Tuesday October 31, 2006

A little update on our PV system

It has already been a year since we generate a lot of our electricity on our roof. Starting in October 2005 we got our new meter. So this years October bill was the time when PG&E did the true-up over the year.

We did not have to pay for any used electricity We only payed for the fixed connection costs (basically that PG&E runs a wire to your house and that they provide the meter) something like six dollars per month.

Our PV system produced around 5080 kWh over the last year, that's more than the estimated 3700 kWh Our household used an additional 1040 kWh from PG&E over the year. I know, other houses use that in a month

Overall I think we saved something like 720 dollars on electricity costs and we avoided around 10,000 pounds of CO2 from coal firing power plants.
( Oct 31 2006, 11:29:51 AM PST ) Permalink

Wednesday October 25, 2006

NB 6 - trunk, Java SE 6 and KDE

Long time nothing on this blog. Sorry about that. But here I come again

I started playing with NB 6 on top of the Java SE 6 RC builds. And as always I'm not using the default configuration. So I ran into an interesting problem. The NB IDE was not able to open an external browser on my Kubuntu 6.06 system

That worked fine with all the NB 5.5 builds I played with, but as it turns out, NB 6 makes use of the new java.awk.Desktop classes when it's running on a newer JDK. But that class only throws IOExceptions when it isn't able to handle the browse() action.

So strace is your friend, and a few minutes later, I had:

[pid 15878] execve("/export/home/marcow/bin/gnome-www-browser", ["gnome-www-browser", "http://www.sun.com"], [/* 46 vars */]) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory)
[pid 15878] execve("/usr/local/sbin/gnome-www-browser", ["gnome-www-browser", "http://www.sun.com"], [/* 46 vars */]) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory)
[pid 15878] execve("/usr/local/bin/gnome-www-browser", ["gnome-www-browser", "http://www.sun.com"], [/* 46 vars */]) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory)
[pid 15878] execve("/usr/sbin/gnome-www-browser", ["gnome-www-browser", "http://www.sun.com"], [/* 46 vars */]) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory)
[pid 15878] execve("/usr/bin/gnome-www-browser", ["gnome-www-browser", "http://www.sun.com"], [/* 46 vars */]) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory)
[pid 15878] execve("/sbin/gnome-www-browser", ["gnome-www-browser", "http://www.sun.com"], [/* 46 vars */]) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory)
[pid 15878] execve("/bin/gnome-www-browser", ["gnome-www-browser", "http://www.sun.com"], [/* 46 vars */]) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory)
[pid 15878] execve("/usr/bin/X11/gnome-www-browser", ["gnome-www-browser", "http://www.sun.com"], [/* 46 vars */]) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory)
[pid 15878] execve("/usr/games/gnome-www-browser", ["gnome-www-browser", "http://www.sun.com"], [/* 46 vars */]) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory)
[pid 15878] execve("/export/home/marcow/usr/vspms/bin/linux/gnome-www-browser", ["gnome-www-browser", "http://www.sun.com"], [/* 46 vars */]) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory)
[pid 15878] execve("/export/home/marcow/usr/vspms/bin/gnome-www-browser", ["gnome-www-browser", "http://www.sun.com"], [/* 46 vars */]) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory)
[pid 15878] execve("/opt/Forte/teamware/bin/gnome-www-browser", ["gnome-www-browser", "http://www.sun.com"], [/* 46 vars */]) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory)
[pid 15878] execve("/export/home/marcow/usr/vspms/bin/linux/gnome-www-browser", ["gnome-www-browser", "http://www.sun.com"], [/* 46 vars */]) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory)
[pid 15878] execve("/export/home/marcow/usr/vspms/bin/gnome-www-browser", ["gnome-www-browser", "http://www.sun.com"], [/* 46 vars */]) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory)
[pid 15878] execve("/opt/Forte/teamware/bin/gnome-www-browser", ["gnome-www-browser", "http://www.sun.com"], [/* 46 vars */]) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory)

OK, once you know what the system is looking for, it's easy to fix If your path does not contain a gnome-www-browser, create one via a simple symlink.

Maybe this helps some people.

Have fun,
-- Marco

( Oct 25 2006, 02:35:11 PM PDT ) Permalink