August 2009 – Adam Wolf's Feels Like Burning

Mediawiki Mail Notifications

I’ve set up little MediaWiki instances for small groups to do work in. One problem consistently encountered is a lack of awareness of updates and changes. The Recent Pages RSS is an ok step, but sometimes RSS isn’t an option. While there are RSS to Email services, the problem can also be solved directly in Mediawiki.

I used an extension I found on the Mediawiki, MailNotification. It provides a way to email all registered users of the wiki a summary page of all the changes made since the last time an email went out. Set up in cron, it’s an excellent way to make Mediawiki more suitable for small group collaboration.

The plugin doesn’t seem to be updated anymore, and it’s had a variety of issues for me everytime I update MediaWiki. I’ve been tinkering with the code, adding more details to the summary page and making sure it works with modern versions. I threw the code up on github last week, and provided a tagged release.

Feel free to let me know if you have any issues installing or using this plugin, and if you have any patches, feel free to send them my way.

How to get Arduino 0017 working on 64 bit Linux (including Ubuntu 9.04)

Currently, Arduino 0017 doesn’t work in 64 bit Linux, including Ubuntu 9.04. Arduino includes a copy of libRXTX, which is for 32 bit systems. Ubuntu only offers up to librxtx 2.1 something as of August 2009, and that doesn’t help either.

There’s a pretty quick way to get everything working–even the Serial Monitor!

The solution is to download Arduino 0017 for 32 bit Linux. Extract the files, and remove lib/librxtxSerial.so and RXTXcomm.jar.

Download rxtx-2.2pre2-bins from the RXTX folks. Extract the files, and copy RXTXcomm.jar and x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu/librxtxSerial.so to the Arduino lib/ directory, basically replacing the two files that came shipped with Arduino 0017.

Doing this doesn’t enable any other java application on your system to use the newer RXTX libraries, but that isn’t a problem for me. I’d much rather keep the rest of my system using packages from the repositories. The Arduino devs seem to be completely on top of the problem and the Ubuntu devs are aware as well.