Finally sorted my duplicate photo collection.

I figured out recently that I have accumulated 21GB of photos and movie clips from my small Pentax S4 camera and was wondering what should I do to remove the duplicates. Having searched google for linux photo management softwares I installed digiKam (from KDE) and it took almost half an hour to catalog them and used fuzzy search (I think I used the right term) to find duplicates and shocked me with many photos with as many as 11 copies in different folders from backups.

I took the painful way of manually cleaning them from duplicates list in digiKam and spent almost 1 whole day in all to do this. In the end I was expecting my original collection to be clean but it wasn't but digiKam showed it clean. So thought of deleting and recreating new album (biggest mistake) and was shocked again by it found all the duplicates and then I realized when you add an album it does the whole copy of the collection and edits the copy. (this is really annoying for me but it may there for good reason of not loosing stuff accidentally) Having said all this I do think it's a very good photo management application.

I was no way ready for the same exercise again so back to Google again and found another solution fslint which shows duplicate files but is still manual work to remove duplicates.

Further search gave me wonderful command on one of the forums using fdupes which did a very good job for me. I was bit skeptical in first place with fear to loose some files so ran it without -d option like
fdupes -r photos/clean_album and reviewed output and was happy with the listing so when ahead and used it as suggested by forum
yes 1 | fdupes -rd photos/clean_album and I had my 95% or duplicate removal work done. (I wish I should have used it in first place) Rest of the work was to clean up using Digikam and then flatten them into one directory where I have some name conflicts which I used as my blog name low-tech approach and added prefixes to avoid clashes.

End result 21GB is now reduced to 8.5GB.

I think I should be more careful going forward about duplicates and backups.

EDIT: Another note is I did miss the avi clips when I did manual cleanup using digiKam but fslint and fdupes sorted those out as well.

How to install Oracle xe on Ubuntu 64 bit?

I wanted to install Oracle Xe on Ubuntu 64bit and was faced with the problem that the debian package that Oracle has with free edition is 32 bit so googled a bit for more information and found a link that helped me to configure it.

Here is a link to keep note of : http://littlebrain.org/2008/05/12/how-to-install-oracle-xe-in-ubuntu-64-bit/

gdm vs xdm surprise on my Ubuntu 8.04.1 x86_64 machine.

While looking at some cleanup in Synaptic package manger for unused packages I thought of seeing what difference it would make to GNOME if I use xdm instead of gdm. Well
1. I saw not so nice startup text display (I am fine with it though)
2. I saw fine black and white mesh screen which is awfully painful for graphical login with thick text box for entering login/password. (I even managed to stand this one)
3. Login was much swift than previous into GNOME. (so it was worth the switch for now)/
4. I could see all the menus icons taskbar etc. so it's good sign.
5. Only thing I missed was shutdown option in GNOME System->Quit (or from the quit button).

The biggest surprise was without anything running I would normally see most of my 4 GB RAM was always in use with GDM which is now drop down to around 700-900Mb even now with Thunderbird, pidgin, firefox on it is at 1.1GB I think to me this is big improvement. (there may some others limitations but for now I thik I will see how it works for me). I past I always saw my system eating away into the 6 GB swap without running much of the applications.

I think I will also try another not so heavy window managers like Enlightenment etc.

The part of inspiration to think about it is DIY I am doing with my homemade Digital Picture Frame out of P-II for which I am trying various linux options after staring the project 2 years back and shelved it with initial success with Windows.

I wish to get more than a digital picture frame out of the DIY possibly low-end media player controllable via remote using lirc. (sounds too ambitious but will give it a go)

Quick and short post on jmxrmi exception in FUSE HQ.

If you even see following exception when using FUSE HQ or Hyperic HQ it is most likely an issue with what JDK/JRE you (or rather HQ) is using. The problem occurred while collecting statistics from FUSE ESB (Servicemix) and FUSE Message Broker (ActiveMQ).

Here is the exception:

org.hyperic.hq.product.PluginException: javax.naming.NameNotFoundException: jmxrmi
 at org.hyperic.hq.product.jmx.MxServerDetector.discoverServices(MxServerDetector.java:404)
 at org.hyperic.hq.product.ServerDetector.discoverResources(ServerDetector.java:203)
 at org.hyperic.hq.autoinventory.agent.server.RuntimeAutodiscoverer.doRuntimeScan_internal(RuntimeAutodiscoverer.java:272)
 at org.hyperic.hq.autoinventory.agent.server.RuntimeAutodiscoverer.doRuntimeScan(RuntimeAutodiscoverer.java:205)
 at org.hyperic.hq.autoinventory.ScanManager.mainRunLoop(ScanManager.java:165)
 at org.hyperic.hq.autoinventory.ScanManager.access$000(ScanManager.java:41)
 at org.hyperic.hq.autoinventory.ScanManager$1.run(ScanManager.java:107)
Caused by: java.io.IOException: javax.naming.NameNotFoundException: jmxrmi
 at mx4j.remote.resolver.rmi.Resolver.lookupStubInJNDI(Resolver.java:100)
 at mx4j.remote.resolver.rmi.Resolver.lookupRMIServerStub(Resolver.java:72)
 at mx4j.remote.resolver.rmi.Resolver.lookupClient(Resolver.java:52)
 at javax.management.remote.rmi.RMIConnector.connect(RMIConnector.java:119)
 at javax.management.remote.JMXConnectorFactory.connect(JMXConnectorFactory.java:38)
 at org.hyperic.hq.product.jmx.MxUtil.getMBeanConnector(MxUtil.java:445)
 at org.hyperic.hq.product.jmx.MxServerDetector.discoverServices(MxServerDetector.java:401)

The cause in my case:
FUSE HQ agent was using JRE 1.4 bundled with it which was causing the problem.
Why : There are some incompatibilities in JMX stuff when it comes to using the same code with JDK 1.4 and JDK 1.5 and apparently moving to JDK/JRE 1.5 got rid of this problem.
I don't know much about JMX so don't know what all incompatibilities are between tow of them. Anyone who reads (in first place) and knows the differences and could comment on this post it would help everyone.

Accessing archetype while using nexus repository manager as proxy

I was trying to use Eclipse with m2eclipse for creating some FUSE ESB project from the archetypes and was getting strange error :

"Unable to create project from archetype [org.apache.servicemix.tooling:servicemix-bean-service-unit:3.3.1.16-fuse -> null]
> The desired archetype does not exist (org.apache.servicemix.tooling:servicemix-bean-service-unit:3.3.1.16-fuse)"

After drilling down more and looking into it I found the problem was :
1. I did configured the nexus index catalog http://repo.open.iona.com/maven2/archetype-catalog.xml correctly.
2. However, I later realized that I am using Nexus repository manager which doesn't automatically download the catalog itself and so it is not getting all the requited information to download the correct artifacts.

The way I fixed this for now is manually downloading the archetype-catalog.xml via my Nexus repository instance like this:

wget http://my-nexus-proxy:8081/nexus/content/repositories/open.iona.m2/archetype-catalog.xml

once the catalog was available locally at my nexus repository I then used the Eclipse m2eclipse plugin in usual manner and it went and download required archetype plugins from the remote repository into my nexus instance.

I really would like to see some option in Nexus which would allow synchronization of such artifacts which are not downloaded normally by maven dependency. Some way of scheduling such stuff (I know we can schedule the task but some smart scheduling for such category of artifacts).

For now manual downloading and sync is the way to get around the problem.

Nexus Revisited after long time.

After long time and not to say with after giving up my thought of setting up nexus/artifactory/archiva I came back to same stuff recently around month back.

I restarted my exercise with nexus 1.2.1 and to my surprise with very little efforts I manage to get it up and running for Apache projects I care about which are CXF, Servicemix.

I also upgraded our team nexus repository manager from older version to 1.3.1 and happily using it now. It is lot more improved than I thought it would have been. In past I was very much annoyed when my pom files got corrupt for the artifacts that were present in more than one repositories I had configured but it appears to have been fixed now and also the web interface for configuration is very helpful.

Having said all this I did spent some time today in figuring out why the artifact present in remote repository won't download even though I had it configured it correctly. After a lot of head scratching and looking at the configuration multiple times discovered that there is a parameter on each repository you configure called Not Found Cache TTL which by default was set to 1440 Minute once I changed it to smaller amount like 2 minutes my build went ahead happily.

I am overall very happy with the new Nexus Repository Manager (surely much better experience than I had with proximity and old nexus version).

SOAP RPC/Encoded and style related articles

I recently looking for more information on RPC/encoded style came across two old but very good and simple articles so thought of bookmarking here via my Blog.

web-services-interoperability-between-j2ee-and-net-part-1
IBM-library-ws-whichwsdl

I have referenced the second one many times. It is very simple and handy to understand different between different SOAP message types.