SUN Campus Ambassador

Yesterday I started officially with my job as SUN Campus Ambassador at Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts. I’m very glad to have this position and will do the best. My main responsibilities with this job are:

– Lead the Sun open source developer community on my campus
- Run Sun Technology demo sessions on my campus
- Promote Sun training events on my campus
- Promote Sun’s open source platforms and development tools to professors and researchers

I’m working part-time about 5 hours a week. I’m very excited to hold my first tech demo before the end of this year. More information about this will follow. Also I ask all the students, professors and researchers here on the campus to contact me if they  have any questions to SUN related products and technologies. At this point I want to thank SUN for this great opportunity and my employer, the Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts, for giving me the chance to combine my studies, my employment at Enterprise Lab and my position as SUN Campus Ambassador. As soon as I have my SUN blog working, I will also post a link here.

CPPUnit

For the DustBot project here at the University I needed a test framework for C++. I found CPPUnit what looked like what I was looking for but it took me almost a day to figure out how to use it. The example in the CPPUnit Cookbook shows everything you need to now but there was no complete ready to use example. What I wanted was just an easy example ready to use. I found on Wikipedia (CPPUnit) a simple example but this was not complete there was the TestRunner missing.

I wrote a short example/tutorial with a few comments how to setup a test framework for your C++ application. You will find the tutorial here and the example code here.

2007-11-27 | Posted in: Development | Comments Closed

Mario Galaxy

Mario Galaxy
Yesterday I found finally time to start playing Mario Galaxy and all I can say is WOHAAAAAAAAAA. Nintendo did a great job on this game. The control is very easy even if you have to walk on the walls and your stand on very small planets where you get around very quickly.

I only got about 6 stars yet but I could already fly around as Bee Mario. I am very excited to see what more brilliant ideas they have come up with.

Office prank [pics]

I hope that this never happens to me. Some people seem to have too much time ;)

2007-11-23 | Posted in: funny | Comments Closed

A LyX layout for Hoschschule Luzern T&A

For most of my writing tasks I use LyX. I didn’t feel like learning LaTeX when I decided to turn my back on conventional Word Processors like MS Word or OpenOffice, so I gave LyX a try, and I have not been disappointed.

With the beginning of the new semester, a new Corporate Design for the Hochschule Luzern has been introduced. Of course, there came no Latex-style with it, just a bunch of halfway useable MS Word Templates (the users cursing them where already in place, waiting for this trigger).

So I decided to hack something like a LyX/LaTeX style together which resembles those Word templates (without the cursing-users part, of course). The template is not identical to the official templates, however. I don’t like page numbers on top left, for example.

You can find the a template for a paper together with a small guide how to use it HERE. I borrowed the idea for this template from the UNSW thesis template.

2007-11-22 | Posted in: Lyx/Latex | Comments Closed

Yaom

Yaom LogoI haven’t talked about my project yet. As a short introduction Yaom has the goal to be a media center that satisfies my personal needs of a media center. I tried other open source media centers before. Every one has it good points and they are quite major sometimes. I tried to improve them but some time they just did not fit for what i wanted. So I decided to do it my self.
The main goal is to have every functionality as a plugin, that if a plugin can’t do what you want it should be easy to replace it.

At the moment I have a kernel with a configuration backend working, both will be used by the plugins. The rest of the functionality shold be implemented in the plugins not should not be fixed in the application.

Today I just got the file loader for the audio backend working. It now loads the files and stores the meta information of the audio files with the help of kaa.metadata into the data base. For the database access I use the object-relational mapper Storm from Canonical. It is quiet easy to use so far.

Hoaxes, hoaxes, hoaxes

Today morning the complete staff at our campus received an email warning of a virus. The mail tells you to forward the information to all your colleagues and relatives. Please, please, please, to all who receive such messages: Check the message first if its a hoax before forwarding it to thousands of people. A good link for hoaxes is the hoax index from TU Berlin.

Frauen Mobbing, nicht blogging.

einwenig traurig bin ich schon, hab ich doch heute erfahren, dass wir gleich alle Frauen verlieren im Institut fuer sichere Software (ISIS). Jetzt wo ich endlich Ruth’s unkomplizierte Sichtweise und ihre Informatikkenntnisse zu schaetzen gelernt habe, wo Agi’s Organisationstalent und immerwaehrende Freundlichkeit zur Selbstverstaendlichkeit geworden ist, gerade jetzt beginne ich die bestimmte und emazipierte Art von Christina zu vermissen. Nun verlassen uns alle drei. Ist das Mobbing gegen die Maennerwelt? Haben wir etwas falsch gemacht? Maenner machen ja bekanntlich immer etwas falsch.Ruth ist fluegge geworden und bereichert die Wirtschaft, Christina kann endlich einen aktiven Beitrag  zu ihrem Weltbild leisten und Agi kann ihre Interessen und Faehigkeiten noch besser einbringen. So gesehen sind wir unschuldig. Nun wuensche ich allen drei Angels einen guten Start mit ihren neuen Charlie’s. Uns wuensche ich einen Frauenanteil, nicht einen groesseren sondern ueberhaupt einen.  

Chines Dinner Scene

Chinese Dinner SceneI just finished today a chines dinner scene for a gift card. I removed the invitation text from the chines fan. I kinda like the result, if I would have more time I would try to improve the spring roles and I would tweak the materials of the spring roles and the dumplings a bit to get a more realistic feeling. But it has to be finished now and I’m satisfied with the result.

It took me about 3 evening to create the scene. I used materials from the Blender Open Material Repository. The dishes use the whitemarble material with changes in the scaling of the marble structure. The wood materials are from the Blender Material Database. The Teapot I got from the Blender Model Repository. All other objects I created by my self.

2007-11-15 | Posted in: Blender | Comments Closed

JRuby applications in glassfish – Databases

As I promised earlier, I will now write how I added database support to a JRuby application running under glassfish v2.
The first step you’ll have to do is installing another plugin. The plugin is called “ActiveRecord-JDBC”. You can add this plugin to your rails project by adding “http://jruby-extras.rubyforge.org/svn/trunk/rails-integration/plugins/” to your plugin repositories. If you’re using gem for plugin management, just execute “gem install activerecord-jdbc”.

The second step you’ll have to do is including the Java libraries in your environment. Just edit configure/environment.rb and add “require ‘jdbc_adapter’” to it.

You’re almost done. The last step (and the important one) is to add the new database connectivity to your databases.yml. There you’ll have to edit the “production” section although  you’re developing. Add the following to your configuration:

     production:
      host: localhost
      adapter: jdbc
      driver: com.mysql.jdbc.Driver
      url: jdbc:mysql://localhost/<yourapp>_development
      username: ...
      password: ...

Just recreate your war file and put it in your autodeploy folder. Your JRuby application should now be able to access the MySQL Database.

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