So I tried updating one of my boxen running the Lucid Kubuntu LTS to the new Precise Pangolin beta. During the upgrade, I received an error message stating that adobe-flashplugin could not be upgraded. I ignored it and continued with the upgrade and all went swimmingly. Once the upgrade was completed and I had rebooted, when I tried to run an apt-get update, I ran into an error with respect to the adobe-flashplugin package. When I tried to remove it, it did not work. As a stop-gap measure, I removed a number of packages that depended on it including Firefox and sun-java6.

Rather than use images with transparencies, it is often preferable to replace transparent pixels with a suitable background colour.

In ACDSee 4, the background colour of transparent PNG files (or any other image file that supports transparency) is by default set to black. There is no immediately apparent option whereby you can change this colour and then save the file as a JPG or similar. After some asking around, I was told that while it is possible to customise this colour, it's a bit of a pain. Here's how:

Continuing on with my workarounds for moving system files around, today, I decided to look into moving my user profile folder to a different partition. While IIRC, it used to be possible (in earlier versions of Windows) to do this by setting the home folder to an appropriate value in the user management snapshot, that did not work for me.

My windows machine is running off a bum drive and seeing as to how HDD prices are temporarily ridiculously high at the moment, I've decided to attempt a few workarounds to see if I can continue to use this erratically faulty drive for a couple of more months. The issue with the drive is in itself unknown. It just locks up suddenly with the HDD LED continuously on. Windows continues to be active for a while, but not terribly responsive. Sometimes, the issue sorts itself out after a while. Other times, the system reboots.

A note to myself on how to force-sync my really outdated master branch with an active branch. This is taken from this excellent post:

git checkout -b tmp origin/upstream
git merge -s ours downstream
git checkout downstream
git merge tmp
git branch -D tmp

where upstream is the branch whose commits we want and downstream is the branch we want to merge into.

If you've been working with Linux terminals for a while, you've invariably found that viewing a binary file tends to output a lot of hieroglyphic nonsense (when all you want to do is check its header) and for some petty collateral damage, rapes your screen by changing your command prompt and window title to more of the same gibberish. While a lot of people (*raises hand*) simply accept such rowdy behaviour as one of the vagaries of life and simple open a new terminal window or similar, this - as I found out a few minutes ago - can be fixed.

On an Ubuntu box, I tried using the locate command to find information about a package and ran into the following error:

mlocate: can not stat () `/var/lib/mlocate/mlocate.db': No such file or directory

The locate program (should) routinely builds a database of files on the box and searches it when we call it. As the error message states, this database appears to be missing thereby leading to the error. Fixing it is as simple as calling:
updatedb

which should build the database.

Hope this helps!

If you find that you Drupal installation is WSOD-dead with the following error message:

Error: Class 'SelectQueryExtender' not found in includes/pager.inc

then this means that you've messed up the Drupal (7, at the time of writing) registry somehow. You might have done this during an import/export operation where you forgot to export the registry and registry_file tables, or as I did, you have foolishly just emptied them to clear up issues with a missing class file that Drupal fastidiously continues to track.

Today, I made quite an impression on my furniture thanks to incessant contact between it and my illustrious head. This, as usual, was due to my looking for a clean regex to solve my issue while working with text files in Vim. My task was, I initially believed, quite simple: delete all the lines that are sandwiched between two types/patterns of lines. In this case, the top slice of the sandwich consisted of a line which was entirely a number and the bottom slice was a line entirely populated with underscores.

I'm using Eclipse (Indigo) and eGit, its Git plugin. Earlier today, when I merged the contents of one branch with my master, I ran into a bunch of conflicts. While I suspect that I should have used the "Team > Merge Tool" to resolve them, as they were rudimentary in nature, I just sorted them out manually. However, eGit did not notice that the conflicts (and their in-file markers) were gone and retained the conflicted icon for each of the affected files.