tOMPSON’s blog

As I stated already multiple times I am a big fan of Google Reader. Since I am using Twitter more and more I searched for a way to inform my followers about new items on my Google Reader shared feed. I found this solution Bob Lee uses. It is basically a Greasemonkey JavaScript that allows you to post directly from Google Reader to Twitter.

I decided to do it another way. Since I am already using twitterfeed for updating Twitter from my blog I added another entry that points to the RSS feed of my shared items.

This is a up to date screenshot of the “Instant Messaging” folder on my BlackBerry Bold. From left to right:

• BlackBerry Messenger - classic, no BlackBerry is complete without this one. My most uses IM at the moment. Safes a lot of SMS costs.
• twibble - one big plus of using twitter is that it allows me to publish from my BlackBerry to the web - therefor I am using twibble, I tried twitterberry but had some problems with it
  
• facebook - the BlackBerry facebook app allows me to make status updates and upload fotos directly from the Bold
• iSkoot - on my search for a free BlackBerry Skype client today I found iSkoot, great Skype client, I am using it mostly for chat, though voice over IP works too
• ICQ - allows me to stay in touch with my old ICQ friends. Provided by RIM directly under mobile.blackberry.com
• MSN Messenger - another native BlackBerry app provided by RIM

With all those instant messengers added the BlackBerry Bold really is a communication monster - I am very satisfied with this device.

In one of the applications I am currently working on I am using the following combination:

• Eclipse IDE with AJDT
• Spring
• Maven

This week I upgraded Spring to version 2.5.5 and had some troubles with compiling my aspects in the maven build.I always encountered the following error message when trying to compile my project:

Unable to continue, this version of AspectJ supports classes built with weaver version 3.0 but the class org.springframework.beans.factory.aspectj.AbstractBeanConfigurerAspect is version 5.0

After doing some web search I found this JIRA entry for Spring about the changes in AspectJ dependencies. Then I found out that the aspectj-maven-plugin 1.0-beta-2 had dependencies to to AspectJ 1.5.2a in his pom file. To override this I did as described in this blog post and added the dependencies in my pom to AspectJ 1.6.0 - now I was able to do a build again.

Jeff Atwood does it again: his post about Spartan Programming hits the nail! If I did not wirte this before then I have to do it now: if you are a Software developer I encourage you to subsribe tho his blog Coding Horror.

I feel good because the way I am trying to write code follows more and more the principles described on this wiki page:

Spartan programming strives for simultaneous minimization of all of the following measures of code complexity:

1. horizontal complexity, that is, the depth of nesting of control structures, just as the total line length.
2. vertical complexity, that is, the code length in lines.
3. token count
4. character count
5. parameters that is the number of parameters to a routine or a generic structure.
6. variables
7. looping instruction, that is the number of iterative instructions and their nesting level.
8. conditionals, that is the number of if and multiple branch switch statements.

Check out the post and this example!

Help us to set a Guinness World Record: most software downloaded in 24 hours. The version 3 of Firefox, the best browser in the world, is released today.

UPDATE: Seems like the Mozilla servers are hit hard by the traffic - they seem to be down. Still waiting for the final version (20:48 CEST)

It seems like HTML email for BlackBerry devices is just around the corner. The new version 2.5. of BlackBerry Internet Service allows it and if the device is on OS version 4.5 it will render HTML. See this official RIM document for detailed information. Now it is just a question of how quick the carriers will update their BlackBerry Internet Service.

Meanwhile Vodafone Germany released OS 4.5 for all their devices. Now I hope it is just a matter of time until the corresponding versions of BlackBerry Enterprise Server and Professional services to enable the features of the new OS.

Seems like the new version 0.9.4.20080603-0114 of the Maven Eclipse plugin now provides better supports for WTP. In the last versions I had troubles when opening or closing depending Java projects. They were not added as jar files when the utility project was closed and the source project was not added to the maven dependency when opened again.

Check out the New and Noteworthy for more details about the new version.

There are a lot of sites around the web that inform us about the “OpenSSL debacle” in the Debian based Linux systems. A piece of code that was committed “accidentally” about two years ago limited the amount of possible SSH keys to about 32000. This means brute force hacking attempts based on the list of possible keys could easily lead to success.

When I read this about a week ago I reacted immediately and updated my system with:

aptitude update
aptitude dis-upgrade

The OpenSSL wiki page describes what has to be done for the various installed packages that use OpenSSL certificates. The tool dowkd.pl allows you to check if there are vulnerable keys on your system.

I use PuTTY a lot in combination with keys created by PuTTYgen - these keys stored on my various systems are of course not affected by this problem.

I already posted a while ago that I had problems with the clock speed of my notebook and vmware guest systems. There are a lot of online resources about this problem. They state out that the power saving features of mobile processors could cause troubles in clock synchronization between host and guest systems.

There are additional articles in the vmware knowledge base about Configuring Virtual Machines to Run on a Laptop Host Computer. They all discuss the problems with Intel SpeedStep and CPU clock timing.

After applying the settings for the time stamp counters from the articles I did not get better results. I was wondering because I remembered running virtual machines on my notebook without a problem.

I tried to update the BIOS of my notebook to the newest version and after rebooting everything worked fine. It did not matter if I tried a Windows or Linux guest system - the clock was synchronized. Two days later I used the virtual machine again - and the problem was there again:

I tried all tips stated out in knowledge base article 928, 1236 and 2039 but nothing worked. I found out that after putting my notebook into hibernate and starting it again the clock synchronization does not work anymore. When I do a complete reboot everything works fine again.

Sometimes you want to reinstall a program and you are not able to find the original CD or case with the product key. This is the moment where the Magical Jelly Bean Keyfinder comes into action. It allows you to reveal the product keys of many Microsoft Software - Windows, Office …