Going step by step, found that dialogflow was returning the value "search" instead of the words the user was using. After going through the codelabs example at https://codelabs.developers.
After submitting this version as a release, the corrected version is live now.
Though GCP's "recommended way" of adding SSH keys is quite convoluted, found that I could use my usual method to add my key, and use PasswordAuthentication yes in /etc/sshd-config to allow password-based logins for users.
As can be seen in this techrepublic post, the way to prevent newly created users from seeing each others' directories is to edit the /etc/adduser.conf file, changing the default home directory permissions from 755 to 750. We can of course do this manually with sudo chmod 750 /home/user1 and so on.
Then, using a "Free Tier" f1 micro instance, someone can do text-based teaching like conducting a C lab after installing the required build tools like apt install gcc or apt-get install build-essential. Currently the specs of a free tier compute instance are -
1 F1-micro instance per month
Scalable, high-performance virtual machines.
1 non-preemptible f1-micro VM instance per month in one of the following US regions:
Oregon: us-west1
Iowa: us-central1
South Carolina: us-east1
30 GB-months HDD
5 GB-month snapshot storage in the following regions:
Oregon: us-west1
Iowa: us-central1
South Carolina: us-east1
Taiwan: asia-east1
Belgium: europe-west1
1 GB network egress from North America to all region destinations (excluding China and Australia) per month.
There are conflicting posts all around, saying that one can only remove subscriptions and not close an Azure account once it is opened. Since I had used this from a test domain, it was an "unmanaged organization"
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/active-directory/enterprise-users/users-close-account
Sign in to close your account, using the account that you want to close.
On My data requests, select Close account.
I used this to remove the test account I had created to delegate permissions for an app being developed by a third-party. The delegation of permissions via Azure Active Directory implies that the guest user has to switch directory to the directory of the current resource in the Azure portal, and then the guest user would have view access to the current directory name (and probably more).
The graphical diff tool Diffuse was not opening - running it from the terminal gave the error message
diffuse
File "/usr/bin/diffuse", line 74
print codecs.encode(unicode(s, 'utf_8'), sys.getfilesystemencoding())
^
SyntaxError: invalid syntax
Apparently this is because diffuse is written for python2.
So, edited the hashbang for /usr/bin/diffuse to use /usr/bin/env python2 instead of /usr/bin/env/ python, works now.
#!/usr/bin/env python2
geogebra.org is the Math App used in HS's blog, which is now https://jee-math.in/
I have used Adobe Acrobat to sign pdfs on Windows, now I needed a solution for Linux or Android. Adobe Fill and Sign is available for mobiles, and its workflow lets you sign on the touchscreen with a finger or stylus. Since I had a scanned signature available, I preferred the Linux solution using Xournal. I had cleaned up the image, deleting the background in Gimp and leaving only transparency and the signature saved as a png.
There seems to be some bugginess in the Export to PDF dialog in my version of Xournal (0.4.8), so that if I try to edit the filename in the dialog box, it fails to save. But I can just export and then edit the filename later. Howtogeek lists solutions for Mac, Windows and Linux, using Preview, Adobe Reader and Xournal respectively, and also for iOS, Chromebook and Android.
An update to my previous post about clearing up disk space by clearing old kernel images - on this machine running Linux Mint 18.3, it appears purge-old-kernels was not removing the kernel headers. Following the post at https://www.pontikis.net/blog/remove-old-kernels-debian-ubuntu for the manual process,
dpkg --list | grep linux-image
- old kernel images were being purged by purge-old-kernels
dpkg --list | grep linux-headers
- were not being purged.
So, did with
sudo apt-get --purge remove linux-headers-4.15.0-7* linux-headers-4.15.0-6* linux-headers-4.15.0-5* linux-headers-4.15.0-4* linux-headers-4.15.0-3* linux-headers-4.15.0-2*
and so on, since current kernel and previous one were linux-headers-4.15.0-118 and 117. This cleared up 3 GB or so.
I followed the digitalocean instructions on setting up xfce properly over vnc for the virtual machine I was running on GCP. Initially, the ~/.vnc/xstartup file was either blank or absent, so only a bare-bones X was coming up. After adding this in the xstartup file,
#!/bin/bash
xrdb $HOME/.Xresources
startxfce4 &
xfce came up nicely. My earlier manual startup trials were missing the xrdb line, hence xfce was not starting cleanly.
Emergency resuscitation for a website which had been hacked, by setting up temporary hosting on github pages - the method I used was:
1. using webhttrack - follow only 2 levels down, -*.pdf, -*.zip, 0 external levels
2. find and replace in files using regexxer
(a) temporary-domain.com with actualdomain.name
(b) replacing js injected code when found using inspect
(c) replacing http with https (This was done later, after https was made to work.)
For html, css and js files.
*html In regexxer, Find files, open a file, Find, then choose the All Files button at the bottom.
3. Copy paste into local github repo, ignoring / overwriting existing files.
4. git add .
git commit -m "git message"
git push
Stackoverflow had an answer when I wondered by some files hosted on github pages were returning 404 errors - the solution was to place a file called .nojekyll in the root directory to enable hosting of files within directories starting with underscore, like _css etc.
While doing the timed qwiklabs google cloud platform assessments on coursera, I found that google cloud shell was taking a lot of time to come up on Firefox. In fact, perhaps it was not coming up at all. Initially I tried the workaround of using the google cloud sdk locally and running gcloud commands from a terminal. Later, found that the cloud shell opens fine when Chrome is used instead of Firefox. So, this adds to the list of google products which don't work properly on Firefox. Can anyone else see some parallels to the bad old days of browser wars with Microsoft?
In a previous post, I wrote that Google Meet worked for me on Chrome and not on Firefox. Now, I work on Linux (Mint 18.3) and most of the world works on Windows. Apparently Google Meet had issues with Chrome, video not appearing, even screen sharing not working, on a Windows machine. Nz let me know the solution, which was based on this thread, https://support.google.com/
That thread has so many descriptions of so many different things which can go wrong! Privacy settings, antivirus, etc etc. If you expand and view the entire thread with nearly 300 messages, it makes interesting reading for people who want to mock Windows.
So, enable-media-foundation-video-capture must be Disabled, otherwise all sorts of weird video issues with Google Meet. This seems to be a windows-only issue.
There are many methods proposed at
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/6449733/how-can-i-add-javascript-inside-blogger
The CDATA method above seemed to work for me, from HTML view.
And preventdefault for stopping the scroll to the top of the page - used
return false;
instead, working for me on Chrome also.
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/13003044/href-going-to-top-of-page-prevent
Google sites recently announced a shift to "New Sites" with a mandatory upgrade for "Old Sites". Since New Sites had some disadvantages like inability to choose our own font size for particular lines of text (as we would like to do for important announcements, making them large), I looked around for options - whether to move to Blogger or New Sites or do something else. New Sites also had the disadvantage of breaking our photo gallery page when using the migration tool. Blogger would break existing page urls. So, since there was only static content, thought about hosting it on github pages.
The move was relatively straightforward, though I took a long time since I did a drag-and-drop commit after each change instead of using the commandline. The changes I needed to make were:
After setting the CNAME records on the domains DNS servers, even 4 days later, the "Enforce HTTPS" was not available, with the message "Not yet available for your site because the certificate has not finished being issued." One of the suggested workarounds was to remove and re-add the custom domain. I did that, and immediately Enforce HTTPS was enabled.
This post on ClassCentral has a good run-down on some 1400+ completely free Coursera courses. I've been doing some Coursera courses lately, and found some of them very nicely done. Courses I'm taking or have taken are:
Fundamentals of Graphic design
Create your first web app with Python and Flask
Visual elements of User Interface design
Google IT automation with Python
In general, you can speed up some of the courses with the available video speed changer, while for some of the courses, you can learn better by pausing the video, doing some of the exercises and then resuming.
A link dump for resources on how to host small low-traffic websites for free on Google Cloud Platform (GCP) or Microsoft Azure - the link names are self explanatory.
I had an issue with converting to pdf with convert - error message, convert not authorized. Found that it was due to a Ghostscript vulnerability.
https://askubuntu.com/questions/1081895/trouble-with-batch-conversion-of-png-to-pdf-using-convert
So I temporarily used the renaming method,
sudo mv /etc/ImageMagick-6/policy.xml /etc/ImageMagick-6/policy.xmlout
And later I commented out the Ghostscript policy restrictions in the policy.xml.
Tried http://copypastesave.blogspot.com/2017/06/add-pervious-page-home-and-next-page-in.html
using revert to legacy blogger.
Step 3 occurs in 9 places!
Unfortunately, this made the entire post not display! So, reverted to adding the Previous and Next links manually.
GMass uses GMail's sending interface - but now the free plan is limited to 50 emails per day.
https://www.gmass.co/blog/gmass-pricing-frequently-asked-questions-faq/
https://www.gmass.co/blog/you-can-now-send-10000-emails-with-gmass-and-gmail/
This may be useful for non-time-sensitive emails.
Some ideas for showing "Now playing" on our icecast server, https://stackoverflow.com/questions/48327310/how-to-display-now-playing-in-my-website-with-icecast2-and-liquidsoap
but since we don't use metadata on our server, this method won't work directly for us. But perhaps I could try tinkering with ices0 to make it send the filenames alone, and then try out the worker.js as mentioned in the stackoverflow post above.
The procedure to add a domain is given at this support page - basically, at admin.microsoft.com, Setup -> Get your custom domain set up -> Manage
There was another domain which they wanted me to add, but that seemed to be already connected to another tenant anotherdomain.onmicrosoft.com - migration would need all these steps, while a simple delete and add with no data being retained is relatively simple as I have posted elsewhere. There are also third-party tools to do this, as I have posted.
I had to download pre-compiled binary, else gave error,
https://github.com/wxWidgets/Phoenix/issues/760
https://www.wxpython.org/pages/downloads/
since otherwise I would need to open another shell and all the env variables created by the mudlet install script would be lost. Then there were more errors about not specifying the MAKE and bitness, so finally the working cmake command was$env:CC = "C:\Qt\Tools\mingw730_32\bin\gcc.exe"
Link dump of issues faced and their resolutions for compiling with mingw. Edit: The final product is posted at https://hnsws.blogspot.com/2020/04/building-opencv-349-windows-32-bit.html and the related github repo is https://github.com/hn-88/opencvpatch
1. mingw compile and log on to appveyor build machine - some tips are at https://github.com/symengine/symengine/blob/master/appveyor.yml
2. avoiding windows paths backslash problems in python - using raw strings - https://lerner.co.il/2018/07/24/avoiding-windows-backslash-problems-with-pythons-raw-strings/
3. For specifying make https://stackoverflow.com/questions/6141608/cmake-make-program-not-found
Setting env var with powershell https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/previous-versions/windows/it-pro/windows-powershell-1.0/ff730964(v=technet.10)?redirectedfrom=MSDN
need to open a new shell if setting on machine as a whole and not for session.
manually may need to set as per https://stackoverflow.com/questions/41918477/how-to-build-opencv-3-2-0-with-mingw-on-windows
failed to set bitness, solved with -G as below.
working cmake command was
cmake -D"CMAKE_MAKE_PROGRAM:PATH=C:\Qt\Tools\mingw730_32\bin\make.exe" -G "Nmake Makefiles" ..
from
(by creating a build directory inside opencv directory, cd build.)
Done in powershell.
Failed with CMake Error: Could not create named generator Nmake Makefiles
Went forward with MinGW Makefiles.
4. For error with sprintf, http://www.programmersought.com/article/3109513497/ says: modify E:\OpenCV_3.3.1\opencv\sources\modules\videoio\src\cap_dshow.cpp, at
#include "DShow.h"
Add a line above that line
#define NO_DSHOW_STRSAFE like:
#define NO_DSHOW_STRSAFE
#include "DShow.h"
Then,
make
and it started from where it left off.
Edit: The final product is posted at https://hnsws.blogspot.com/2020/04/building-opencv-349-windows-32-bit.html and the related github repo is https://github.com/hn-88/opencvpatch
My post in the small_planetarium Yahoo group
(Edit - Yahoo groups closed down in Dec 2020)
| deploy: |
| provider: releases |
| token: $mytokenname |
| file_glob: true |
| file: h*.bin |
| skip_cleanup: true |
| draft: true |
| after_success: |
