Bugzilla "Cannot determine local time zone" problem

I had this problem today and was pulling my hairs out trying to find a solution.
Below is the only fix that worked for me:
In 'lib/DateTime/TimeZone/Local.pm', find 'sub TimeZone {', right after it, put this next line:

return DateTime::TimeZone->new(name => 'Asia/Shanghai');

(Replace 'Asia/Shanghai' with your own timezone.)
Basically all the rest of this sub has no effect now.

Reload the error page, if it show another error says: "List::Util version 1.31 required...", open 'lib/List/AllUtils.pm', goto line 10, or find the line:

use List::Util 1.31 ();

Just delete '1.31'.

After that, it should work.  I'm using Bugzilla 4.4.9.

Cloning HDD to a smaller SSD for a Windows 8 Laptop

My win8 Dell Laptop has a 500GB HDD, I bought a 480GB SSD for hard disk replacement.  Unfortunately, the 500GB HDD's partitions span the whole disk, the exact layout copying wasn't possible.

I formatted the SSD to a GPT disk, then use various cloning softwares to do the cloning.  I tried Macrium Reflect Free, EaseUS Partition Master, Minitool Partition Wizard. None of them get me to Windows startup screen.

The last one I used is Minitool Partition Wizard. During boot, it said can't find OS.  So I tried changing different bios settings out of desperation and hoped one would work.  It did.

The setting is "disable virtualization".  I don't know why it worked, it doesn't make any sense, I'm just glad it did.

So if you have problem migrating HDD to SSD, this might be something you can try.

Re-sizing a Virtualbox disk image in Linux

One of my VirtualBox virtual machine had its disk full, I thought a simple resize should fix the problem. And I went:

vboxmanage modifyhd u140464-02-disk1.vmdk --resize 30000
0%...
Progress state: VBOX_E_NOT_SUPPORTED
VBoxManage: error: Resize hard disk operation for this format is not implemented yet!

What?!
Turned out "modifyhd" only support .vdi, not .vmdk. OK I will just use .vdi then:

vboxmanage clonehd u140464-02-disk1.vmdk u140464-02-disk1.vdi --format vdi
vboxmanage modifyhd u140464-02-disk1.vdi --resize 30000

Then detach vmdk disk from the VM and attach the vdi.
But after I boot it up, the disk was still full. The disk size wasn't changed. After some googling I found I need to install gparted and use it to grow the partition, and gparted has to be run at boot. Too much hassle.  All I want was some additional disk space. So I did it my way.
(Inside the VM)

sudo fdisk /dev/sda

then enter p, it showed:

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sda1   *        2048      499711      248832   83  Linux
/dev/sda2          501758    33552383    16525313    5  Extended
/dev/sda5          501760    33552383    16525312   8e  Linux LVM

Enter n to create a new partition, press enter 2 times to accept default partition size. For some reason, there was a stray segment, so I have to enter n again to create a new partition. 2 partitions were created, after a p, my partition table looked like this:

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sda1   *        2048      499711      248832   83  Linux
/dev/sda2          501758    33552383    16525313    5  Extended
/dev/sda3          499712      501757        1023   83  Linux
/dev/sda4        33552384    61439999    13943808   83  Linux
/dev/sda5          501760    33552383    16525312   8e  Linux LVM

sda3 is useless, so I deleted it by a 'd' followed by a '3'. sda4 is the one I will use. Enter 'w' to write to disk. Then reboot the VM.

After reboot, do a:

sudo mkfs.ext4 /dev/sda4

My /opt was not used, so I just mount sda4 as /opt

sudo mount /dev/sda4 /opt

Add "/dev/sda4 /opt ext4 defaults 0 2" to the end of /etc/fstab so it was mounted automatically at boot.

In the end, I should have just add another virtual disk without bothering resizing the current one.

fixing VPN problem in Ubuntu

I set up VPN in Ubuntu 14.04, but when I tried to turn it on in NetworkManager, I kept getting errors like "No suitable device found", "Could not find source connection" in /var/log/syslog.

The problem turned out to be that my ethernet connection was not managed by NetworkManager. "nmcli c" didn't show my wired connection.

The solution:
Edit /etc/NetworkManager/NetworkManager.conf, in section [ifupdown], change "managed=false" to "managed=true", then do a:

"sudo service network-manager restart"

Now both vpn and ethernet connections are managed by NetworkManager, turning on VPN just works.

Programming Minecraft with Python: Introducing JuicyRaspberryPie

I developed a Bukkit plugin called JuicyRaspberryPie, that let you add commands to Minecraft with Python programming.

It's largely based on RaspberryJuice plugin, I added a Python command server and also changed the Java code a little bit to let the plugin talk to the command server.

The github page has more detail.

Here's a video demo of the plugin. (Fast forward to 15 minutes for python examples, before that is just about how to download and install the plugin, which is pretty boring)