Summer starts with OpenMRS

Wow Its amazing.. got selected to GSoC for the Second time! After the successful GSoC 2010 with Apache PhotArk, I was determine to participate in this year's GSoC as well. 

Like last time I only focused on one organization, this time its OpenMRS.

I was attracted to OpenMRS because of its motto “Write Code. Save lives.” and now after looking at its active community I have become more passionate in contributing to OpenMRS.

This year I applied three proposal, where two looked quite easy but one did not. But apparently I got selected to the hard one, and which is the one I liked most :)

"Message Delivery Triggered by Conditions within OpenMRS"

 

I like this because its challenging and interesting. Further I too got two good mentors; Daniel Kayiwa, the primary mentor, and Shaun Grannis as Backup Mentor. I'm very Excited to work with them :)

Project Starts now ...

Write Code. Save lives.

The release of Apache PhotArk M3-incubating

I'm pleased to announce the release of Apache PhotArk M3-incubating.

Apache PhotArk will be a complete open source photo gallery application including a content repository for the images, a display piece, an access control layer, and upload capabilities. The idea is to have a rigid design for the content repository with a very flexible display piece. The images in the content repository will be protected with granular access control.

PhotArk gallery currently allows you define and manage a set of albums hosted local into the content repository and provides a default web UI for album navigation. PhotArk also supports creating and deploying your own photo gallery into Google AppEngine cloud infrastructure.

For full details about the release and to download the distributions
please go to:
http://incubator.apache.org/photark/photark-downloads.html

Apache PhotArk welcomes your help. Any contribution, including code, testing, contributions to the documentation, or bug reporting is always appreciated. For more information on how to get involved in Apache PhotArk visit the website at:
http://incubator.apache.org/photark/

Thank you for your interest in Apache PhotArk!

The Apache PhotArk Team.

Shortcut launcher for IntelJ Idea in Ubuntu

Than starting from command prompt, Launcher is a fascinating way to start programs by a single click in Ubuntu.

We can add launchers either in the Desktop or on panels.
To add one, right click the panel and select "Add to panel...", you will get the "Add to panel" window.
Here double click on "custom application launcher".

On the "Create launcher" window, for name type "Idea" and for the  command type:

/bin/sh -c 'export JDK_HOME=path for Java home && path for /bin/idea.sh

E.g.

/bin/sh -c 'export JDK_HOME=/usr/lib/jvm/java-6-sun-1.6.0.20 && /home/suho/proj/idea-IU-95.66/bin/idea.sh'

By clicking the launcher icon on the "Create launcher" window you can select an image file to add as the icon of your launcher. For Idea you can find its image form Idea_Home/bin/

Happy coding!

Huawei E1550 USB 3G Modem on Ubuntu

USB modem configuration is always an issue for Ubuntu users. Here I provide an easy solution which worked for my Huawei E1550 USB modem on my Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx.

Ubuntu has a great feature called rule files, here we only need to create a new configuration file for our USB modem. After creating the corresponding rule file the machine will automatically switch the USB mode of your 3G Modem from USB Storage to USB Modem.

As the first step we need to find out the product id and the vendor id of our 3G USB modem. Connect the Modem, then in the terminal type;

$ lsusb

You will get a list of drivers connected to the USB ports.
In my case, one of the entries I found was.

Bus 002 Device 004: ID 12d1:1446 Huawei Technologies

Here 1446 is the Product id, and 12d1 is the vendor id, of my USB Modem.
Note: In this case, my system has only recognized the USB Modem a USB Storage drive.

Now you need to create a rule file for the Modem.

$ sudo vi /etc/udev/rules.d/15-huawei-155x.rules

Then type the following:

ACTION!="add", GOTO="huawei_zerocd_end"

SUBSYSTEM=="usb", ATTR{bDeviceClass}!="ff" ,ENV{DEVTYPE}=="usb_device", GOTO="huawei_zerocd_disable"
SUBSYSTEM=="scsi", ENV{DEVTYPE}=="scsi_device", GOTO="huawei_zerocd_disable"
GOTO="huawei_zerocd_end"

LABEL="huawei_zerocd_disable"
ATTRS{idVendor}=="12d1", ATTRS{idProduct}=="1446", RUN+="modem-modeswitch -v 0x%s{idVendor} -p 0x%s{idProduct} -t option-zerocd"

LABEL="huawei_zerocd_end"

Now, save and exit. Next time when you plug in your USB modem, your system should automatically switch it to USB Modem mode and you’re good to go.

To cross check whether Ubuntu has properly detected the USB modem, type;

$ lsusb

now your output should contain a line like;

Bus 002 Device 004: ID 12d1:1001 Huawei Technologies Co., Ltd. E620 USB Modem

Now if you get something like this, then you can be sure that the system has successfully recognized your USB as 3G Modem.
Note there is an “USB Modem ” at the end of the line.

But before you can finally start using your USB modem to connect to the Internet, you still need to configure your network connections. Simply go to “System -> Preferences -> Network Connections” and select the “Mobile Broadband” tab. Then click the “Add” button and the Mobile Broadband Connection wizard should be able to help you configure your Internet connection in no time.

For other USB Modems try the same technique by adding the corresponding product and vendor ids. Wish they will work for you :-)

The 'vi' arrow keys not working in Ubuntu

Most people get this issue of arrow keys not working for 'vi' in Ubuntu. Instead, it displays A, B, C, and D characters.

This is because the default 'vi' in Ubuntu is a vi 'light' version (that is the vim-tiny package). This does not use the arrow keys as you would expect.

If you want the arrow keys to function you have to install the 'full' vim package. By this you not only get the arrow keys working but also other nice features such as colored syntax.

Just installing the 'vim' package should get you fixed up. Try:

sudo apt-get install vim

or

sudo apt-get install vim-full

'vim-full' will install all the vim related package and the dependencies, that includes gnome libs, etc... if you don't use gnome and just want to fix this issue in the text mode you can also run :

sudo apt-get install vim-runtime