When you’re setting up the network controllers, make sure to change them to Intel card emulators, because there’s a bug in the FreeBSD driver for the non-Intel cards which makes them not work, but still appear in ifconfig.

Then the elkin theme came along. It is a bit light and fluffy, but the grey-on-white is much brighter and cleaner than the previous default theme, and much more modern. The only problem is the channel icons (in the UK at least) are massive, leaving only four or five channels on the screen at any one time.

Fortunately the fix is quick and simple. You will need to edit a single CSS file for the TV listings, tv_list.css, which is stored in the skins/elkin/ directory of mythweb. On Mythbuntu Maverick this is /usr/share/mythtv/mythweb/skins/elkin/tv_list.css.

Change the entry for channel images:

.x-channel img {
    position:           relative;
    top:                -4px;
    vertical-align:     middle;
}

to:

.x-channel img {
    position:           relative;
    top:                -4px;
    vertical-align:     middle;
    height:             40px;
}

Adding the height value shrinks the icons down so you get more information onto a single screen, so it ends up looking like this:

Elkin theme on mythweb with scaled icons

It is of course possible to tackle this problem in another way – resizing the images manually will probably end up with a crisper image on the webpage. Before 0.23 I had written a script to make imageMagick scale the a larger version of the logo (from the same source) to 40px height, and then add rounded corners to it. The final look was excellent, but the script went the way of many un-backed-up things, and I’m back to square corners again.

// Get the type of the field, as a Class object. Note we can't do instanceof on this, because it is a Class.
Class<?> type = field.getType();

//FIXME - make generic for any enum - this will work if we just change the catch criteria here.
if (type == OurEnumOne.class || type == OurClass.NestedEnumOne.class || type == OurEnumTwo.class) { ... }

At first this doesn’t seem like it should be a problem, but the obvious solution (to get an instance of the field and just use instanceof) involves some convoluted reflection which will no doubt introduce bugs later on.

Fortunately, the real solution is a) more elegant, b) simpler, c) not likely to introduce bugs and d) applicable to all cases like this. Every class has an isAssignableFrom(Class test) method, which evaluates whether the calling class is a superclass or the same class as the test parameter, so the following returns true for any enum:

if(Enum.class.isAssignableFrom(type)){ ... }

Thanks autoboxing!

I’m not sure why it was so hard to find, but WordPress has a big thing about blocking Javascript, so searching for “syntax highlighting javascript on wordpress” provided suitably incorrect results. The highlighting options look pretty comprehensive, and although the highlighting of dojo code isn’t quite spot on (I haven’t found an editor that is, TextMate is about as close as I’ve got), it is certainly more readable than the ‘pre’ tags.

Luckily it’s an easy fix, changing this code:

Scanner s = new Scanner(inputFile);
while(s.hasMoreLines()){
    System.out.println(s.nextLine());
}
s.close();
</pre>
<hr />

to:

<hr />
<pre>
Scanner s = new Scanner(inputFile);
try{
    while(true){
        System.out.println(s.nextLine());
    }
}catch(NoSuchElementException e){
    s.close();
}

For those of you used to exception-based programming this will seem obvious, but I’ve posted it here for everyone else!

Basically all you need to do is download the package from CPAN, extract it and drop the folder into /System/Library/Perl/Extras/5.8.8 (for global addition of the package). The only caveat I found with this is that you need to make sure the naming is the same as you reference the package in Perl, so for example I wanted to use Statistics::Distributions, so I renamed the downloaded, extracted folder from Statistics-Distributions-1.01 to “Statistics” with Distributions.pm inside it, and it worked like a charm.

I’m guessing there will be some which need compiling and can prove to be a complete pain, but for now I’m impressed.

From a quick foray it is obvious how much better the interface is for Mac users now they’ve moved away from X11. Keep up the good work guys!