Month: January 2016

“python.exe has stopped working” suddenly appeared under Windows 10

When attempting to start python tonight, Windows 10 suddenly produced the “python.exe has stopped working” error. Examining the event in the Event Viewer didn’t provide any more useful information, but surprisingly everything worked if I launched python.exe directly from Explorer – or through bash (cygwin), but not if I launched it through the regular command line (cmd.exe).

What solved it? Removing the old directory again (even after trying a fresh install) and then explicitly finding the 64-bit version from the python download page (it gives you the 32-bit version by default, it seems). Reinstalling with the new archive fixed everything, and now it works again (and I checked “pre-compile the standard library, but that shouldn’t change anything)! Woho! Now to just reinstall quite a few virtualenvs..

Android: Changing the Title of an Activity – setTitle works – android:label does not?

To change the title of an activity (to show a more custom title for a certain activity than the application title), you can set the new title either through calling setTitle("foo") on the activity or by setting android:label="@string/price_after_rebate" in your activity style.

The problem was that the latter didn’t work, while the first one did. I try to keep any static definitions related to the activities outside of the code itself, but that’s hard when it doesn’t work as expected.

Turns out that if there’s a title set in the AndroidManifest.xml file (located under app/manifests/ in the standard layout / Android Studio), it’ll override any title set elsewhere in the definitions. You can change the specific titles by setting android:label="@string/price_after_rebate" on the activity definitions in the manifest instead of the activity xml file:

<activity
    android:name=".xyz.Foo"
    android:parentActivityName=".MainActivity"
    android:label="@string/xyz_foo_activity_title"
>
    <meta-data
        android:name="android.support.PARENT_ACTIVITY"
        android:value="xyz.MainActivity" />
</activity>

Enabling OpenVPN configuration / autostart on Ubuntu

This assumes that you’ve already made sure that your configuration is valid and is able to connect (you can do this by calling openvpn --config /etc/openvpn/FILENAME.conf directly. It won’t be daemonized, but it will give you any errors on the console directly).

There’s a few details you’ll have to get right before the openvpn daemon starts your configuration automagically under Ubuntu:

  1. Your configuration has to be under /etc/openvpn/FILENAME.conf. The .conf part is important. If it ends with .ovpn or anything else, it won't be loaded.
  2. Ubuntu isn't set to start all configurations by default. You can change this by editing /etc/default/openvpn. Change the AUTOSTART variable to the configurations you want to start when the daemon starts. The example in the file says "all", which means that all defined configurations will start. This is OK if you want to keep openvpn up at all times.
  3. You have to tell systemd that you've changed the default file. If you don't do this, nothing will have appeared to change for openvpn - unless you restart the OS. And you don't want to restart your server just to make a setting visible. Do systemctl daemon-reload to make systemd reload the settings (this is also in the comments in the file, but hey, you don't have time to read those, so now you're searching Google instead).
  4. Restart openvpn: service openvpn restart
  5. Confirm that everything went OK by looking in /var/log/syslog