FormFu, DBIC, model_config and resultset.

I have found myself back in Catalyst development work. This wouldn't be such a bad think if I hadn't just spent a whole day trying to fix up a form to edit a 'many_to_many' relationship which is stored in my Schema.

I've been following this post which says it should be about as simple as it sounds. i.e. not as simple as Rails, but definitely doable with finite effort. So, FormFu syntax not withstanding, I following these instructions but ended up with some peculiar error talking about 'result_source'. I tried playing with 'nested_name', 'model_config' etc... I began to think about building my Select in the controller.

Finally, I discovered my error: I had not configured Controller::HTML::FormFu which is shown nicely in this post:

http://lists.scsys.co.uk/pipermail/html-formfu/2009-March/001932.html

That is a day of my life gone, but at least I will be able to rise from sleep tomorrow knowing that I can move onto doing some new development.

UPDATE: One additional comment to the post above from 2009-March. I found that I needed to use the many_to_many relationship as the nested_name, not the has_many as stated.

Skype on a Ubuntu HP Mini 1000

I have been playing with Ubuntu 9.10 on a HP Mini for a while - on and off.

I have a request to get Skype working. I struggled with this for a bit, but I couldn't get it to work with the duplex sound card: when I pluged a microphone in, the speakers stopped working for example.

Something changed - it could have been an kernel update - anyway, I can now use Skype with minimal effort - including the web-cam.

The vital thing I had to do was disable the checkbox (options->audio settings or something):

'Allow Skype to automatically adjust my mixer levels'

Then, I could twiddle the 'pulse audio' options (right click on the volume icon) to increase the microphone input level. It seemed that one problem was Skype wouldn't let me increase the microphone input level while I was letting it 'automatically adjust my mixer levels'.