Friday, 30 November 2007

Apache, JBoss and Mod_jk

A few weeks ago I customer called and asked if I could help him with a problem using Apache, JBoss and Mod_jk and he gave me two hours to get an idea what is going on. When I received their configuration it took me a few minutes to glance at all files and due to context coloring I knew pretty soon that they had a mistake in the Tomcat's Server.xml file where some properties where outside of the Connector entry. Easy fix which solved their problem which was just due because most Unix consoles don't have context coloring. After the successful resolution I went back and had a look at their files and thought that it would be time to try out Mod_jk myself.

  keep on reading here

Posted by schaefera at 10:07 PM in Madplanet.com Inc.

Thursday, 29 November 2007

Upgrade to Magnolia 3.0.5 CMS

Our website is powered by Magnolia CMS community edition allowing us to easily change and expand our website in the little time we can spend on it. After a few days I finally finish the upgrade to 3.0.5 including an upgrade of JackRabbit to 1.3.3. This seems not to be a big step but I finally took the time and revamped our website so that I could create a Magnolia Module which can be deployed as a single file and so when we have to do another upgrade, at least within 3.x, it is as simple as dropping the JAR file inside the appropriate directory and bingo.

  keep on reading here

Posted by schaefera at 4:13 AM in Madplanet.com Inc.

Wednesday, 28 November 2007

A New Kind of Bitch: the Apple Store Service

As you may have noticed it Apple appears quite often on my blog and often I give it a bad rap. My relationship with Apple is like the Opera Director and his Diva. He needs her and he likes her performance but he gets nuts about her attitude and ego. The same applies to Apple where I like their hardware and mostly ease of use of their OS but when it comes to service I could kick their ass. This time I got double charge from the UTC Store in San Diego and quite a heap of money, too. There I bought my Apple 30-inch monitor which is quite a gem but during checkout the transacti  keep on reading here

Posted by schaefera at 5:37 AM in Annoying

Tuesday, 27 November 2007

Verizon FIOS: Update

You could maybe guessed it already from a little bit faster download of this blog that I finally could switch over to Verizon FIOS. That said it needed some heavy guns to get the necessary info from Verizon. At the very end I had to call up an account representative and request that my service will be cancelled with an angry ton to stress the point and finally they were able to find a tech support gal able to find the right answer. And the answer was dead simple - I just had to look for Static NAT on their firewall settings. I never thought that IP forwarding could be found under firewall settings. Still Verizon is not able to provide a manual for their ActionTec router and so when I have another question I just have to get angry, call the account guy and demand a tech support guy/gal.

  keep on reading here

Posted by schaefera at 10:17 PM in Annoying

IR Blaster to Change Channel on any Set Top Box

Switching to DirectTV required me to look for an alternative solution to change channels because their USB port did not seem to work. So I bought an IR Blaster and started to create a LIRC driver that will use the IR Blaster device to send the change channel command like a regular remote would do. This is a complete, I hope, instructions on how to setup IR Blaster on a SuSE 10.x box (I installed it on 10.2 and 10.3 without any problems). These instructions are based on the excellent howto from jds-myth. I just made it a little bit simpler for SuSE users but with some minor adjustments it should also work for Fedora. Here I will just highlight the steps to make it work but on my company's article page I will also have the necessary code available. The only thing you have to do is to find the correct configuration file ledxmit.conf for the set-top box remote and adjust the driver name inside the change_channel.sh script. I use here RC24.

  keep on reading here

Posted by schaefera at 10:06 PM in MythTV

Tuesday, 20 November 2007

Verizon FIOS: Hurray - What? - Fuck!

Yesterday I finally had fiber optic internet service (FIOS) installed at home but, of course, I need a static IP address to run my web and mail server. The euphoria started to go down as soon as I realized that my installer did not have a clue how to install a static IP address. At the end he left me with a barely working internet router that only worked to the point that I could access it with a DHCP client. I tried for several hours to configure the router so that I would be able to use my static IP addresses on a client of that router but to no avail. I am not a hardcore Internet expert but so far I mostly got around things. But this time I failed not only because all the names on that box where quite different to the equipment I was used to but also because I was not able to set a static IP address on the LAN side of the router. If I switched that side to a static IP address everything went south.

  keep on reading here

Posted by schaefera at 11:24 PM in Annoying

Wednesday, 14 November 2007

Halo 3: Crow's Nest on Legendary

I am now 3 weeks without a working XBox 360 and Microsoft's Service Center doesn't care about their customers otherwise they would at least put out a timeframe until they look at the box. They got the box last Friday but since them the status is still on Device Received at Service Center, thank you guys (finally on Tuesday 11/13 they switched it to Device shipped to Customer so I should have it before Thanks Giving).

This week I had a chance to play on another box and could go through the mission: Crow's Nest which is the second mission in this game. This is one of the more difficult missions and contains some good fights. Because of the lack of heavy weapons it is requires more skill and you have to face some heavy hitters.

The missions starts with a lot of talking but you can already go down the stairs and proceed. In the first room or better a cave you should walk around until you pick up a Battle Rifle then proceed. When you open the next door you see some Grunts throwing grenades on a Warthhog but you are too late. Make sure you switched to the Battle Rifle before heating out. Slowly but surely kill the Grunts and the Jackals. When you run out of ammo then walk back to get some more. After everything is clear slowly move forward but be aware that soon a brute with a Brute Shot will come out making your life difficult. With the Battle Rifle he is an easy target. Then go to the door and use the Battle Rifle to kill the Jackals at the end of the hallway. If empty then use the Brute Shot or the Assault Rifle but you may need to go closer to them. After the hallway is clear look for Battle Rifle and Carbide ammunition. Then proceed until you see a room with two doors. This will be the first heavy fight in this game.

  keep on reading here

Posted by schaefera at 6:50 AM in Personal

Monday, 12 November 2007

What type of Halo Fighter Are You?

On the second mission of Halo you start to look for other survivors from the various life boats. The first thing I do after I fight my way through the several drop ships and drove through the artificial tunnel is to pick up a sniper riffle. From there on until I finished the toughest fight in the Belly of the Beast I snip, snip and snip. And whenever I find a sniper rifle again I like to hang back, search for victims and snip them out of the blue. This works often quite well but it makes your fight slow and susceptible to counter snips or melee attacks. For example in Halo   keep on reading here

Posted by schaefera at 10:49 PM in Personal

Sunday, 11 November 2007

Microsoft's XBox Service Sucks

I know I did not write much this week because I am in the middle of describing a walkthrough of Halo 3's Crown's Nest but without having a running XBox 360 at home that is quite difficult and while going through some other walkthroughs I found some new tricks I want to explore first. After having a Mission completed the fun can start to find better ways to deal with the enemies and sometimes even run pass them without a fight which for example Halo 2 has two major ones and some minor ones. Therefore I wanted to see if I can post some interesting strategies   keep on reading here

Posted by schaefera at 10:06 PM in Personal

Wednesday, 7 November 2007

Software Development Process: Treat the Symptoms rather than the Cause

I know, I know I sound like an old LP with a crack that make the song repeating itself but it seems that certain things are coming back over and over even though there is no proof that it is working. A process is there to make sure that repetitive actions are executed correctly. Now the question is is software development are repetitive task? In my opinion for the most part it is not and if it were we could easily automate it. So why is this theme coming back over and over again, you may ask. It is because the managers, executives and maybe some project leaders would like to make it so so that software development becomes controllable and easy to manage. Controllable because they want to assess the risks and then minimize it and Easy because they don't want to work hard for it. And then, not to forget, there are many consultants out there that make big bucks with feeding into that hunger even though the results are nearly non-existent.

  keep on reading here

Posted by schaefera at 8:29 AM in Java

Tuesday, 6 November 2007

ServiceMix MEP In-Depth

As discussed yesterday there is a significant difference on how to code MEPs based on if they are synchronous or asynchronous. First let's have a look on the synchronous MEP on a provider (acting also as consumer) assuming we are coding it with the ServiceMix Bean's MessageListener interface:

  keep on reading here

Posted by schaefera at 9:46 AM in Java

Monday, 5 November 2007

ServiceMix: JBI Message Exchange Patterns

I am working with ServiceMix for some time now but it took a considerable amount of time to understand the JBI message exchange patterns (MEP) and to know what it means when coding Service Units to be deployed on ServiceMix. The first problem is that most of the examples or test cases in ServiceMix are working with synchronous calls only which makes it quite easy to work with but in most cases is not a good choice for a real world project. Then the JBI specification is not very good (as discussed earlier) and so the the allowed interactions in a MEP is not quite clear. Finally some of the MEPs don't make much sense at the first glance. For example the In-Option-Out MEP give the consumer (the one from which the MEP originates) the ability to send a Fault back to the provider (the one that provides the response) if there is something wrong with the response. Even though that sounds good there is not much that the provider could do because he can only set the message exchange (ME) to either DONE or ERROR. But then I realized that he could initiate corrective actions like compensatory transactions.

  keep on reading here

Posted by schaefera at 5:04 PM in Java

Thursday, 1 November 2007

New Mac OS X Leopard: Despite Apple's Assurances the Upgrade is Not Without Problems

Update: after some further investigation I figured out that using the IP address of Google or the other servers fixes the issue. Also a ping on Google is pretty fast around 100ms. And when I use an Ethernet cable hooked onto the Wireless router the problem is gone as well. So, it seems to be an issue with the Airport inside the Mac OS X 10.5. I played for several hours with the settings in the Wireless Network but nothing did the trick. It is especially annoying because with Windows or even the iPhone everything works great.

Upgrading to the new Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard) is not without troubles when you upgrade from 10.4. There are a lot of issues that can make a Mac user's life difficult and frustrating. For example I now get a Pop-up from time to time telling me that the PubSubAgent wants access to my keychain but it does not say what the PubSubAgent is nor who is the vendor of it or what it is supposed to do. Then I had a lot of troubles with .Mac and Sync to it. Suddenly my iDisk space was reduced and the System Preferences tells me that I did not do a sync ever even though I just did one a few minutes ago.

  keep on reading here

Posted by schaefera at 12:12 PM in Mac