From the monthly archives:

December 2008

The week in review - 2008-52

December 29, 2008

I’ve just discovered that commons-transactions offers a transactional file service allowing atomic read and writes on a filesystem.
Theres a good write up here about the evolution of Wordpress. I love stories like this, because it reinforces the fact that software doesn’t have to be perfect when it is released. Releasing early and often can work, [...]

Read the full article →

SoundJuicer and MP3

December 24, 2008

I wanted to convert some CDs to MP3 - normally I’d use OGG, but you can’t always rely on devices being able to play that format (i.e. DVD players). I was relieved to see it is easy in Ubuntu 8.10:

enable multiverse and universe repos
sudo apt-get install gstreamer0.10-plugins-ugly-multiverse  sound-juicer
start sound-juicer and go to Edit/Preferences and switch [...]

Read the full article →

Comment spam

December 23, 2008

I’ve been wondering for a while why people spam blogs with comments like:
Your site is so cool, thanks it really helped me!
Or any of the many variations. Its usually obvious for several reasons (spelling and just completely out of context) that this is spam.
But why bother?
It turns out that some blogging software is set up [...]

Read the full article →

A better StringTokenizer

December 22, 2008

I’ve just been reminded how painful it can be splitting a string based on a token with StringTokenizer. The problem is that it gets messy when you have two tokens consecutively. Luckily commons-lang comes to the rescue with StrTokenizer - where empty tokens may be removed or returned as null.

Read the full article →

The week in review - 2008-51

December 22, 2008

I’ve had to disable MemoKeys because it interferes with Intellij. I often use ALT-F1 to locate a file in the project tree, but this doesn’t work because MemoKeys is intercepting the F1.
There is some awesome goodness coming in Grails 1.1 - check out the release notes for the Beta.
I just had a requirement to open [...]

Read the full article →

Upgrade to Mythbuntu 8.10 broke nuvexport

December 22, 2008

I didn’t notice until now, but nuvexport has stopped working since my upgrade to 8.10. I found the solution here, but I needed to add the Intrepid Medibuntu repository first. The full solution:
sudo wget http://www.medibuntu.org/sources.list.d/intrepid.list –output-document=/etc/apt/sources.list.d/medibuntu.list
sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install medibuntu-keyring && sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get purge ffmpeg
sudo apt-get install libavcodec-unstripped-51 libavdevice-unstripped-52 libavformat-unstripped-52 [...]

Read the full article →

MythFrontend for viewing media over the network

December 22, 2008

I’ve installed MythTV frontend on my laptop so now I can view TV and recordings, and play music across the network. I had to change the backend setup to serve from the ip address instead of ‘localhost’, and I also changed bind-address in /etc/mysql/my.conf to use the ip address. I’m not sure if I had [...]

Read the full article →

mobiusly.com launches

December 22, 2008

A friend finally launched his company mobiusly.com - I expect great things to follow, so keep an eye on this space. I expect 2009 will be a good year for mobiusly.
Keep up to date with mobiusly:

Blog
Feed
Twitter

Read the full article →

The week in review - 2008-50

December 16, 2008

A friend must have seen my comment about JDiskReport, and mentioned WinDirStat to me. I’d never seen it before. It’s a similar product to JDiskReport but for windows only.
I recently tried installing 64 bit ubuntu on a spare partition on my laptop - it already had Vista and 32 bit Ubuntu dual booted with Grub. [...]

Read the full article →

The week in review - 2008-49

December 6, 2008

I’ve been looking for a convenient way to re-use some old harddisks for backup purposes. I think this cable is just what I’m looking for. It appears to support both IDE drives as well as SATA so it means I can get some extra life out of the old disks while still using it for [...]

Read the full article →