May 05
because I can not remember when I really needed it the last time. Most of the time I press it accidentally and get into troubles.
A quick web search brought up this page describing how to disable the Caps Lock on various systems and links to annoyances.org for more information. I chose the first method by downloading the registry key and adding it to my system.
May 03
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.
Mar 18
Last week Truecrypt version 5.1 was released. I downloaded and installed it today. Everything works fine so far, my encrypted volumes still work
The performance improvements they made are not recognizable for me because Truecrypt already worked smooth and fast with the 4.x versions for me.
Mar 10
Microsoft now provides all of its Internet Explorer versions in separate downloadable virtual PC images. This is extremely useful for web developers because it allows them to test their applications for compatibility.
Mar 04
Today I found this post on problogger.net that made me aware of another Google tool I did not use until now that could be very helpful. I am talking about Google Webmasters Tools. Google Webmasters Tools allow you to see a website from the view of the Google crawlers. This means it is possible to check a lot of statistics like the top queries in specific months or to see what words went into the Google search index.
Another very interesting feature is to list all the external links to the specific page of your site and in total. This tells me I definitely have to get more links pointing to my blog
This tools is a nice addition to the other Google tools I use to manage my blog, which are Analytics, Alerts, AdSense and AdWords.
Feb 19
Aaron postet two screencasts on his blog showing how to use VIM. I really love VIM - I thought about installing the viPlugin for my favorite IDE Eclipse some months ago. Now these videos made me think again - I think I will give it a try. Checkout the two casts:
- VIM Screencast 1 - basic usage (navigation, modes, …)
- VIM Screencast 2 - commands with motion (yank, change, …)
There is even a vi emulator for you Visual Studio users out there - it is called ViEmu.
Feb 08
Nearly a year ago I stumbled upon a post on lifehacker about Launchy. I downloaded, installed and used the tool - and I had to blog about it.
Now for everybody who does not know it until know: I love Launchy! It is THE tool that improved my whole using-a-PC-experience to most in the last year (next to using Google Reader).

Launchy creates an search index of all the shortcuts on your PC so you can start any application by pressing ALT+Space and entering a part of its name. It is also possible to open web bookmarks and do calculations. You may even extend its functionality with plugins.
It increases the speed of working with Windows a lot because you do not have to get your hands of the keyboard just to open an application.
Jan 11
Some weeks ago I wrote a custom JSP tag for a Spring project I am currently working on. Inside the tag I wanted to use a Spring bean. Soon I realized that this case had to be handled a bit different because the tag is instantiated by the application server and not from the Spring context. Therefore the simple standard injection mechanism did not work.
Using the Spring documentation I found out that I had to use AspectJ for dependency injection in this case. I added the @Configurable annotation to my tag class. I added the required configurations to the XML files:
1
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| <context:spring-configured />
<bean class="net.einwaller.spring.Tag" lazy-init="true" /> |
To get the required classes in the classpath of my application I had to add the libraries aspectjrt.jar and spring-aspects.jar. The first approach I took for weaving the aspects into my classes was load time weaving. I achieved this by adding the following to the VM arguments of my Tomcat instance:
-noverify -javaagent:pathtojar\aspectjweaver.jar
The noverify option was needed because the version of log4j caused a problem when starting the server without the option. I configured the path to my aspectjweaver.jar as an absolut path.
Having done all these steps I got my application running again but the load time weaving was a bit annoying. I was not able to change the code of my application while the server was running. The Java VM hot code replace did not work anymore. Restarting the server for every change slows down development performance a lot. So I searched for a better solution.
First I installed the AspectJ Eclipse plugin. I wanted to use the AspectJ compiler for compile time weaving of the AnnotationBeanConfigurerAspect. To do so I had to convert the project into an AspectJ project which changes the compiler and adds some project preference pages (RMB -> AspectJ Tools -> Convert to AspectJ Project).
Afterwards I had tried to add the spring-aspects.jar to the Inpath of the AspectJ Build preferences but that did not work. I moved the JAR file out of the WEB-INF/lib folder and tried to add it again - and it worked! Seems like the AspectJ plugin has some problems withe the classpath of the WTP plugin.
Now I got the shiny AspectJ markers at the top of the classes I marked with the @Configurable annotation. The application runs inside the Tomcat after removing the VM arguments for load time weaving and hot code replace works again - perfect!
Jan 07
Today I tried to upgrade to the newest Skype version 3.6.0.244 but I had some issues. Every time I ran the installer it stopped in the middle of the process showing me the following error message:

I found this forum post describing how to get rid of Error code 1603. Therefore I just had to download the Windows Installer Cleanup Utility and remove the Skype Plugin Manager.
Dec 19
I added the shared items of Google Reader to the sidebar of this blog - check it out and read what I enjoyed to read. Some days ago there was a new feature added to Google Reader that allows to add shared items of friends to your list- now need my friends to shared their feeds with me.

There is even a nice page that lists all my shared items.
I want to use this chance to recommend using Google Reader as your RSS reader again - I am loving it!
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