ruby, java and the rest
I ve been using unblock-us for some time and took only a few precautions like not signing in to any service but hulu.com while using this other DNS service. Yesterday Damon wrote a great article on how to secure your system for unblock-us and I followed his lead. My only machine runs Mac OS, so I [...]
Last week I was asked whether I knew how to set up a dyndns server. Well, I didn t at that time, but I did some research. This is what I found. First, problem description. At home,you have a FritzBox or similar DSL router that lets you specify a dnydns server. For some reason, you don t [...]
After a system update on my computer (Gentoo linux), CUPS (version 1.4.6-r2) suddenly decided it was a good idea to print the banner pages before each printing job double-sided, i.e. with the banner text on both sides of the page. This is annoying because it ruins the usefulness of the blank side of the banner [...]
For the last 3 years I was working in an area called Engineering Productivity at Google. This group builds internal tools for other engineers but sadly there is very little I can talk about, except for the obvious facts: it s challenging, fun and at a scale I hadn t seen before. Well, a few weeks ago [...]
I just spent a few minutes looking for a tool to convert a small number of PNG files to JPG on Mac OS. It was just a few dozen files but so in the end fell back to the good old command line because I don t like graphical interfaces for these tasks. For future reference: [...]
I love Chrome! But one thing drove me crazy: we have numerous internal web-apps running on different hosts. From Firefox was easy to get to these tools by just typing the toolname (not the FQDN) in the url bar. Chrome knows it better and assumes that I want to search for toolname. A moment later [...]
Dear Garmin, I don t know if anyone told you that you build pretty good hardware but your firmware SUCKS! It s Nearly March 2010 and your customers still have to fight with an embarrassing Y2010 bug in your code, the UI is horrible and getting anything on or off the device is a pain. I am [...]
This is mainly a test to see how adding this blog to my Buzz account works. Additionally I want to say how thrilled I am to finally buzz with people outside work
Overall the instructions on code.google.com are really good, so this is just a dump to remind me of the Ubuntu specific stuff I did on a pristine Ubuntu installation sudo apt-get install sun-java6-jdk sudo apt-get install ruby-full rubygems This installs only rubygems 1.3.1 but appengine needs 1.3.5. ERROR: Error installing google-appengine: bundler requires RubyGems version [...]
The usual problem: you want to kill a process. $ ps aux grep randomprocessname psycho 20429 0.0 0.0 11824 1580 pts/7 S+ 12:00 0:00 /bin/bash ./randomprocessname psycho 20528 0.0 0.0 4188 740 pts/17 R+ 12:00 0:00 grep randomprocessname $ pkill -9 randomprocessname WTF? Kill that sucker! $ pkill -9 randomprocessname No typo... Am I [...]
Quite some time has passed since the last time I wrote something on this blog, mostly because I did little non-work related worth mentioning. But last week I helped Damon to finally support JRuby on his Android Scripting Environment (ASE). Downloaded JRuby sources (jruby 1.2.0RC1) from http //www.jruby.org/download. Patched the build.xml to not include doc/index.html from dynalang.jar [...]
Last week I added the 1gb data plan to my Simyo contract to use the SIM with my Christmas G1. I tried a few configurations I found online for simyo but they did not work for me. After some frustration I tried an eplus configuration and this one finally worked for me: Name: does not [...]
A few days ago I finally upgraded my (== my employer s) Macbook Pro from Tiger to Leopard. Everything worked flawless except for one crazy problem: I could not use to tab key the way I used to in forms. My usual routine of quickly entering username, tab, password, tab, hit return did not work anymore. [...]
Last week I cross-compiled miniruby to Android (more details on that adventure later). I asked some time ago about JRuby on Android and it seems like Charles Nutter finally managed to run JRuby on Android. # cat test.rb require 'java' import java.lang.System class Ruboto def greet(who) puts "Hello, #{who}!" end end name = System.get_property('java.runtime.name') Ruboto.new.greet(name) [...]
Seems like nowadays I only write blog posts in response to other blog articles But I hope this is better than not writing at all. Ted Neward asks if code reviews do actually work because evidence suggests, that the scientific review process does not. Only 8% members of the Scientific Research Society agreed that peer [...]
I stumbled over a great essay on pair-programming (via James Shore). Rod Hilton explains it much better than I could ever do, why you should Pair-Program. But I haven t heard about the ping-pong pairing : When doing Test-Driven Development, one of the things we do is called “ping-pong pairing”. So the other developer will write a [...]