Dealing with Transip’s Java based Console for VPS VM’s on Ubuntu

This is just a dump of my experience in getting the Transip VPS Console interface to work on Lubuntu 11.04 (64-bit) with Chromium 14.0.835.202 (Developer Build 103287) Ubuntu 11.04.

Transip uses a Java Applet for accessing your newly created VM. At first I could not get the Java applet to work with the packages available on Ubuntu. This is not Transip’s fault, but rather due to the issues surrounding Java on Linux. Oracle decided to change Java ‘s license and thus forcing Ubuntu to change the way they are handling Java. Basically making installing Java unnecessary difficult. Anyways, if you follow these steps you at least should get a working Transip Console, albeit a very buggy and highly annoying to use console.

Since I use a 64-bit version of Ubuntu the following steps might be different for the 32-bit version. Oh, this worked for me, it might not work for you and eat your cat or something evil like that. Use the following information at your own risk! For now I’m ONLY interested in getting Java applets to work with Chrome & Chromium. If you need a different browser or want to use this Java version on the desktop, you’ll have to find out yourself on how to achieve what you need. Leave a comment if you have done so

Anyways, let’s start!

1) Download Oracle Java JRE 7 (Use the link otherwise you might get lost in a forest of corporate speak…). In my case I’ve downloaded only the Java Runtime Environment (JRE 64-bit tar.gz) version and not the Java Development Kit (JDK) since I only wanted to use an Java applet.

2) Unpack the tar.gz. In my case I used the following path: /opt/jre1.7.0_02
I’ve symlinked this from /opt/jre-oracle to make it more accessible and easy to change.

3) In order to make Chromium use the newly installed Java plugin you need to tell it where it can find the plugin. You need to do this by making a symlink:

sudo ln -s /opt/jre-oracle/lib/amd64/libnpjp2.so /usr/lib/chromium-browser/plugins

4) Restart Chromium and check if the plugin is found. Do this by entering chrome://plugins in the url bar. If you see multiple Java plugins, for instance something with IcedTea, disable all except the one you just installed (probably called similar to this: ‘Java(TM) Plug-in 1.7.0_02′

5) Check if you can use or view a Java Applet. I’ve used this example from the excellent Learning Processing site by Daniel Shiffman

Note: In theory nothing should happen to any other installed Java version you might have, since we only changed the Java plugin for Chromium, but keep in mind that Java Applets will now run using the Oracle JRE and not any previous installed Java versions.

After following the above steps I finally managed to ‘use’ the Transip Console.

PS: Transip, if you’re reading this please fix this abomination you call a console. You can do so much better as you have already shown with your awesome employees responding diligently and the spot on price quality ratio in your products. Except for this horrible VPS console! Please check out Linode and learn from them.

Oh, feel free to contact me if you need a beta tester for a new console

The iPad signals an end to the ‘hacker era’ of digital history?

The thing that bothers me most about the iPad is this: if I had an iPad rather than a real computer as a kid, I’d never be a programmer today. I’d never have had the ability to run whatever stupid, potentially harmful, hugely educational programs I could download or write. I wouldn’t have been able to fire up ResEdit and edit out the Mac startup sound so I could tinker on the computer at all hours without waking my parents. The iPad may be a boon to traditional eduction, insofar as it allows for multimedia textbooks and such, but in its current form, it’s a detriment to the sort of hacker culture that has propelled the digital economy.

Perhaps the iPad signals an end to the “hacker era” of digital history. Now that consumers and traditional media understand the digital world, maybe there’s proportionally less need for freewheeling technological experimentation and platforms that allow for the same. Maybe the hypothetical mom doesn’t need a real computer. As long as real computers stick around for people who do need them, maybe there’s no harm in that.

Wherever we stand in digital history, the iPad leaves me with the feeling that Apple’s interests and values going forward are deeply divergent from my own. There’s nothing wrong with that; people make consumer decisions every day based on their values. If I don’t like the product that the iPad turns out to be once released, I’m free to simply not buy it. These things have a way of evolving, and I won’t preclude the possibility that Apple eventually addresses concerns about the openness of the device.

For now, though, I remain disturbed. The future of personal computing that the iPad shows us is both seductive and dystopian. It’s not a future I want to bring into my home.

Source: http://al3x.net/2010/01/28/ipad.html

This quote (emphasizes are mine), perfectly reflects my concerns with regards to computing, but also our society in general, and the closed, proprietary direction some companies and people want to take us into. I belief that this direction will turn out to be a dead-end street and I hope we can prevent this from happening before causing it too much harm. This also highlights my arguments in favor of: sharing, openness, free software, accessibility and the right to play, destroy(mostly accidentally, sorry), create, tinker and experiment. In my humble opinion that is the only way to learn, innovate and work towards new, sustainable ways of living on this planet.

Most stupid function in WordPress?

[...]Will only output the date if the current post’s date is different from the
previous one output.

Source: the_date() function in the WordPress source code.

WTF! Why on earth is this function only returning a date when the post date differs from the previous one and does nothing if the two are equal. I don’t get this. I guess I’m going to supply a bugreport and a patch.