depth you want to recurse or go into. Change to an appropriate number

Check the man page of wget for more information

• Login to your remote terminal (e.g: via SSH)
• Open Screen

 user@remote> screen

• Use the following commands to create, navigate etc. CTRL+A (CTRL A) is the control key in my Ubuntu server by default, and this might be the case for you as well. Thus when I refer to CTRL A p, I mean holding CTRL + A down, press the ‘p’ key
• Create a new terminal:

user@remote> CTRL A c

• Move to the next terminal:

user@remote> CTRL A n

• Move to the previous terminal:

user@remote> CTRL A p

Etc. Some more commands are as follows

• Move to a specific terminal: CTRL A “
• Move to the last used terminal: CTRL A A
• Move to terminal number 0 (0-9) : CTRL A 0

These commands were enough to get me going. For even further commands and to explore the power of screen in depth, here are some useful resources:

Resource 1, Resource 2

Problem: The internal Intel card worked fine. The T400 contains switcheable-graphics which can switch between the Intel Card (low-performance for power saving) and the ATI radeon mobility 3400 series card (high performance). In some OS, automatic switching occurs based on the power status. Unfortunately, Ubuntu, and the latest version I’m using – Jaunty Jackalope a.k.a 9.04, doesn’t support this. What’s more is that since the Intel card is set as the primary card, that is what Ubuntu detects.

Solution: To install the ATI Mobility driver, do the following:

1. Reboot the T400, and go into the BIOS setup
2. Under Config, select Display
3. Change from Switcheable-Graphics (both cards) to Discreet Graphics (ATI). Integrated Graphics is the Intel card.
4. Disable OS Auto-detection of Video Cards
5. Save and Exit (F10)
6. Boot into Ubuntu, go into menu: System->Administration->Hardware Drivers
7. Install the ATI driver given there – Ubuntu will automatically do this for you

Everything’s up and running after this (a reboot maybe required), and ATI’s proprietary fglrx driver should be installed. The ATI Catalyst Center should be under Applications->Accessories->ATI Catalyst Control Center.

However, I did experience a lot of flickering – especially when Google Earth was running – I also couldn’t watch movies in the full screen mode.

This fix worked:

1. Install the latest version of the ATI Catalyst Center. I installed version 9.6
2. URL: http://support.amd.com/us/gpudownload/Pages/index.aspx
3. Select the correct version for your architecture.
4. Assign permissions to your downloaded file:    sudo chmod +w <filename.run>
5. Run the installation:   sudo ./<filename.run>
6. Once finished, reboot into Linux. Everything worked fine for me hereonwards.

Ok – there seems to be some bugs overall which restricts 2 way sync between Google Calendar and Evolution (2.22.31) – however for simple calendars, here goes:

1. Create your calendar in Google Calendar
2. In the Evolution (2.22) mail client, select New->Calendar
3. Set the type of the calendar to Google
4. Give a name for your Calendar such as “Conquest of the Shire Timeline”
4. Enter your google account username in the Username section
5. Click OK, and enter your Google account password in the resulting box
6. Sit back and view your Google calendar in Evolution

There seems to be some bugs in accessing multiple calendars from the same account too. Anyways, as a workaround, you can add calendars as ICAL:

1. In your Google calendar account, within the specific calendar settings, copy
the ICAL URL.
2. In Evolution, create a new calendar of the type “On the Web”
3. Enter the ICAL URL in the URL section: replace the ‘http://’ section with ‘webcal://’
4. The other steps are similar to the Google setup given above

Enjoy…

Dr Sabine Begall and colleagues from the University of Duisburg-Essen looked at thousands of images of cattle on Google Earth in Britain, Ireland, India and the USA. They also studied 3,000 deer in the Czech Republic. The deer tended to face north when resting or grazing.

Wow. And to know that the cow in my backyard can be used as a very handy compass . This comment on Slashdot summarizes it all:

Having an edible compass would come in handy if you get lost.

However, when I tried starting qGIS from the command line, I got the following 2 errors/warnings:

Couldn’t load SIP module. Python support will be disabled

And

Couldn’t load PyQt bindings. Python support will be disabled.

The above 2 can be corrected by installing the following packages in Ubuntu:
sudo apt-get install python-sip4
sudo apt-get install python-qt4
And with the above steps completed, I now can run QGIS again. Viva GIS

Of course, there are simpler methods of debugging PHP scripts: a var_dump is quite handy in terms of simple debugging – however, having the right tools at hand for development means that we can spend more time in actual development than writing debug statements every once in a while – anyways, that’s my take.

XDebug is a remote debugger. Here we’ll take a look at getting XDebug working with Eclipse PDT providing a full debugging client. The first step would of course be to get Eclipse PDT up and running (refer previous post if needed). Once done, the next step would be to get Xdebug for our PHP environment set up – in my case, PHP5. On Ubuntu, this can be achieved by:
apt-get install php5-xdebug
This should install Xdebug for PHP5. Next, we’d configure Xdebug by editing the PHP configuration file. Most systems require the configuration items be added to the main php.ini, or the appropriate conf file. In Ubuntu 8.04 LTS, a separate configuration file,xdebug.ini, is created for Xdebug. Open this file using your favorite text editor (vim in my case):
sudo vim /etc/php5/conf.d/xdebug.ini
Add the following lines after the zend_extension= or zend_extension_ts= conf value.

xdebug.remote_enable=On
xdebug.remote_host="localhost"
xdebug.remote_port=9000
xdebug.remote_handler="dbgp"

And restart your web-server. In my case, Apache:
/etc/init.d/apache2 restart
To try out the debugger, open a PHP project in Eclipse (if you are importing an existing project via CVS, remember to add it as a PHP project using the New Project Wizard). In Window->Preferences->General->Web Browser, select external web browser, and set it to point to your default web browser. Next go into the debug section, by Window->Preferences->PHP->Debug, and set the PHP Debugger option to XDebug (by default this is set to the Zend Debugger). Note the chekbox “Break at first line” in this page as well – you can change this later on, as required. After you’ve applied your changes, go into the Debug menu, by Run->Open Debug Dialog… Here, make sure the Server Debugger is set to XDebug, and that the PHP server points to http://localhost or an appropriate server location. The file section should point to the file to be debugged, relative to your workspace (Note: if your project is missing from the list, check whether you’re project is configured as a PHP project – I’ve noticed that non-PHP projects fail to appear on this list). Thus if your file is index.php, the relative path maybe something/www/index.php etc.
Next, check the URL section to see whether it points to the correct location – if not, make sure you uncheck the “Auto-Generate” check box, and enter in the correct location. Apply the changes and close the dialog box.
A view of the Debug dialog is here:

You should now be ready to debug your application. Click on Run->Debug or F11 to enable debugging – Eclipse should switch to the Debug View, and the page should start loading in your external browser. If “Break at First Line” checkbox was checked previously, then the program would have “stopped” at the first line – you can step into or step over subsequent lines using the controls on your top left corner. Alternatively, you can place breakpoints at various locations and stop code execution there as well. The variables tab should give you the variables and their values at various times. I good guide from which I borrowed from is here. Get creative – start debugging.
A view of the debugger in operation is here: