http://johnbokma.com/ John Bokma, a freelance Perl programmer living in Mexico http://johnbokma.com/mexit/2012/01/13/down-the-grassy-slope.html In the morning I had a hard time getting up; I hadn't slept much during the night. When I looked out the window the gray clouded sky didn't help me much convincing that it was a good day for hiking. After some pondering, should we stay or should we go, I decided to just go, also since the weather might [...] 2012-01-22T01:51Z http://johnbokma.com/mexit/2011/11/01/installing-qt-sdk-ubuntu-lucid-lynx.html Yesterday I tried to install Qt 4.7 via the Linux/X11 64-bit "Online Installer" on Ubuntu 10.04. At first the installation failed since I ran out of space on the partition that has /usr/local/. I had selected the custom installation and added Qt Designer, its documentation, and the Qt [...] 2011-11-02T01:16Z http://johnbokma.com/mexit/2011/09/01/books-received-in-august.html Since I want to relearn C++ programming; I've been programming in this language back in the 90's but soon got more work in Java and Perl programming, I asked for several C++ programming related books. The reason why I want to pick up C++ again is that I would like to do more GUI related programming work. [...] 2011-10-24T20:06Z http://johnbokma.com/mexit/2011/09/01/re-learning-c-plus-plus.html Recently I decided to relearn C++ programming. I used to do some C and C++ programming back in the 90's but somehow I kept getting more and more Perl and Java programming work, so after some time I stopped improving both my C and C++ [...] 2011-10-24T22:01Z http://johnbokma.com/mexit/2011/07/18/adobe-flash-11-on-ubuntu-64-bit.html In the afternoon I installed the beta of the Adobe Flash Player 11 plug-in into the plugins directory of Firefox. Below I have written down the steps I [...] 2011-07-18T23:03Z http://johnbokma.com/mexit/2011/07/18/oracle-java-plug-in-firefox.html While I had installed Oracle Java on Ubuntu 10.04 weeks ago I hadn't had time to install the Java plug-in so Mozilla Firefox could display Java applets even though this is a piece of cake. And since today I had planned to, finally, configure Firefox on a recent fresh install of Ubuntu Lucid Lynx to my [...] 2011-07-18T23:03Z http://johnbokma.com/mexit/2011/07/04/installing-saxon-he-ubuntu.html Because Ubuntu didn't see my manual installation of the Oracle Java JDK as a valid Java alternative I couldn't install Saxon-B using apt-get install. Instead of trying to find a solution to this issue I decided to install Saxon manually as well. And since I was now free in my choice, I decided to install [...] 2011-07-12T22:38Z http://johnbokma.com/mexit/2011/07/04/installing-apache-fop-ubuntu.html Since I had installed Oracle Java installed manually without a single problem I decided to install Apache FOP manually as well. Also because when I tried to install it via sudo apt-get install fop it turned out that Ubuntu didn't see that Java had already been installed, most likely due to a step I hadn't [...] 2011-07-12T22:21Z http://johnbokma.com/mexit/2011/06/29/ssh-client-time-out.html Nearly a week ago I did a fresh install of Ubuntu Lucid Lynx on my development system and I am still installing software I need for my work on it and configuring the system. Today I restored the .ssh folder from backup into my home directory. I have in the config file inside this directory the two following [...] 2011-07-12T18:52Z http://johnbokma.com/mexit/2011/06/24/oracle-java-jdk-installation-ubuntu.html In the evening I installed the Oracle Java JDK on Ubuntu Lucid Lynx. Since Oracle Java is no longer available via the default repositories I decided to manually install Java instead of adding a repository and possibly installing an older version. Since I need Java to run programs like Apache Ant, Apache [...] 2011-07-12T16:56Z http://johnbokma.com/mexit/2011/06/24/installing-vlc-media-player-ubuntu.html In the evening I installed VLC media player 1.1.10 "The Luggage" on Ubuntu 10.04 LTS. The latter I had freshly installed yesterday on my Dell Vostro 200 ST. Instead of installing the outdated 1.0.6 version that comes with Lucid Lynx I decided to install VLC, at my own risk, from a Personal Package Archive [...] 2011-07-12T01:34Z http://johnbokma.com/mexit/2011/06/24/emacs-anti-aliased-fonts.html On the previous installation of Ubuntu on my Dell Vostro I used a snapshot version of Emacs to have much better looking anti-aliased fonts while editing. Today, in the afternoon, when I checked the default version of Emacs on my fresh installation of Lucid Lynx I was pleasantly surprised to discover [...] 2011-07-12T01:34Z http://johnbokma.com/mexit/2011/07/09/utorrent-server-64-bit-linux.html In the evening I decided to install the 64 bit 3.0 alpha of µTorrent Server on my Dell Vostro 200 ST running Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx. Earlier this week I had checked if the program would even run on my computer, which it seemed to do without any problems. And today I wanted to install it for real and [...] 2011-07-11T01:22Z http://johnbokma.com/mexit/2011/06/29/making-org-mode-pdf-export-work.html A week ago I received "The Org Mode 7 Reference Manual", published by Network Theory Ltd as a reward for some Perl programming help I had given. I had already been reading parts of the book and so far Org mode for Emacs looks very, very useful to me, especially since I still keep todo lists on paper [...] 2011-07-06T18:23Z http://johnbokma.com/mexit/2011/06/24/subversion-apache-ssl-ubuntu.html In the afternoon I installed Subversion on my Dell Vostro running Lucid Lynx. Yesterday I had done a fresh install of Ubuntu Lucid Lynx 10.04.02 LTS and in order to be able to do some work I really had to make the SVN repositories I keep my work in available via https [...] 2011-07-10T23:43Z http://johnbokma.com/mexit/2011/06/08/ Today, while still preparing for the reinstall of a more recent version of Ubuntu I wrote a small bash script to backup each MySQL database to a separate file. I have not much experience with writing bash scripts and at first wanted to write the program in Perl. But after firing up Emacs and typing the [...] 2011-06-09T00:19Z http://johnbokma.com/mexit/2011/05/02/ The 23rd of April "alex" posted a message to the Dutch Linux Usenet group nl.comp.os.linux.installatie with the subject "Install Hypervm " centos". In the message "alex" asked for help since he couldn't make it work. Since I had installed CentOS in Microsoft Hyper-V several times the past year I replied [...] 2011-05-03T01:45Z http://johnbokma.com/mexit/2011/03/10/ And this time, finally, I was right: 2 boxes from Amazon. One box contained two books ordered the 10th of February in return for the Perl programming help I had [...] 2011-03-12T01:11Z http://johnbokma.com/mexit/2011/03/09/the-little-bookworm.html In the evening we wanted to watch a movie in our basement. The basement has 2 sections: one part is my office and the other part has a couch and a monitor. The latter is used to watch movies on by connecting it to Esme's laptop, a Dell Inspiron 1525. A Muscle Rack, functioning as a bookcase, is used [...] 2011-03-11T21:48Z http://johnbokma.com/mexit/2011/03/09/date-manip-arguments-must-be-valid-dates-bug.html Today, a Perl program, part of a parallel site crawling project I am working on for a customer, reported the following issue (reformatted for easy [...] 2011-03-11T21:24Z http://johnbokma.com/mexit/2011/03/07/ In the early evening I decided to check the substrate of a terrarium in which I keep a centipede collected the 6th of November last year near the town of El Limón Totalco, Veracruz. I hadn't seen the centipede for months and was worried that it had died even though I've kept the substrate about as moist [...] 2011-03-10T01:15Z http://johnbokma.com/mexit/2010/08/15/ While we were living in the town of Coatepec we went on several walks close to this town. Due to time constraints I haven't been able yet to write about most of those walks; a blog entry of a single walk can take between one and two days to write, including sorting through a lot of photos. Since in that [...] 2010-08-16T02:57Z http://johnbokma.com/mexit/2010/04/28/ In the morning, just after I woke up, Esme told me that the Compaq computer wasn't working. She thought it had died, which wouldn't have been a big surprise since the motherboard, an Asus K8S-LA (Salmon), had nearly killed the north bridge about 2 years ago. Ironic, since I specifically bought the Compaq [...] 2010-04-29T03:45Z http://johnbokma.com/mexit/2010/03/31/ One of my most favorite Firefox add-ons is Copy URL+. For one reason or another the maximum version of Firefox it supports hasn't been updated for quite some time. So each time I want it installed on a computer with a fresh install of Firefox I have to update the maxVersion in the install.rdf [...] 2010-04-01T03:50Z http://johnbokma.com/mexit/2010/03/22/ I just closed my AdSense account and removed all AdSense related code off my site. The reason? Tired of having to ask in a public forum if someone can please assist in helping me out. Yes, you're reading that correctly, nowadays Google insists that you ask for help in a public forum, where you have to [...] 2010-03-23T06:25Z http://johnbokma.com/mexit/2010/03/15/ If you use the subdl command-line tool for downloading subtitles you probably have noticed that it suddenly stopped working a few days ago. Instead of a list of subtitle files to download I got the following [...] 2010-03-16T02:00Z http://johnbokma.com/mexit/2010/02/17/ In the afternoon I decided that in the evening I was going to install Ubuntu 9.10, also known as Karmic Koala, on my mother-in-law's computer. But I needed something easy to put a backup on of the /home directory, which has two accounts, one for Esme and one for her mother. Since we have an old 256MB [...] 2010-02-19T00:54Z http://johnbokma.com/mexit/2010/02/11/ The past two days I've been working on a small project which required the generating of a PDF file with a barcode and some other text data, and a watermark image. Today I decided to do a clean install on Ubuntu 9.10 AMD64 running in VirtualBox of all programs I use to convert an XML file, via an intermediate [...] 2010-02-12T03:37Z http://johnbokma.com/mexit/2010/02/05/ Just after 10 in the morning Esme, Alice and I went out for our appointment with Naolí Vinaver Lopez, our midwive, who lives just outside of Xalapa. Since I wanted to take my digital photo camera with me, and the rechargeable batteries have become very unreliable - especially the Energizer AA 2500 mAh [...] 2010-02-11T18:32Z http://johnbokma.com/mexit/2010/02/02/ Today Esme and I went to Xalapa. We left Alice with her grandmother, Esme's mother, who has been staying with after her mother passed away. We went to Xalapa for two reasons: first I had to do some paperwork in order to get my FM2 visa, and second, I wanted to see Avatar [...] 2010-02-11T18:41Z http://johnbokma.com/mexit/2010/01/27/changing-the-mysql-prompt.html For example the following command will show the current database name between parentheses in the prompt, which is quite useful if you switch often between [...] 2010-01-28T02:20Z http://johnbokma.com/mexit/2010/01/27/sql-from-text-file.html Today I was working on a Python project for a customer, and had to add some additional tables to an existing MySQL database. I normally add the SQL statements to a text file, using the extension 'sql' and feed this file to the mysql client program as [...] 2010-01-28T02:20Z http://johnbokma.com/mexit/2010/01/21/ In the afternoon I finished "Into the heart of Borneo" by Redmond O'Hanlon (ISBN 0-394-75540-5). Back in the 90's I had read the Dutch translation of this story, and I loved it. Hence sometime ago I had added the book to my Amazon wish list and later on asked for it to be ordered in exchange for some [...] 2010-01-23T01:02Z http://johnbokma.com/mexit/2010/01/05/activeperl-wxwidgets-dll-issue.html Last week I decided to update a development environment, Windows XP Professional running in a virtual machine, with the latest version of ActivePerl and WxWidgets. However, when I had installed the Wx package via the Perl package manager the application I am developing didn't start but reported the following [...] 2010-01-06T02:23Z http://johnbokma.com/mexit/2009/12/30/alice-broke-her-arm.html "John! John! John!" that was how I woke up around noon, Esme calling loud several times my name. I was still in the bed: I had a cold for a few days now and hadn't been able to sleep most of the [...] 2010-01-20T23:15Z http://johnbokma.com/mexit/2009/09/26/python-downgrading-beatifulsoup.html Yesterday, a customer of mine emailed me that the Python program I had written for him didn't work. The last line of the traceback [...] 2009-09-27T22:29Z http://johnbokma.com/mexit/2009/08/08/dirt-road-to-san-marcos.html After a little more walking, with a dense patch of coffee plants to our left, we came upon a wall to our left, and a T-junction in front of us. I decided that we would go to the right, into the direction of San Marcos de [...] 2009-08-23T01:12Z http://johnbokma.com/mexit/2009/08/08/coatepec-augacatal-road.html I woke up quite late in the morning, and was not feeling very well. I asked Esme if we could go out for a short walk to clear my mind, and to get out of the house; away from the computer and work. I already had an idea where I wanted to go; I wanted to explore the very green part south of Coatepec in [...] 2009-08-22T22:12Z http://johnbokma.com/mexit/2009/08/08/cable-cat.html Just before noon I found out where our new pet, a kitten we bought last Tuesday in the petshop, was hiding: behind my Dell Vostro, on top of some cables with its paws close to the on/off switch of the power strip to which my computer, monitor, etc. are [...] 2009-08-22T22:08Z http://johnbokma.com/mexit/2009/08/17/mime-lite-smtp-port-bug-fix.html If you use SMTP to send email using MIME::Lite from your Perl program and use not the default SMTP port 25 but specify one as [...] 2009-08-17T20:35Z