...nwood...

Last night I finally achieved a goal I've been doggedly pursuing for - well let's just say "too long." I've got Band-in-a-Box (BIAB) running under Wine (MS Windows emulation) in Ubuntu 7.10. I've been dual-booting Windows and Linux on my IBM Thinkpad T40 for quite a while. One of the main reason I've needed to subject myself to the ugly and soul-less world of Microsoft has been to use BIAB.

Tonight I was giving Rhapsody another look. I have been using Napster mainly because it was a little cheaper. Rhapsody.com launched back in Dec 05. You can stream from within a web browser and the kicker is you don't have to use Internet Explorer, and they provide an Firefox extension! Sweet! Only one problem, the XPI installer bombs with an incorrect message about insufficient disk space. (Boo! Bugs!) I did a lot of googling and didn't find anyone with an answer, so I resorted to taking a look inside the XPI to see why it's so TWEEKED.

I figured out the url to the XPI download and then used wget to save it to my disk. (Is there an easier way?)

An XPI is just a zip file, so I unzipped it and pulled up install.js in my trusty editor (Emacs). The problem is right here:

var kilobytesAvailable = parseInt(bytesAvailable / 1024);

By looking here ~/.mozilla/firefox/pjfmmgsq.default/install.log I could see that parseInt is returning a very small negative number. Maybe diskspaceavialable isn't returning an int, or maybe it's just broken? I am not a java programmer and it's late (way past bedtime AGAIN), so I took the brute force approach and commented most of this function out.

I abandoned the previously blogged phpWiki in favor of the much more
user friendly and elegant MediaWiki
application. MediaWiki, another Apache-MySQL-PHP application, is the
workhorse behind Wikipedia, among other great wikis. One of the most annoying problems that I quickly ran into with phpWiki was that the application began complaining about "conflicting" edits as I made subsequent edits to the same page. Leveraging my programmer impatience, I did minimal troubleshooting and began searching for a different wiki solution.