Philip's Blog

We had some trouble with our xmpp server’s memory consumption. We moved the service to a machine with more RAM and CPU power.
Enjoy an smooth XMPP experience.

You can find all relevant informations about the service here.

SI Captcha is not exactly brilliant. We still have SPAM so lets try something different:
If Google’s OCR can’t read it, who can?

reCAPTCHA uses the best OCR mechanism that exists: humans! Go to Plugins->Installed Plugins and enable reCAPTCHA.
Go to Settings->WP-reCAPTCHA and check your settings, make sure “Enable for comments form” is enabled. Get your API Keys here, you need them to configure your WP-reCAPTCHA.
Stay tuned to our fight against spam.

Enjoy a SPAM free blogging experience.

As of today, vmware Fusion 4 / Workstation 8 can be downloaded and licensed in our vmware Webstore. Yay!

We proudly announce our XMPP (aka Jabber) Server!
For all those who don’t want to read an article about it, here’s the link to the configuration Setting for your Client: XMPP Connection Settings

Why should you use our XMPP Service? There are several reasons:

• Your data is encrypted from Client to Client (TLS is forced, Old Style SSL disabled)
• You can use your normal Enterprise Lab Username / Password. Don’t forget that we disconnected from HSLU AD
• You can create your own Rooms, even persistent or password protected ones.
• No Conversations will be logged, and we don’t analyze your conversations to display personalized advertisements.

If you have a lot of spam in your Enterprise Lab Blog, please check your SI Captcha options. You can find them (when you’re logged in) in the Plugins menu.
You’re Setting should look like this:

Please be sure that the CAPTCHA difficulty level is set to high.

Compiling on Solaris isn’t always easy. I added a step by step Tutorial on How to compile and configure suPHP on Solaris 11 Express:
suPHP on Solaris 11

We have seen many Classmates having trouble to get JacORB running on Linux and Mac OSX, so here is a step-by-step installation tutorial:

Change to the directory where JacORB should be located:
cd ~/src/

Move the provided zip file to the location (or get jacorb via wget):
mv ~/Downloads/SW8-Komponentenarchitektur.zip .

Unzip the file:
unzip SW8-Komponentenarchitektur.zip

Rename the folder to something reasonable:
mv SW8-Komponentenarchitektur jacorb

Change to the directory:
cd jacorb
Unzip the jacorb source:
unzip jacorb-2.3.1-src.zip

Rename the new folder to something reasonable. I use the Version as folder name, so i can have multiple versions in this directory:
mv jacorb-2.3.1-src 2.3.1

Edit the Properties File and fill in the current Paths:
vi jacorb.properties

jacorb.home=/Users/gasserp/src/jacorb/2.3.1
java.endorsed.dirs=/Users/gasserp/src/jacorb/2.3.1/lib
jacorb.naming.ior_filename=/Users/gasserp/src/jacorb/2.3.1/lib/NS_Ref
ORBInitRef.InterfaceRepository=file:/Users/gasserp/src/jacorb/2.3.1/lib/IR_Ref

Move the Properties file to the correct location:
mv jacorb.properties 2.3.1/etc/

Build the Code:
cd 2.3.1
ant clean
ant

Move up one directory:
cd ..

Remove unused Files:
rm apache-ant-1.7.0-bin.zip
rm jacorb-2.3.1-src.zip
rm set_env.cmd
rm start_ns.cmd

Set you Path for the NS binary:
export PATH=$PATH:/Users/gasserp/src/jacorb/2.3.1/bin/

Start the NS Service:
ns -DOAPort=38693

Remember: The Path you set via export is only valid in the actual Shell. If you want to set your PATH permanently, add the following line in your ~/.bashrc or ~/bash_profile:
PATH=$PATH:/Users/gasserp/src/jacorb/2.3.1/bin/
export PATH

Your done!

Google rolls out Android 2.3.3 for the N1 right now. It was hard to wait so long for Gingerbread, so i cant wait for the OTA update again:

- Download the update Image
- Verfiy the MD5 checksum: 706a4631271b6ee2c819ab548394b71e
- Rename the Image to update.zip
- Copy it to your SD card root
- Shut down your N1
- While powering up, hold down the Volume-Down button
- Choose recovery with the Volume-Down button and press the Power-Button
- When you see a big exclamation point, press the Power and Volume-Up button
- select “Apply sdcard:update.zip.”
- Wait until your Phone reboots

Its real and no fake. Works in Switzerland for me.
Credits goes to: trebor_88

EDIT:
Be sure that your  HBOOT Version is 0.35.0017. If you still have 0.33.0012, update your HBOOT with this update (same procedure as for the gingerbread update)

… we finally found an Threatened Species.

While gnome-do hasn’t updated over the last year, a couple of weeks ago synapse was released. Synapse is a lightweight, super-fast Application launcher for Linux.

It comes with a Zeitgeist integration which let you search for things like: the video i watched half an hour ago. This new method of finding things sounds very interesting to me.
I recently discussed about file management with my workmates, and we all agreed that we personally don’t care were files were located on our disks, the main clue is to find things quickly and without browsing and searching through hundreds of folders. We still want to have access and the full control over it (for special situations where you want to have a file at an exactly position) but for everything else we don’t really care.

Who could explain Synapse better than its developer mhr3:

“It well… searches stuff… If you ever used Gnome Do / Quicksilver / Gnome Launch Box, you’ll feel right at home with Synapse, if not, the only thing you need to do is run Synapse (or press Ctrl+Space to summon it), type what you’re looking for, and Synapse will present you a list of items that match your query.

Once you found the item you were looking for, you can perform an action on it (and these are defined by the plugins you’re using). If you don’t like the default action, just press Tab and search appropriate action.

And besides this primary use-case, you can also browse recent items which were logged by Zeitgeist, in case you close a document by mistake or just want to hear again the music track that played a few minutes ago.”

Its really really fast and has a Plugin management. The list of available Plugins isn’t as long as the gnome-do list, but i think this is a matter of time. On my desk, it looks like this:

Be sure to give it a try:
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:synapse-core/ppa
sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install synapse