No GLXFBConfig for Depth 32

I love Beryl/Compiz, b0ut I have found them to be a bit finicky (understandably). Under Kubuntu Feisty with an Nvidia 7300 Go video card, I ran into a tremendously annoying problem where the title bars for windows were not visible. Looking at the output for beryl-manager, I saw the following:

No GLXFBConfig for Depth 32

I found this puzzling because I’m not running at a 32 bit depth – I’m running at 24. Again, the Ubuntu forums saved me:

 http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?p=2121656

That told me to add the following two options to the Screen section of my xorg.conf file:

Option "AddARGBGLXVisuals" "True"
Option "DisableGLXRootClipping" "True"

The screen section of my xorg.conf now looks like the following:

X Error: BadDevice, invalid or uninitialized input device 169

Running Kubuntu Feisty 7.0.4 and the latest “stable” versions of Beryl and Compiz on a System76 Gazelle Performance laptop with an Nvidia 7300 Go card, I kept running into the following error every time I launched an X application from the console:

X Error: BadDevice, invalid or uninitialized input device 169    Major opcode:  147
  Minor opcode:  3
  Resource id:  0x0
Failed to open device
X Error: BadDevice, invalid or uninitialized input device 169
  Major opcode:  147
  Minor opcode:  3
  Resource id:  0x0
Failed to open device

I found the straightforward answer in the Ubuntu forums:

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?p=1762954

For reasons I don’t understand, my xorg.conf contained multiple references to a Wacom tablet device, which I don’t have. Commenting out all references to this device and restarting Xorg solved the problem

Struts Redirect w/Parameters Part 2

In an earlier post, I described a class to handle redirects in Struts and passing parameters along. That technique is not necessary; as of Struts 1.2.7, you can use the ActionRedirect class instead.

event:Selectors for Prototype

http://encytemedia.com/event-selectors/

Very interesting idea of defining events such as mouseover, mouseout, etc. in javascript using CSS syntax combined with Prototype and Script.aculo.us.

Client/Server Logging for AJAX

One of the huge pains about writing AJAX applications is handling logging and debugging. Many Java developers use log4j, so something similar would be immensely beneficial. Of course, there is a SourceForge project called log4ajax that attempts to solve this very problem. Eric Spiegelberg wrote an article on today.java.net describing possible usages of log4ajax for both client and server side logging.

Exception Handling Framework for J2EE Applications

OnJava has an interesting article on generic approach to handling exceptions within a J2EE framework. The basic idea involves creating a generic base class for exceptions and a basic handler for all requests that includes dispatcher to pass the request along to the appropriate method.
The fundamental idea is fairly sound and the idea of including a context to allow reuse of generic exceptions seems like a strong idea. My concern is that in a large project, the use of a "context" may make it difficult to figure out which specific message code is used in a given place. The generic exception handling is especially beneficial for the "this should never happen" cases where there isn't much the app can do about the exception, but should still handle it in a robust manner.

Building RPMs as non-root User

Based directly on an article at FedoraNEWS.ORG

1. Create appropriate rpmbuild directory structure.
2. Create ~/.rpmmacros

Beagle on Suse 10.0 Part 2

After completing the previous tutorial, I found I couldn't run beagle-search. I always got an error regarding a missing function related to librsvg. I swear the shared library was available, registered with ldconfig and contained the function in question.

That's when I discovered there was an easier way.

Beagle 0.2.2 on Suse 10.0

Suse 10 comes with a very outdated version of Beagle that does not include support for Firefox. This is what I had to do to get Beagle 0.2.2 working on Suse 10.0.

Installed the following packages via YaST:

• librsvg
• librsvg-devel
• libcroco-devel

ReplayGain amaroK script

ReplayGain KDE-Apps.org

Nice little script for amaroK that analyzes songs in your collection and determines the amount of gain necessary for each of them to play at roughly the same volume, without forcing you to adjust the volume for each song. Stores the information in a tag, so none of the songs are actually modified.