No graphics show in Real Studio IDE on Ubuntu 11.04

A small problem however. No graphic images show up in the Real Studio interface. I switched Ubuntu back to GNOME classic thinking it may have been the Unity interface causing the problem. No good. The images in the IDE still were not showing up. Perhaps it was because I did an “Upgrade” from 10.10 to 11.04.

This upgrade takes a LOOOONG time because of the download time to get all of those files. I recommend doing a fresh install of Ubuntu. By downloading using a torrent, the ISO comes down in minutes. Install onto a flash drive and an install takes about 30 minutes total. With the upgrade route, you’re looking at a couple of hours.

I did a fresh install of 11.04 and still no good. I did a fresh install of 10.10 and … the images were there. I liked GNOME better than the current Unity interface anyway.

Please don’t think I’m bad mouthing Real Studio. William Yu responded quickly to my posting on the forum and they’ll be looking into it and will probably have it corrected for Real Studio 2011 release 2. Especially if I help them test in the next beta cycle. Yup, I can be of help for the issues that affect me. This is a situation where the rapid release cycle, and an open beta-testing program really helps.

This issues, I’m sure are a small one. Probably having to do somehow with the internal representation of pathing to the graphics that appear in the IDE. Straighten that out and Real Studio is back in business. In the mean time, hold off on upgrading to Ubuntu 11.04 if you do development in Linux until the next release.

I received an email from them describing the World Archives Memory Project.

The World Memory Project uses software and processes developed by the Ancestry World Archives Project, an established community that has spent years helping to preserve historical documents and make them available online for free.
It starts with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum creating digital images of historical documents. Then, using special software developed by Ancestry.com, contributors like you help make these documents searchable online by typing or “keying” information from the digital images into a database.

Cool. I love to give back. I’d love to be able to help others research their forefathers, especially when it will be made available for free. I’m a good typist and I can code tags or whatever is needed. I’m ready to sign up and get more information on what I need to do…

The software is Windows only. Dang. Really? This is 2011. They describe that Mac users need to run this in a Virtual Machine. I’m a big Linux user and I could do the same thing but … dang. I know they’ve just lost a *LOT* of their contributors right there! A good number of their potential customers won’t know what a virtual machine is, even though Parallels is pretty easy.

I was hoping to be able to type in the information in OpenOffice (Libre Office) and then paste it into a web form, or even use some sort of AJAXy web application to enter the information. If I’ve got to start up a Virtual Machine, and probably one just to install this software on, and *then* hope it submits correctly to their service, well, that’s too much work.

I’m disappointed. I was hoping to be able to help some people out but I’m thinking this is too much work now. I’ve got a business to run, and I already volunteer a lot of my time to charity. I’m sorry customers of World Archives Project! It’s a darn shame.

notify-send -t 10 "Header" "Body"

After Googling around for a while, I ran across a message board confirming what I was suspecting. Evidently this has been the behavior since 2009 at least and people are asking for a change in the documentation.

I would agree that the documentation should be changed to reflect the current state of the command. I’m a bit sad that this change has been needed for several years now and someone hasn’t been able to get the change in the documentation, or better yet, change the command so the notification timeout is honored.

I hope this helps someone else confirm this behavior more quickly than I was able.

End Function

You can see that there are many parameters passed to the CellTextPaint method of the ListBox object. In my example, I was adding a “” as a flag to the RowTag of the listbox. If the rowtag had that flag, it was a refund and we set the graphics object to have a forecolor of a dark red, and set the Italics to be true.

What originally threw me is that I have to think of g (Graphics object) as the “row”. A bit misleading but you can see it is very easy to adjust the font on a listbox. I hope this helps someone out! Even if it’s a future version of me!

While setting it up, one of the tools I have to install is REAL Studio (REALbasic). Well, the DEB file says it won’t install because it isn’t 32bit Linux. I’ve installed it on 64bit Linux before but I hadn’t published the notes so this is a great opportunity to get caught up. Here are the simple steps I followed:
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install libgtk2.0-dev
sudo apt-get install ia32-libs


If you are going to be using the HTML Viewer in your application, make sure to run:
sudo apt-get install libwebkit*


Then download the latest REAL Studio TGZ file to your local hard drive. Then from the command prompt launch Nautilus as administrator:
gksudo nautilus

My file was downloaded to /home/kcully/Downloads, so I navigated there and double clicked on the REAL Studio TGZ file. This opened up the “Archive Manager”. I clicked the “Extract” button and extracted the files into the /opt/ folder. This is where REAL Studio is normally installed to when using the DEB files so I figure it’s good to keep consistent with the normal installation. Once extracted, the REAL Studio application was already marked as an executable. I just created a launcher for my toolbar and I’m ready to rock! REAL Studio launched, I entered my license information and I’m good to go.

I hope this helps out fellow REAL Studio Linux developers!

ctEggTimer v1.6 for Winders
ctEggTimer v1.6 for Linux

Here’s the magic to get this to run.


cd /tmp
wget http://security.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/pool/universe/i/ia32-libs/ia32-libs_2.7ubuntu6.1_amd64.deb
dpkg-deb -x ia32-libs_2.7ubuntu6.1_amd64.deb ia32-libs
sudo cp ia32-libs/usr/lib32/libstdc++.so.5.0.7 /usr/lib/
cd /usr/lib
sudo ln -s libstdc++.so.5.0.7 libstdc++.so.5


I’ve made a slight adjustment to the commands above to make reference to the Ubuntu 10.04 directory structure of /usr/lib instead of the /usr/lib32

Good luck geeky people!

The major enhancement is the addition of warning sounds. This was based on a suggestion where a conference presenter wanted to be warned close to the ending of his session so he could give a good wrap-up. See. The timer is used in unexpected ways! I love that.

The settings are also now saved in a SQLite database named ctEggTimer.rsd. You can access it via any SQLite Database manager and see what is inside of it. Basically, it is used to save your settings and reload them when the Egg Timer is restarted.

I’m next going to be working on major enhancements for version 2.0. I’m hoping to have better notification of the end of the timer, sound selection, and more. If you have an enhancement request, just email me and I’ll do my best to include it in version 2.0.

I also may make version 2.0 “for sale”. I’ve always been curious on whether this will work out, so this is a social experiment as well. I will probably sell version 2.0 for $3US or something like that. We’ll see whether people will pay a “micro” payment for a small utility program.

Downloads here:

• ctEggTimer for Winders [1.7M]
• ctEggTimer for Linux [1.6M]
• ctEggTimer for Mac [13M]

The ctEggTimer application is written in REAL Studio 2010r1!

Thanks!
-Kevin

The first utility is “ESPEAK” and should be installed by default on your system. From the command line, give this a try:

espeak “Hello there. It is a beautiful day outside!”

To try out espeak with a female voice, try out:

espeak -v en+f1 “You rock.”

There is another utility installed on Ubuntu systems called “Festival”. On my hardware, the speech is of much higher quality. From the command prompt, start up festival by typing “festival”. Here’s an example:

festival {ENTER}
festival> (SayText “Hello Doctor Floyd. I am fully operational and all of my circuits are functioning perfectly.”)

Very nice. More information on Festival can be found here:
The Festival Speech Synthesis System

Now get out there and get your computer talking to you!

• ctEggTimer for Winders [1.5M]
• ctEggTimer for Linux [4.1M]
• ctEggTimer for Mac [10.5M] untested

INSTALLATION NOTES:

[For Windows]
Unzip it into your local work area or other safe location.

[For Linux]
Place application to where you want to run the program. Make sure to set the executable attribute!

[For Mac]
I don’t have a Mac so this is untested. You’ll need to decompress the file. Perhaps set the executable attribute? Let me know how it runs on the Mac! I’m always looking to improve.

Keep the suggestions coming and I’ll make adjustments as they come along. So turn off the email and browser and don’t answer that phone for the next 25 minutes and be productive!