So, if you found this blog post, I assume you’ve run into this particular problem in your installation of Confluence. And you’ve probably also found the Atlassian KB article, RuntimeException Multiple AttachmentData objects were returned when only one was expected, which is only marginally helpful at best. The “resolution” suggested by Atlassian — “Rename the attachment and upload again” — is not a resolution at all. It’s a workaround. It doesn’t even acknowledge the root cause of the problem: that Confluence and its underlying database disagree on the definition of integral attachment data, and the database somehow ends up storing data that Confluence doesn’t like. Of course, when a problem is worked around rather than resolved, it’s bound to come up again. In this particular case, as long [...]
Geeky Stuff
All your base are belong to us.

So, you’ve liberated yourself from the prison of proprietary audio formats like MP3 and decided to move to an open format with growing industry support and a far superior sound quality: you’ve selected FLAC. And if you run a GNU/Linux distro on your computer, there may not be a more bulletproof tool than Rubyripper for making high-quality (almost exact) copies of your audio CDs in the FLAC format. How to install Rubyripper on a Debian-based distro To get the latest release, browse to http://code.google.com/p/rubyripper/downloads/list. At the time of this writing, the current version is Rubyripper-0.6.0. Download and extract to a directory of your choosing. You’ll need a few prerequisites and some recommended packages — on Debian 5.0.5 (lenny): I also recommend ruby-gettext for translations and ruby-gtk2 for the [...]

For the impatient or inattentive: the Debian installer currently detects when it’s executing in a VirtualBox guest VM and installs the guest additions for you during setup. If you think that your installation is bad for some reason, install the virtualbox-ose-guest-x11 package and you’re all set. So, you want to run Debian in VirtualBox at a screen resolution higher than 800×600. Admittedly, this is not a complicated problem to solve, which is precisely why this post is so short. But first, note that Beastie is eating a striped apple in the image to the left and his tail is actually a Debian logo. This is not important and has virtually nothing to do with this post — I just think it’s funny. About the environment Pretty straightforward. Host [...]
So, I figured that tweaking the Thematic WordPress theme that I recently selected as the basis for my blog would present no challenge whatsoever. I mean, it’s PHP, right? Well, yeah, but … The stumbling block Child themes and the filter system. Period. I don’t think I’ve ever stumbled across a less-intuitive design. (Admittedly, this post is less about filters and more about hooks and actions, but filters bend the mind as soon as the average person encounters them.) The author(s) of the theme have posted a fairly-useful guide to customization here, but there’s still a bit of grokking and head-scratching required if this is new to you. Of course, once you “get it”, it’s easy — just like most other abstract concepts. So, let’s dive right in [...]

On a recent whim, I decided to spend a Saturday morning attempting to install Apache Tomcat 6 on FreeBSD 8.0. It turned out that it’s not as straightforward as some GNU/Linux distros*; particularly those that are Debian-based. Through some trial and error, though, I got things working as I liked. *It also turns out that I still hate non-free software, or software that comes with restrictions, which is probably why I drifted away from java more than 8 years ago. About the environment Since this was an experiment, I simply spun up a VirtualBox VM on my Debian workstation, and allocated 1 CPU, 512MB RAM, and 8GB of hard drive space — FreeBSD is famously small, light, secure, and fast. You can download the latest FreeBSD here. Installing [...]

