While reading Linux Journal Issue 181 today, I stumbled upon a section explaining about running Ruby on Rails on Apache using an Apache module called Phusion Passenger, also known as mod_rails. To install Passenger, I followed the instruction provided in the magazine: sudo gem install passenger Unxpectedly, I got the following error: Building native extensions. This could take a while... ERROR: Error installing passenger: ERROR: Failed to build gem native extension. /usr/bin/ruby1.8 extconf.rb extconf.rb:8:in `require': no such file to load -- mkmf (LoadError) from extconf.rb:8 Gem files will remain installed in /usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/fastthread-1.0.7 for inspection. Results logged to /usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/fastthread-1.0.7/ext/fastthread/gem_make.out What’s happening? What did I do wrong? ...

Warning: The following is for personal note only, and is not meant to be a tutorial or guide. On Debian server at work, we have /home mounted to /dev/hda6 partition, and I want to move that to a new hard disk /dev/hdb. First, I need to create the new partition on /dev/hdb using fdisk with a desired size. Then, use dd to copy the content from /dev/hda6 to /dev/hdb1. # dd if=/dev/hda6 of=/dev/hdb1 bs=1024 The above command instructs dd to read the content from /dev/hda6 and writes it to /dev/hdb1. bs=1024 sets the block size to 1024 bytes. ...

Aaaahhh… I fixed the Pidgin problem with Unknow protocol just 5 minutes after the previous post was made. I’m going to write how I found out the problem and how it has been fixed. If you’re interested, keep reading. In the previous post, I mentioned that I would removed the Pidgin package completely including its configuration file (# apt-get –purge remove pidgin.) I did and followed by re-installation of Pidgin, unfortunately, it didn’t fix anything. ...

Update: The problem has been fixed. Please see the above post. A few weeks ago, Pidgin could not connect to Yahoo messenger server because Yahoo was changing its protocols. At the time, the Pidgin was at version 2.5.5. Then that Yahoo connection problem has been fixed in version 2.5.7 and newer of Pidgin. ...

It’s Saturday, what am I doing in front of the computer? I should be out and enjoy life. ^o^ A colleague asked to customize a theme for his blog using WordPress. Because I didn’t have any good plan this Saturday, learning PHP sound like a logical and useful choice. Well, I bribed myself with a bottle of Tui. Then, I found an interesting PHP related post by Chorn Sokun titled PHP date diff. The author was trying to calculate the number days between two give dates. At the end of the post, he asked “What would you do instead?” ...