Saturday, June 21, 2008

Mplayer crashes using beryl compiz-fusion

When you start to use compiz-fusion and all the fancy desktop effects you will notice a little problem, you can't watch videos!. There's a bug that crashes mplayer, totem and all your video players. Hopefully there's a workaround for mplayer (not sure how to solve the problem with totem).

1. Open mplayer.
2. Right click over the window.
3. Click on preferences.
4. Click on the Video tab .
5. Change the video driver from Xv to X11 and click Ok.

You may have to restart mplayer to see the changes.

Wednesday, June 18, 2008

Vista Blue Screen of Death: STOP: 0x0000008E



The famous blue screen of death attacked me again (previous bsod), this time on Vista, on my Dell inspiron 1520. It's very annoying that you have to deal with this kind of errors on a laptop recently bought. This error started to display a few seconds after logging in to the user account and with no clear reason of what could be the trigger of the error.

The solution this time actually had nothing to do (directly) with Windows Vista but with the laptop BIOS, and the solution came from the dell support site support.dell.com, the error itself suggested to update the BIOS , but I don't pay too much attention to this general error messages. If you're having this same problem you could go and follow this check list from dell, the BIOS upgrade was the second suggestion for a BSOF error and this was the one that worked for me, the file to do this is in the "Drivers and Downloads" section and you can select between all the different models.

Subversion: MKCOL of '...' 405 Method Not Allowed

I was messing with the .svn/entries file in one of my local working copy folders, also I rm -rf a folder and regenerated again (I'm using symfony admin generator) , long story, but the fact is that I think I screwed up something and started to get this error when trying to commit:

# svn commit -m "backend modifications"
Adding apps/backend/modules/comment
svn: Commit failed (details follow):
svn: MKCOL of '/projects/cms/!svn/wrk/5ca09002-f34f-0410-890e-9511925f86a5/trunk/apps/backend/modules/comment': 405 Method Not Allowed (http://svn.calipso.com.co)

After some googling, I found it could be some proxy problem, but I wasn't using a proxy. Later I found that this error could mean that
the directory already existed in the repository and couldn't be recreated again, so my next step was to delete the folder from the repository (svn del ...) and try to do a fresh commit after recreating the folder and files included in it, and this worked ;).

I hope this helps some lost soul out there.