some quick notes about IT (and organization)

Review: Zenoss 4/5

2011-11-14T06:54:00.001+01:00

Have been runnning Zenoss for over a full year, here is my verdict: Product (4/5): Monitors hundreds of nodes running of a not to beefy vm. Easily extendable. Smooth upgrades. (Not automatic but well documented.) User interface is sometimes a little hard to understand. Not bad for a product the size of Zenoss but not perfect either. Documentation (4/5): Lots of official documentation freely

Review: Flexiglass 5/5

2011-10-26T07:59:00.000+02:00

If you are a Mac user that have spent any time on recent desktop Linux, chances are you will be missing Compiz-like window management. (On a side note: Even Windows converts may be missing some niceties such as double click to maximize, or resize by any corner or window edge that wasn't added until Lion.) I bought a Flexiglass license a couple of months ago and I love it. Flexiglass offers:

Do those stylesheets really need to be in the page body?

2011-10-25T22:26:00.000+02:00

I once worked on a medium size enterprise software project that felt very sluggish and slow. I was new to the technology stack, new to anything but small web applications and I figured it just wasn't possible to get that particular stack any faster. As the project went on features were added, more optimizations were added by expensive consultants, a few performance regressions were weeded out

Review: repositoryhosting.com 5/5

2011-04-05T21:12:00.000+02:00

I've been using repositoryhosting.com since late august last year, and it seems like now is a about time to write a very small review. The good stuff: Your choice of version control system: Git Mercurial Subversion Filestore with WebDAV included Trac Included plugins, selectable on a project by project basis: Agilo Timing and Estimation Discussion Forum Batch Modify Tickets Custom Roadmap

RewriteBase takes one argument

2011-01-09T22:53:00.000+01:00

Staying in Denver, CO, away from my family, and far from the development databases at work I decided I had time to work on a pet project of mine. Knowing there will be a few hours on airports and in the plane on my way home I decided to get the project running correctly on my laptop before I continued work. Then I ran into this: Internal Server Error The server encountered an internal error

Configuring Mac Snow Leopard for Symfony development

2010-10-17T21:18:00.002+02:00

If you want to develop symfony applications using the built in Apache web server in Mac OS X here are my notes. Keep in mind, this is not a production configuration but just the necessary steps to get a developer workstation up and running. Activate Web Sharing System Preferences -> Sharing -> Web Sharing Change your UserDir settings. In a terminal window, edit the file with your userdir

The web2py ide

2010-10-01T22:14:00.005+02:00

The web2py ide is Firefox. Or Chrome, or Opera, or Safari (or Internet Explorer). Just create a good old frameset and you can have split view between models and controller, documentation and even a preview running in one browser tab. Running the browser in full screen and the built in code editors in "full screen" (which fills the whole assigned frame), this turned out to work really well.

Quick hack to develop web2py on a different machine

2010-09-29T23:16:00.000+02:00

For security reasons web2py will not allow you to log in as administrator unless you are logging in from the same workstation. (There are exceptions, but they are cumbersome: See the official book for full details.) However, there is a quick hack that allows you develop from any machine: Just set up a ssh tunnel: ssh username@ip_address_or_dns_name -L 8000:127.0.0.1:8000 -N As usually, I

Using web2py, first impressions

2010-09-29T22:58:00.000+02:00

I've had the opportunity to do some quick prototyping in web2py in my spare time over the last few weeks. Here are some very quick notes about what to like and what not to like: Good: Works out of the box. Just download, open, choose password, press start. Your default browser starts automatically. Automatic updates (beta warning, bur works.) Built in editor and version control. Built in user

Getting ipythonx to work with Mac OS X

2010-05-30T10:02:00.002+02:00

If you're trying to get ipythonx to work under Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard you might get and error message like this: ImportError: /System/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.6/Extras/lib/python/wx-2.8-mac-unicode/wx/_core_.so: no appropriate 64-bit architecture (see "man python" for running in 32-bit mode)Here's a couple of hints: Use standard ipython instead. Unless there was

Copy OpenVPN settings from Tunnelblick on Mac OS X to Windows 7

2010-05-25T21:41:00.001+02:00

I forgot the charger for my job laptop in the office today. So I spent the last few minutes of battery copying the configuration files to the pc at home. Below is what I ended up doing: Install OpenVPN software. You can find it on the official OpenVPN site. Copy all the config files from the job laptop to C:\Program Files (x86)\OpenVPN\config. The job laptop uses tunnelblick, so the files was

Swithing to Mac - one year after

2010-04-09T21:45:00.010+02:00

This has been a long time coming, but here it is: My "Switching to Mac story". I've been working on this for almost a full year. It started with three optimistic blog posts about the things I learned while unlearning Windows, and then reality struck me: I thought Mac supposed to be almost like Linux, supported. It is not. Here is a nice summary of the differences between Mac and PC: Top Ten

The real reason why we don't use silverlight or flash

2010-04-05T21:16:00.001+02:00

I think I speak on behalf of a lot of people if a say: A lot of silverlight & flash fans are missing the point: We know about flash. It's not that we somehow do not "get" silverlight. We program Java, PHP, Python, -list goes on and for many of us also includes C# and actionscript. We do use a lot of different frameworks. Learning new stuff is part of our daily grind (and to be honest, we mostly

Simple recovery of deleted files from ext3 file systems

2010-03-25T19:46:00.000+01:00

Yesterday I finished recovery of about 8000 photos by burning them to DVD and handing them over to a friend of mine. Recovery of files from ext 3 partitions have long been considered somewhere between hard and impossible, but thanks to free and open source PhotoRec the recovery was done automatically during the night after answering a few, relatively simple questions. Next day I just rsynced the

Spam and malware, with screenshots

2009-11-03T06:45:00.004+01:00

Got this fake antivirus message yesterday and thought it might be worth sharing: This one was rather well crafted, but they obviously didn't take the time to check operating system, even though they found my ip address. (See bottom left.) Here's another one. This one I got in mail a few weeks ago, from a friend who obviously got her email account stolen: It's in norwegian, and it's

Windows 7 fail

2009-10-29T23:01:00.001+01:00

I downloaded the Release Candidate of Windows 7 earlier this year, and today I decided to give it a try. After booting from the dvd and asking a couple of questions it asks for a cd rom driver(!). What did you say, Microsoft? You are booting from that CD rom drive. You also have a whole DVD to store whatever drivers you need. Every major linux distro I've tried manages include drivers for my cd

Creating Drupal themes from scratch

2009-10-18T00:44:00.000+02:00

If you want to create Drupal themes from scratch, i.e. you do not want to modify an existing theme but rather paste your own html and insert placeholders, MODx style, then this post is for you. MODx has long been my favourite framework because of it's simple and powerful templating system (copy and paste your html, insert placeholders, go), but recently the lack of visible activity has

2009-10-15T23:07:00.000+02:00

I'm new with drupal, and I wish sobody told me this yesterday: To make an absolute link to an image in a theme, without worrying about where the theme is going to be installed, you can do the following: /img/some_image.png" /> If you are using phptemplate, the drupal_get_path-call might be substituted by

Netbeans got a nice css preview

2009-10-15T22:24:00.008+02:00

Was doing some spare time drupal work in Netbeans 6.8 when I suddenly found out it had working css preview. See screenshot below for details: Logging into my other (work ) account I found it in Netbeans 6.7 too, which explains why it wasn't mentioned in NetBeans 6.8 -- New and Noteworthy

The "bug"

2009-05-10T01:18:00.003+02:00

A couple of days ago I troubleshooted some code that was supposed to take a ResultSet as input and return a String as output. For some reason it would just skip the entire resultset, regardless of what I did. In hindsight, it's funny. That last() gave me a lot of debugging, including looking for possible concurrency issues. Don't know why I put it there in the first place either :)

A very short review of the N82

2009-05-06T22:57:00.002+02:00

I got my Nokia N82 about one year ago. Here is my short review: The good Built in camera is good! Build in GPS is decent. I like it. (the reason I say it's decent is that my brother, who was used to the Nokia navigator phone says the N82 it's horrible in comparison.) Makes good use of features. Examples: Camera can geotag pictures automatically. The "Sports tracker"-program uses both GPS

Updated the pomodoro timer

2009-04-13T10:54:00.003+02:00

I've finally upgraded the pomodoro timer. List of updates: You can now open the applet in a pop-up window. See fourth tab on the top. Buttons instead of small links. (Thanks Sten, Johan)Fixed a bug that prevents new unplanned and urgent items beeing added after the last one has been moved up.)If you are a pomodoro fan without a physical timer, -go ahead try it! You are encouraged to leave

Inverting the colors

2009-03-27T23:34:00.000+01:00

is as easy as pressing Win + m (on my machine, Ubuntu 8.10, "Extra" desktop effects) Makes programming a little easier on the eyes a late friday night.

A four leaf clover!

2009-03-17T06:44:00.004+01:00

(Picture is from last summer, found it today before work and thought I'd like to share it anyway. And yes, I feel lucky :)

What does "cd -" mean?

2009-02-16T18:53:00.003+01:00

I didn't know until I read the free ebook "Linux 101 Hacks. (It lets you change between the two last directories.) Oh, -the book is really free. At least I found the password at the web site without registering my email address.

Making a screencast from Ubuntu 8.10

2009-01-05T04:52:00.002+01:00

(Hopefully I'll get back to this post with more details later. Bug me if I've left out something important.) I've been planning to make a couple of Norwegian Linux screencasts for some time, and yesterday night i sat for several hours to try to figure out the best way to do it. After figuring out most details I guess there is enough stuff interesting details to make a new blog post. First

firesymfony - using firebug with symfony

2008-12-25T13:18:00.000+01:00

Found a Firefox add on for symfony development while I was downloading firebug today. Haven't tried it yet, but might give it a try next time I'm working on one a symfony project.

Three guys "switching to Windows"

2008-12-22T22:58:00.004+01:00

(This post is heavily updated and is now just a list of links.) Howto switch from Linux to Windows - a users experience Switching to Windows: Not as easy as you thinkIs MS Windows ready for the desktop?http://www.mailinglistarchive.com/ubuntu-users@lists.ubuntu.com/msg90388.htmlhttp://climbing-the-hill.blogspot.com/2009/06/why-windows-is-not-yet-ready-for.html (added 2009-06-13)http://

Hacking the rich:pickList using jQuery

2008-12-22T22:34:00.001+01:00

Another post about the JSF 1.2 upgrade. Short description of the problem: We had hacked together a custom pick list from before. After upgrading to newest JSF and newest RichFaces, we could use a standard pick list, except that the standard pickList didn't support any means of showing details about the selected item. We could of course tried to subclass the RichFaces pick list component, but

Reduced size of my online pomodoro timer

2008-12-20T02:05:00.001+01:00

Had forgotten to remove some pictures I used early in development of my online pomodoro timer. When I removed then, the size decreased from >1 MB to less than 100 KB :) Hope this will reduce loading times significantly. If not, there is a feedback form on the third tab on the page. Feel free to report bugs or add feature suggestions.

Upgrading a JSF 1.1 project to JSF 1.2

2008-12-16T15:39:00.004+01:00

I've just upgraded a project from JSF 1.1 (MyFaces) with tomahawk to JSF 1.2 (Mojarra) with Facelets. Halfway through the process I realized it would be worth sharing, since I would have appreciated if somebody else had done that before me. (There is a description about how to make a new project with JSF 1.2 on http://forums.sun.com/thread.jspa?threadID=5156242, but I wanted to upgrade an old

First usable result form my playing with JavaFX

2008-12-13T19:33:00.005+01:00

I really like the pomodoro technique. So, while learning JavaFX, I made a software kitchen timer for use with the pomodoro technique. The result can bee seen here: http://www.itlanddata.no/the-pomodoro-technique/. Click once to start, click again to stop. I also used the opportunity to add a little jQuery goodness to the mix, allowing you to add to do's, urgent and unplanneds, sort and move

Going to boot Windows XP on my laptop tonight..

2008-12-09T21:02:00.002+01:00

..because I want to test JavaFX while commuting tomorrow.I've been looking forward to JavaFX because I hope it may put an end to the current misuse of HTML for web applications by people who think that hiding javascript from the developers is a good thing.

Ubuntu Intrepid supports Nokia N82

2008-12-08T23:26:00.005+01:00

Just the other day I saw HAL was updated with support for, among other things, Nokia N82. Today I had time to test it. I seems I can now use my telephone as a wireless broadband modem, preconfigured with correct settings, and also sync Rhythmbox even easier than before. I've tried installing support for Nokia N82 on Windows XP, and it seems to me that once again, once things work in Ubuntu, they

Making a "selectable" list component using facelets

2008-11-18T21:43:00.008+01:00

Disclaimer: This is not a defense of jsf. If markup were an animal specie, then using jsf would get you arrested for mistreatment. I'm hoping that JavaFX wil give us a better way to make RIAs. in web.xml

facelets.LIBRARIES

/WEB-INF/somewhere/you/decide/whatever.tablib.xml

Quick wins with Java 6 update 10

2008-11-17T22:40:00.001+01:00

So, the other day I needed a count down timer. For the pomodoro technique. A quick search on the net: java timer applet gives this http://javaboutique.internet.com/JavaTimer/ Seems like it was uploaded 2000-12-11. (Nice thing about Java. Just works, also with old stuff.) Problem solved. But, it would be funny to see if I could use any of the new features of Java 6 update 10, so I downloaded the

Using git locally, perforce centrally.

2008-11-08T10:37:00.003+01:00

Work In Progress... It probably comes as no surprise for people who know me that I find Perforce a bit awkward. I have suggested in an earlier post that the only reason anyone would go for Perforce is because they already have a big Perforce repository from before. That is not to say I'm against version control. I use version control for every project that lasts for more than a few hours, for

JavaZone: Domain specific languages in Java

2008-10-31T01:00:00.003+01:00

For me, one of the most inspiring talks at JavaZone this year was by Robert C. Martin. He talked about refactoring at method level, and one of the ideas he brought was that you should be able to read down a class like a book and immediately understand what was going on. To achieve this, he said, you have to make methods that do one thing, and you have to make them short. When you give those

Why I would never choose perforce

2008-10-18T22:53:00.004+02:00

I know two kinds of people who like perforce: People who have never tried a modern version control system, and Roall. Perforce has one major weakness: It is very obtrusive, forcing you to "open" every file you want "for edit" every time you want to do any change to it. This basically means that perforce is very hard to use without tool support, compared to svn or git. Add to this that when

So, you're stuck with

2008-10-17T19:15:00.016+02:00

This is a work in progress. Don't be surprised if this post changes over the coming weeks. This post is about small things you can do, even if you're stuck with whatever uncool technology. Do something cool while commuting I personally have spent a almost all my commuting time the last twelve months programming symfony. First a billing system for small businesses and then a web app for

Delphi for Java developers

2008-09-25T23:40:00.003+02:00

Why is there no book titled Delphi for Java developers? I guess I'm not the only software engineer who has been forced to learn Delphi after Java. The reason is of course not that the company I'm working for at the moment is moving to Delphi, but rather that they have some programs written in Delphi that still needs maintenance. Learning Delphi after Java give some interesting insights into

Another anti-virus solution

2008-09-24T23:37:00.007+02:00

Tried vipre yesterday on a customer pc. After a 6 minute scan it found and removed the trojan (TDSServ) that neither spybot, trend or avg managed to remove. I think it is the worst trojan I've seen so far, hiding from the Windows API, redirecting requests for security related domains to various other domains, including, if I remember correctly, qxl.no and thefreedictionary.com (instead of the

About Java, closures and attracting new developers, part II

2008-09-21T19:01:00.005+02:00

(Warning: A web developers perspective.) I've been thinking of this since I wrote the post: About Java, closures and attracting new developers, where I tried to prove that the problem with Java is not related to the lack of closures. At the risk of offending the rest of you, here comes my explanation of why I don't use Java for my spare time projects, even if I like it. The web server (I mostly

A really great time logger

2008-09-11T23:55:00.001+02:00

Are you already using KDE? If so, you're in luck, cause the best time logger I've ever seen has been available on KDE for years. Karm (forget about the name, it's a KDE thing that almost every name starts with a K) logs the time you spend on each virtual desktop. Just place all programs related to each project on a separate desktop, and all private stuff (like instant messenger, gmail etc) on

Update: Ubuntu on GIGABYTE ga-73pvm-s2h

2008-09-05T21:06:00.001+02:00

Earlier this year I installed a new computer with Silverstone SST-LC17 case, GIGABYTE ga-73pvm-s2h mainboard, 4 GB RAM and Intel Core 2 processor. The power supply was a Fortron Source Zen 300W. The computer was built from a recommendation from hardware.no, who also suggested that the pc should work with mythbuntu. After I've testet it, my conclusion is that it will need a better power supply.

2008-08-18T12:10:00.000+02:00

Had a really strange problem with JSF before the weekend. A command button was supposed to save the form, but instead, the page would just rerender, as if it failed validation. It turned out to be just an ordinary null pointer exception, but it took some time to realize that because no stack trace showed up, and the h:message box was empty. I guess sooner or later someone will search for this

About Java, closures and attracting new developers

2008-08-06T12:06:00.002+02:00

Background Julian Exenberger has an interesting post where he states that of the top 10 languages on the Tiobe index, Java is the only one not to support closures in any way, either officially or by at least som kind of (planned) support. He goes on to state that Java is going to be perceived to be obsolete, and it's going to be a harder sell in the enterprise because of this. Another possible

5 minutes well spent: Automatic notification about new information on the web

2008-07-28T22:31:00.007+02:00

Todays post is about two techniques to get automatic notifications about new information on the web.First out is Google's free service "Google Alerts." Some interesting uses:Get notified when other people write about your company.Get notified when other people write about your competitors.Get notified about what other companies/organizations write. (example: make a search for site:tomra.com.)

Delphi maintainers survival kit

2008-07-25T23:51:00.002+02:00

This is going to be a short post. Just wanted to share my most important Delphi books in case there are other Java programmers out there who has to maintain Delphi apps. I like "Delphi in a nutshell". Especially the first two chapters which gives you a brief introduction to Delphi programming, and chapter 5 that is a (big) alphabetical language reference. Developer's Guide to Troubleshooting is

Ubuntu post-install customization

2008-07-21T22:27:00.009+02:00

Here I've collected some of the things I did last time I installed Ubuntu from scratch on my commuting-part-time-LAMP-developer laptop. Get security upgrades. Install my favourite firefox extensions: Firebug. The must have web developer extension. Delicious bookmarks. I don't care much for the social part of it (at least right now,) but I consider it the best bookmarking feature I've found.

New web site for want

2008-06-12T23:17:00.003+02:00

Want, the Delphi build tool I wrote about back in february, has launched a new web site: want-tool.org. Looks like the new site is mostly geared towards the development of want 2, while I personally would have preferred some fixes to want 0.3.0 :) Anyway, thanks for the great work you've done so far by giving us want, and I'm looking forward to see if you can make something even better. If want

Why Mandriva isn't perfect

2008-06-06T22:08:00.003+02:00

Having used Mandriva for a couple of weeks there's a lot to like about it, like a nice default theme (so you don't have to use a couple of hours just to get rid of the Ubuntu-brown interface KDE done right: KDE looks good in Mandriva. With some other distros it's not hard to understand why people don't like KDE. Suspend/resume just works. Ubuntu broke suspend resume a couple of days before Hardy

Vista: Not ready for my desktop, yet

2008-06-06T21:30:00.005+02:00

I've installed Vista on another computer today. Think it's the third time I install Vista on a pc. And this time I got it installed in less than one hour. I expected it to take at least a couple of hours based on my previous experiences, so i was pleasantly surprised. I even thought about installing Windows Vista on my laptop, but then the PC used several minutes just to install a

Changing from Ubuntu to Mandriva

2008-05-18T21:49:00.004+02:00

The new Ubuntu Hardy Heron release broke suspend / resume on my hp compaq nc6320. The bug is reported on https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/219657. For me, however this was the a good excuse to try something new. So I'm running Mandriva Spring 2008.1, and it seems to be a really good release. If you think Ubuntu is well polished (I used to think so,) then think again. Mandriva

New use for subversion

2008-02-29T22:11:00.003+01:00

Have you ever been in the situation where you need to figure out exactly how some legacy software works? I have too, a couple of times. This time I was trying to make a build server for some old Delphi stuff, when I suddenly realized that much of the hard work could be simplified considerably by using version control together with vmware workstation. So I thought it might be worth sharing.

I never thought of using tail that way before

2008-02-23T13:03:00.004+01:00

While debugging a symfony app I suddenly realized that I could grep tail: tail -f log/frontend_dev.log|grep someword I realize it's quite obvious, it just took a couple of years before I thought of it :)

Update: Ubuntu on GIGABYTE ga-73pvm-s2h

2008-02-17T19:54:00.004+01:00

Turned out that the built in sound card didn't work with ALSA. Here is what I found: ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=684839. Here's the command that fixed it: sudo aptitude install linux-backports-modules-`uname -r`. Just needed one more reboot after that and everything worked!

Building Delphi programs using Want

2008-02-16T17:23:00.012+01:00

I've recently been trying to get some Delphi code into continuous integration using want. As there's very little available documentation on the net on this subject, I decided to collect what I've found out.Want is an ant-like build tool for Delphi. It's available from sourceforge.net, but if you want the latest and greatest binaries, you might (at the time I'm writing this) just as well download

Delphi 6 and Perforce

2008-02-16T12:43:00.013+01:00

Using Delphi 6 with Perforce can be a cumbersome process. Coming from Eclipse I'm used to having the IDE opening the files for edit. Last week I tried to get Delphi to do the same. Here's what I did:Search for delphi perforce 6 First result: Chris Fairall's Home Page - Delphi Dowloading, compiling and installing, gives a new menu: I tried to click logout on the new menu. That was stupid. Trying

Ubuntu on GIGABYTE ga-73pvm-s2h

2008-02-09T17:04:00.006+01:00

(Updated information is available here.) I recently installed a new computer with Silverstone SST-LC17 case, GIGABYTE ga-73pvm-s2h mainboard, 4 GB RAM and Intel Core 2 processor. The power supply was a Fortron Source Zen 300W. The computer was built from a recommendation from hardware.no, who also suggested that the pc should work with mythbuntu. After I've testet it, my conclusion is that it

2006-12-04T21:50:00.001+01:00

Kom som andremann til denne utforkøyringa på lørdag. Bilen hang halvveis utfor muren, men hang i ei lita bjørk. Her har dei fått traktoren under. Bjørka som gjorde at bilen hang kan du sjå framfor. Føraren kunne ikkje krabbe ut før dei hadde fått traktoren under. Her har bilen kome ut av veien før den forsvant rundt, langs murkanten og til slutt vart hengande. Litt vanskeligare å sjå

2006-11-20T21:22:00.001+01:00

Tidslogger / time logger English summary I made this little script to log how much time I spend on various tasks. It's useful for: keeping track of time spent on various projectsavoiding procrastination (it's a little bit embarrassing to log "surfed")to prove to myself that I've really been working efficiently todayThe last point might actually be the most interesting to many of you, considering

2006-11-16T19:51:00.001+01:00

Elektronisk loggbok (på mindre enn ein time)/electronic logbook (in less than an hour) English summary This post describes how to make an electronic, searchable logbook for your company/organization in less than an hour, using your ordinary email system. Yes, and I'm talking about a real, fast, easy to use, cross platform, logging application with integrated search. And you don't have to know

2006-11-16T19:49:00.000+01:00

5 nyttige minutter: Automatisk varsling om temaer du er interessert i En innføring i effektiv bruk av Google sin gratis-tjeneste "Google alerts." Aktuelle bruksområder: Se hva andre skriver om ditt firma.Se hva andre skriver om konkurrentene dine.Hold deg oppdatert på hva som skjer i markedet.Slik gjør du: Gå til nettsiden google.com/alertsLegg inn et søk som beskriever det du er på jakt etter.

2006-11-16T19:23:00.000+01:00

5 minutt på å bli langt mer effektiv med Word Her følger en del triks som kan redusere plagen med å måtte bruke MS Word: Bruk sideskift i stedet for å sette inn mange linjeskift. Fordel: Det fører til at teksten ikke så lett blir ødelagt når du oppdaterer den.Hvordan: Du setter inn et sideskift ved å holde nede Ctrl samtidig som du trykker . Bruk stiler i stedet for å formatere en etter en