Nice short introduction to SCRUM

Just see this video.

rdesktop on Ubuntu 8.10

Running rdesktop on Ubuntu 8.10 is not as smooth as on 8.04, because the damn thing grabs keyboard input despite the -K parameter I specify.

Ubuntu 8.10

Few weeks ago I upgraded my Ubuntu 8.04 to 8.10 and I'm very happy with it. My laptop runs about 20°C cooler than before and it doesn't freeze on me. Since I run BOINC client all the time (running my Dual Core CPU at 100%) this happened daily with previous version, but not now. :))
So Ubuntu team, a great release and keep up the good work.

Control fan speed on T60 with Ubuntu 8.04

You can follow this link, but basically you do this:
- add "options thinkpad_acpi fan_control=1" without quotes to /etc/modprobe.d/options
- then you control fan speed with this commands (as root):
echo level 0 > /proc/acpi/ibm/fan (fan off)
echo level 2 > /proc/acpi/ibm/fan (low speed)
echo level 4 > /proc/acpi/ibm/fan (medium speed)
echo level 7 > /proc/acpi/ibm/fan (maximum speed)
echo level auto > /proc/acpi/ibm/fan (automatic - default)
echo level disengaged > /proc/acpi/ibm/fan (disengaged)

Regular Expression Cheat Sheet

Follow the link.

Google's Chrome

Now that was a surprise, not.
It was expected for some time now and I personally don't like it, because it is just another web browser web administrators will have to support.
Oh and Google applications will, eventually, only work good on Chrome.

Easter eggs in OpenOffice.org

I just came across some Easter Eggs in OpenOffice. I hope you'll enjoy them. :)

Big projects and vi/emacs

I'm working with Java on couple of projects with couple of hundreds or even thousands of files of source code. I'm using NetBeans, because of the project management system it provides, it's editor with code completion, refactoring, GUI designer tool and other stuff.
I've always admired people who use vi or emacs on projects of that size. I can't imagine to live without code completion. There are too much methods with different parameters in a project to remember them all.
I'd like to hear from someone using vi/emacs on large projects how they do it. Thanks. :))

Java in Hollywood

I've just finished watching movie called Antitrust. The movie is about a system called SYNAPSE. Couple of time you can see a snippet of code that makes SYNAPSE and the code is Java. Cool! I've never before seen Java in a movie.

OTS 2008

On my blog you can find the application that me and my colleague demoed at OTS 2008. It is build upon NetBeans Platform 6.1. The source code will be available shortly and the application itself will get updated with time.

Why I like NetBeans 6.1

Of course, because it is getting faster and faster, better and better editor, JEE and Glassfish support,.. I could get on and on.
But the greatest thing, for me at least, is that when I open a file it gets opened on the far right side of all editor tabs. NetBeans 6.0 had this issue with this and files got put somewhere in the middle of tabs, sometimes at the end, ... The algorithm was a total mistery for me.
I just hope this won't get lost by the time 6.1 is released.

South Park for free

If you like South Park you can watch it here free.

Custom resolution with VMWare Server

I'm using VMWare to run Windows on my Linux machine and the machine supports 1680x1050 which is not supported by default when you install VMware Tools.
To get it to work you can follow this steps:
- open regedit
- go to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Video\{device id}\0000 use {device id} that has VMWare SVGA II in the description
- add a new binary value Resolution.x (x being by one bigger that other Resolution.y values), for example Resolution.11
- enter the value 31 36 38 30 78 31 30 35 30 (binary for 1680x1050)
- exit regedit and reboot

You can read more here and here.

Total size of a table in DB2

If you wonder how to get the total size of a table in DB2 you can use following SQL statement which gives you 30 largest tables:
SELECT TABSCHEMA, TABNAME, DATA_OBJECT_P_SIZE + INDEX_OBJECT_P_SIZE + LONG_OBJECT_P_SIZE + LOB_OBJECT_P_SIZE + XML_OBJECT_P_SIZE AS TOTAL_SIZE FROM SYSIBMADM.ADMINTABINFO ORDER BY TOTAL_SIZE DESC FETCH FIRST 30 ROWS ONLY WITH UR

Total size here means size of data + size of indexes + size of long objects + size of LOB objects + size of XML objects.
More about this can be found at IBM DB2 InfoCenter or directly here.

New ATI drivers and hibernate

As you might remember I didn't have ATI drivers enabled since hibernate did not function correctly. Couple of days ago I installed ATI driver version 8.452.1 and hibernate does work.

GNUCash

For the past 18 days (yes, New Years' resolution) I've been using GnuCash for managing my finances. The biggest problem I've seen with it it that you cannot protect the file where transactions are written.
Today I came across a Wiki entry how to encrypt that file using GnuPG.
This script can be also used for other applications, not only GnuCash.

Software development process

Colleague pointed me to this post. Does it sound familiar ? :))

Changing the CVS keywork substitution mode

If you want to change the CVS keywork substitution mode, you unfortunately cannot do it with NetBeans, but you can use this few steps:
- let's say the new keyword substitution mode should be -kkv
- cvs admin -kkv File.java
- cvs update -kkv File.java
- edit the File.java to change it a bit
- cvs commit -fm "Change substitution mode" File.java

I've used this on number of files, so it does work.

History of CVS changes

If you want to know what you and your colleagues changed in a period of time in the whole CVS managed project, just right click the root directory of the CVS managed project and use Search history command. There you can search by revision or date. Great. :)
You can for example see how much work did you do in year.