the empty quarter

After finally getting some time to fully read up on Mono (especially on the excellent The Source) I have decided it is best to remove it from my system. The Open Sourcerer has a nicely written up set of instructions for 10.04 Lucid Lynx and 10.10 Maverick Meerkat.

In case you missed these, Innovent Solutions (one of the corporate backers of Eclipse BIRT project) published papers comparing Jasper and Pentaho to BIRT. Naturally, they conclude that BIRT is top of the pile in open source reporting, however they do justify this conclusion and the papers make an interesting read. BIRT versus Jasper BIRT [...]

UPDATE: For an improved version of the code which works correctly with parameter groups and cascading parameters please see this updated post. Thank you to Stork for pointing out the problem with this code. The traditional way of accessing BIRT report parameters from script is through the expression ReportContext.getParameterValue( parameterName ). Naturally this method requires [...]

The following expression will dynamically get the file name of the report: reportContext.getReportRunnable().getReportName(); Two points to note: The expression actually returns the full report URI rather than just the name, i.e. something like file:/C:/BIRT/Report01.rptdesign. The URI is percent-encoded and so space characters will be returned as %20 and so on for other special characters, e.g. [...]

Here’s a quick way to remove empty lines from a file using the Linux command line: cat file1 | sed /^$/d > file2 Where file1 is the input file containing empty lines and file2 is a newly created file with empty lines removed.

In what is rapidly becoming a mini-series, we have so far discussed how to set BIRT chart palette dynamically (based on category values) for pie charts and area charts. Today we cover stacked bar charts, i.e. bar charts with the Optional Grouping data element. Once again, let’s start with a quick recap. In what is [...]

Series labels can be shown in BIRT area charts by opening the Chart Wizard and navigating to the Format Chart tab, then selecting Series > Value (Y) Series > Show Series Labels checkbox. The result will look as shown in the screenshot below: Often there is one particular grouping (series) which is especially important and [...]

Changing the port number of SSH daemon is a quick way of reducing the number of SSH brute force attacks your server might face (check the file /var/log/auth.log to see if there are many failed SSH login attempts). Just to be on the safe side, create a backup copy of the SSH daemon config file. [...]

Here’s how to disable the annoying Update Manager pop-up (technically a “pop-under”) and instead have the update icon displayed in the notification area. Hit Alt-F2 to open the “Run Application” dialog. Type in gconf-editor to run the GNOME Configuration Editor. Navigate to Apps > Update Notifier. Untick the auto_launch checkbox.

This post is an update on integrating Thunderbird with Ubuntu’s notification system. For Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx it supersedes my earlier post on the topic which was applicable previous versions of Ubuntu (Jaunty and Karmic). The big difference in Lucid Lynx is the Indicator Applet and the “Me Menu”, both of these incorporating features related [...]