kennywest

... the dates are set. February 4 & 5, 2012 ... yeah!

Today the final package containing 14 missing red lift arms arrived. I had to place 5 orders in 5 different stores, for a total of EUR 380 to get all the necessary parts for this car. Most parts (and the largest order) where found in Juergen's store. I am still missing the wheel covers . These have become very rare and very expensive. Since I think these are ugly, I might not order these anyway. Pictures coming soon!

Alright, I'll admit it I am an Adult Fan of Lego (or AFOL). Maybe this doesn't make me a real adult, but you'd be surprised to see how many people my age are still buying sets or creating MOCs (My Own Creations). My love for Lego started many years ago with a Universal Building Set . After that, many sets followed, ranging from space ships , airports to famous Technic sets. I have always been fond of the larger, more complicated Technic sets. I also remember being very fond of the Technic chassis series ( 853 , 8860 ) which later became real cars. Unfortunately I don't own any of the chassis sets, but I do own the 8880 and the 8448 . Recently I stumbled upon an interesting blog entry talking about a concept car for sale on eBay, designed by Nathanaël Kuipers . The car looks a lot like the car from the old 8448 set, but is using a more modular design. It is also completely studless whereas the 8448 still had some older Technic bricks. The car was eventually sold...

As a consultant, it is important to be able to track your time spent on different tasks and projects. This is necessary to be able to report everything accurately in your time sheet or invoices you send to your clients. Tracking time can be a tedious process, however, and there are different tools available to help you with this. A long time ago, I found a tool called Timelog. I can't provide a link to this software, because it seems dead at the time of this writing. You should be able to find it again if you google for Timelog and kclee. Anyway, the tool did a terrific job and was written in Java. The only problem I had, was its inability to cope with different clients and projects. You were just able to track time spent on tasks, regardless of clients and projects. So my solution was to keep different files for different clients. This worked just fine, but consolidating all the different files into one time sheet was error prone and not so easy once I started to work for a lot of...

Ik heb momenteel een Diamond Shake + abonnement bij Telenet. Deze formule bestaat al een tijdje niet meer. Deze maand heeft Telenet echter voor een vervanging gezorgd. Fibernet 40, vergelijkbaar met Diamond Shake +, maar iets goedkoper en Fibernet 60, vergelijkbaar met Turbonet. Fibernet 40 zou echter sneller moeten zijn dan ExpressNet XL, die vervat zat in de Diamond Shake +. Dat zullen we dan wel zien. Volgende week ga ik hiervoor een nieuwe modem halen, die trouwens vlot over de toonbank gaan. Het Telenet Center in mijn buurt was zijn volledige stock van 100 modems kwijt na één dag. Een collega van mij heeft de stap reeds gezet en ging gisteren een nieuwe modem halen. Tot zijn grote verbazing werkte er niets meer. Geen Internet toegang, geen telefoon en dus ook geen digitale TV. Telenet was echter zo vriendelijk een technieker te sturen en er bleek een probleem te zijn met de versterker. Telenet plaatst immers bij elke abonnee een versterker tussen de kabel die binnenkomt, de modem...

As already mentioned in earlier posts, I uses mondo to create system backups of all my systems. By system backups I mean; create a backup of the live system, without any personal data. In short, this is a backup of everything except home folders. The home folders are backed up using rsync and external disks, but this is another story. Restoring from a mondo backup is easy; simply burn the images, put it in a cd drive and nuke the system (yes, this is a restore option in mondo :) ). If you just want to restore some files from the backup, without overwriting the whole system, there's an easy way to do this. Suppose you created an ISO a while ago and these are stored on some disk. First, you will need to mount the ISO as a loopback device like so: mount -o loop MyIso.iso /mnt The ISO is now mounted in /mnt . Now locate the file you want to restore (I was going to restore smb.conf ): $ grep smb.conf /mnt/archives/filelist.* /mnt/archives/filelist.11:/var/lib/ucf/cache/:etc:samba:...

I encountered the error mentioned in the title of this post after upgrading my samba install on Debian Lenny using Enterprise Samba binaries. The latest version they distribute at the time of writing is 3.4.9. My samba install talks to an ldap backend and the above error was shown upon starting the new version. Seems they added (or changed the default) option for the ldap protocol in smb.conf . Adding: ldap ssl = off makes the error go away. Cool.

On a past project, users needed to be able to create a custom query and execute it. To do this, the user was able to select a field, an operator and select or fill in a value. If, for example, we were searching for people living in Belgium, the user would select person.address.country for the field, like for the operator and fill in "BE" for the value. I'm sure you all know how the resulting SQL would look like. There are different ways to create a query builder. If you're using Hibernate , the above example could easily be translated to HQL using the criteria API. In some cases, however, the resulting SQL is not exactly what you wanted (e.g. not performing well) or maybe Hibernate is just not capable generating a correct SQL. Unfortunately, at that time, we discovered we were suffering both aforementioned problems, so the only solution was to create our own query builders using string concatenation. Yes, this can get ugly really fast, when not being careful, but I...

I've been using f-spot for quite some time now to manage and categorise all my pictures. In older Ubuntu versions (8.04 and earlier), the default location for f-spot to store its photo's was: /home/username/Photos . For some reason, Ubuntu 10.04 (probably earlier versions as well) changed this folder to: /home/username/Pictures/Photos . I didn't notice this until today, while I was importing photo's and checking the contents of /home/username/Photos only to see nothing was copied to this location. That's when I discovered they changed the default location :) Since f-spot is backed by an sqlite database, this wasn't very hard to solve: create a backup of the sqlite database photos.db (should be underneath /home/username/.config/f-spot ) now update the location with sqlite3: kenneth@pavane:/data/home/kenneth/.config/f-spot$ sqlite3 photos.db SQLite version 3.6.22 Enter ".help" for instructions Enter SQL statements terminated with a ";" sqlite...

Now that I had my system up and running, it was time to add some of the applications I love to use. The previous LTS version shipped with Thunderbird 2, whereas the current LTS comes with Thunderbird 3. The new version recognized my existing profile (underneath HOME/.thunderbird , which is where all accounts are kept) without any problems. No mails got lost in the transition. The new version comes with smart folders, which gives an aggregated view on all folders when using different accounts (e.g. webmail, gmail, your ISP's pop mail, ...). My favorite photo management software, f-spot , is also updated and I was very pleased to see it converted my database from the older version without any issues. In short, all software I used on 8.04 managed to convert my personal settings and data without any problems, which was a relief. For the rare occasions I still need Windows (only to sync my GPS software with my old PDA, actually), I've set up a virtual machine inside vmware server. U...

I've been using Ubuntu since Hoary, which was released 5 years ago. It has always been, and still is, my preferred OS for desktop computing. April 29th the latest LTS version, 10.04, was released. This week, I decided to take it for a spin. Being able to upgrade / dist-upgrade on a Debian based Linux system, has always been one of the main reasons why I like Ubuntu so much. In Ubuntu's early days, however, breakage was very likely after dist-upgrading your system. dist-upgrading from Hoary (5.04) towards Dapper (6.06) every six months has been a true nightmare. After that experience, I decided to stick with every LTS version (i.e., 6.06, 8.04, 10.04, ...) and reinstall from scratch. Having my home directory on a separate partition, eases this process a lot. Just reinstall Ubuntu (after backing everything up of course), mount the home partition and your done. Since I became a big fan of KDE, over the years I've been using Linux, I decided to replace my Kubuntu 8.04 (which wa...

We're developing a fairly large application in Java. There are 2 front end applications, one written in Flex, the other in plain Spring-MVC and Spring-WebFlow. Both of them are using 3 main applications deployed as 3 different wars on the same application server. The front end applications talk with the back end applications using RMI exposed as HTTP. The back end applications also talk to each other using the same protocol. One of the applications deployed in the back end is responsible for validating data entered in the front end applications. One of the rules in the, so called ValidationService, checks if the SSIN of a person is valid. In Belgium, all people have a unique SSIN (Social Security Identification Number), comprised of 11 digits. The first 6 digits are based on the person's birth date. So if this person was born on April 21, 1978, the SSIN starts with 780421xxxyy. To check if an SSIN is valid, you need to check the person's birth date against these first 6 dig...

The other week, a friendly colleague of mine brought me a small present. He gave me one of his Cobalt Qube s (for free!) which was collecting dust at his home. He was certain that I could give it a better use. I think I can still remember the days these things hit the market (somewhere in the late 90's). This was a home / office server appliance way before the people of Microsoft thought up their Windows Home Server . It was running some modified version of Linux RedHat, featuring a web interface for all administrative tasks. It also had 2 network cards, so you could easily turn it into a gateway / firewall. The RedHat version running on the Qube was known to be notoriously insecure. It was also running an older 2.0.x kernel which was outdated, even at that time. The Qube 2700 and Qube 2 were both equipped with a MIPS processor. Later models had an i386 architecture. Mine was a Qube 2. Getting the serial connection to work The Qube does not have any VGA adapter, so if you want to s...

Java 6 has been available for a while on Mac OS X, but if you don't specifically tell the OS to use this version, it still uses Java 5 32 bit. You can change this by dragging Java 6 to the top of the list in Java Preferences . After that, all applications started from the terminal or spotlight will use Java 6. I had a problem when using Java 6, or any 64 bit JVM. I couldn't type in any input field. Clicking around worked, but no input. Even jconsole wouldn't allow me to enter anything. Since I wasn't very fond of the US keyboard layouts provided with the OS, I've been using the US International layout from Rainer Brockerhoff for quite some time now. Apparently, version 1.1 does not allow any input when using it on a 64 bit JVM. Downloading the latest version (which is 1.2 at the time of this writing) solves this problem. Now everything is working as it should. It took me a whole day to find this solution and Google didn't help. So I hope, this post will someday...

Today I updated my Subclipse , which is my preferred SVN provider for Eclipse . Apparently, the latest version ships with a more recent SVNKit library which requires you to login to your SVN repository over and over again. Other IDE's, like JetBrains' IntelliJ suffer the same problem. To solve this for Eclipse, put the following line into /configuration/config.ini file: svnkit.http.methods=Basic,NTLM For other IDE's, I guess you can add -Dsvnkit.http.methods=Basic,NTLM to your startup command, not sure though.

Vinyl records have been there for ages. My dad still has a couple of old records but he has no turntable anymore to play them. This is because _I_ claimed his turntable a long time ago, which he thought had become old fashioned. I started buying vinyl records about 12 years ago. I remember saving all my pocket money and buying the latest records with it, instead of visiting pubs with friends. I remember everyone thinking vinyl records belonged to the past and MP3's and CD's were taking over. In fact, this was not true. DJ's playing at parties and clubs never stopped buying records and from my experience, about 80% of their music came from plain old vinyl and a tiny 20% from other media like CD's or MP3's. The reasoning behind this is simple, if you wanted something new, something not popular (yet), you bought it on vinyl. If it became popular, some record company would probably be so kind to put it on some CD and sell it. But then again, ages, if not decades ( :) ) ...

NVIDIA has had the best drivers for Linux users for several years. Since early releases of KDE 4, however, some nasty artifacts appeared when running some Gnome based applications (like Open Office and Thunderbird) on systems with NVIDIA cards. These bugs have been reported to NVIDIA but haven't been addressed until now. According to this very long thread, the latest beta drivers from NVIDIA (180.x) the nasty artifacts should have disappeared. I compiled and installed this latest driver and indeed, the panel corruption when, for example, composing a new mail in Thunderbird does no longer appear. Finally, people running KDE 4 with NVIDIA cards are no longer nvidia-victims :)

In an earlier post I was talking about how I've been using mondo as preferred backup solution for quite some time. However, I have never used it to restore stuff, since I've never broken any install before and hardware hasn't failed on me yet. Since I wanted to replace the smaller 10GB hard drive, I've installed in the Wyse, with a bigger 500GB one, this would be an ideal case to try and restore everything with mondo . So I created a backup of the 10GB drive with mondo to an NFS share on another PC (using the script posted earlier). Next, burned the resulting ISO to a CD and finally booted from the CD and interactively restored my data. mondo has 2 main restore modes; interactive and nuke. Since my new drive was bigger than the original drive, mondo suggested to drop to interactive mode, which allowed me to create a whole new partition scheme (which is nice). The only thing that failed was grub installing itself on the master boot record. I'm not sure why, maybe...

Ubuntu has been a fantastic operating system for my desktop and has been my preferred Desktop OS for more than 3 years now. The cool thing about Ubuntu is it's Debian based. So you install once and dist-upgrade to every new release without ever having to reinstall the whole thing. The downside is a dist-upgrade in Ubuntu sometimes fails leaving you with a very b0rken system. That's why I stick with LTS releases for now, because I have little spare time to reinstall my desktop every few months or so. Nevertheless there are brave people out there always keeping track of the latest, more or less stable, version and don't mind the dist-upgrade problems. Anyway if your install is broken after a dist-upgrade (or any upgrade) it's always nice to have a backup at hand. In search of the ideal, most flexible, backup tool out there I found mondo . So, people, stop asking for a backup tool for Linux on forums, this one will suite your needs. Unlike some other tools, mondo creates ...

I like to have my users, that will be logging in on different types of machines on the network, stored in a central place. The ideal solution for this is an LDAP repository and configuring Samba to talk to this repository and configure it as a Primary Domain Controller. This solution will enable users running Linux to authenticate using pam_ldap and users running Windows (NT and up) authenticate against a Samba Domain Controller. Linux users can also join their machines on the Samba domain, and create shares accessible to other users known by the Domain Controller. This setup caused me a second headache, since the Samba server running on Ubuntu Hardy could not join the Samba Domain Controller running on Etch. This is because there is a compatibility issue between Samba 3.0.28a (Hardy) and Samba 3.0.24a (Etch). I had to fetch some more recent source packages here and compile and build them on Etch. This is not a procedure for the faint of heart, so if you haven't upgraded to Lenny ...