Tips and Solutions for Dell XPS 13 Developer Edition

The Dell XPS 13 Developer Edition comes with Ubuntu 12.04, and even though most of its hardware works perfectly with Ubuntu there are some things that doesn't quite work from the beginning (what a shame).

In this post I present some of the issues that I experienced with this powerful ultrabook and how I solved them.

Bluetooth

At the beginning I couldn't enable the bluetooth but after the first Ubuntu update it worked perfectly.

Additional Tip: if you want to send files from your phone to your computer you should do search and find "Personal File Sharing" in the dash and activate both the checkboxes under "Recieve Files over Bluetooth, as commented by Reza Ghayem in AskUbuntu.

WiFi

By default there are some issues with the stability of WiFi connections. If your WiFi connection is not stable (ie: disconnects and reconnects a lot) you should run the following in a Terminal:

sudo apt-get install linux-generic-lts-quantal

and reboot your computer after that as suggested by Dan Wood in this AskUbuntu post.

Hibernate

Warning: Some people have reported some problems (ruins installation) using this hibernate tip when the Home directory is encrypted. I haven't confirmed this, though.

Although in my case Suspend worked from the beginning, Hibernate didn't so just installing uswusp solves the issue:

sudo apt-get install uswsusp

There are additional instructions suggested here but they weren't necessary. After installing uswsusp you can try hibernating your computing executing in a terminal:

sudo s2disk

If it works then you just have to restart the computer (after waking it up) and check hibernate through the standard options in Ubuntu (right top button-->Hibernate).

And that's it! Just let me know if you have additional hacks needed for Dell XPS 13 Developer Edition or if you had any problem with any of these solutions!

Dell English Linux Tips Troubleshooting Ubuntu

How to send emails in Wordpress with Contact Form 7

Recently I was working with a client's Wordpress-based site where they had configured a contact form using Contact Form 7 to send emails to clients. I'm not going to enter in details on how to use Contact Form 7 since there are good guides in the plugin's site.

The thing is that after configuring Contact Form 7, I found issues sending emails. The Contact Form 7 owner posted a link to a blog that explained how to solve this for specific configurations using WP-Mail-SMTP plugin. This gave some guidance but I had to tweak it a lot (for example, changing from WP-Mail-SMTP to WP-SMTP) to make it work for me, and I hope with the following instructions you will be able to solve it in your site too.

First of all, my configurations:

• Wordpress, version 3.5.2
• Contact Form 7, version 3.4.2
• WP-SMTP, version 1.1.5
• The site is hosted in GoDaddy.

Notice that I use WP-SMTP instead of WP-Mail-SMTP.

First, you have to change the WP-SMTP configuration. You can do it through Settings -> WP-SMTP. Set the following:
                From: my email (ex: "asdf@gmail.com")
                From Name: "Whatever you like"
                Host: localhost
                SMTP Secure: None
                Port: 25
                SMTP Authentication: No
                All the other fields empty. 

WP-SMTP Configuration

You should be able to send a test email using the fields at the bottom of the form. If this works, you're almost done!

Finally,  another problem that I found is that you cannot send empty message body in the Contact Form (notice the [your-message] value in the picture below). Based on the Contact Form Docs, I configured the contact form as shown. The field [email-88] is the name of the field email that the user introduced in the form.

The reply-to header was a nice touch that I took from Mario Varga's post.

Contact Form 7 Configuration

Hope it works for you!

English Troubleshooting Web Wordpress

How to map Postgres capital names to Hibernate

When I was developing the Simulation Model System (SimModSys), I faced this issue.

I'm from the school that believes that the database should be developed first and independently from the system, to serve the purpose of maintaining the data integrity, and the application should integrate to the existing database to apply logic on the data, but not to force how the data should be represented. So I designed the database first ignoring that there were issues between Hibernate and Postgres capital letters.

Instead of changing the database I decided to fight for it, after all it was a learning personal project. 

I received a partial answer that I completed later at StackOverflow. In short, what you have to do is the following:

• Escape every table that has capital letters (using \"):

• Escape every field that has capital letters (using \"):

• Escape joins that include columns that have capital letters (strangely, using `):

It is a tedious work. This worked for me with PostgreSQL 9.1.9, Hibernate 4.1.3 and Java 7. 

For a complete example you can review the code at BitBucket of any of the classes of the SimModSys project's persistence package.

English Hibernate Java PostgreSQL Simulation Model System Troubleshooting