Nearly ten years ago I bought my first mobile phone. I will take this anyversary as a reason to write a small sumary about all the phones I had within the last decade.
August 1998 – Samsung SGH
My first mobile phone. I bought this one with a prepayd card called B-Free from Mobilkom Austria. In this time there were not many phones around and most of them were Nokia (the better ones) or Alcatel (the cheap ones). My Samsung was special and I liked it a lot. It was very “american” because of its flip and the telescope antenna. It was a good companion while I had to do my military service.
In one of my projects I came across an interesting problem with BigDecimal values. The project uses a persistence framework to persist Java objects into an Oracle 9i database with the Oracle JDBC driver 10.2.0.3.0. I could also reproduce this problem with Hibernate on a Microsoft SQL Express 2005 database using the Microsoft JDBC driver 1.2.
The problem was that sometimes when I tried to store objects containing BigDecimal values the following exception was thrown and the object could not be persisted:
Sometimes you have to accomplish work on a windows PC where you do not have administrator privileges.
This can be quite frustrating if you are a power user and you are used to your shortcuts and tools.
Here are some tips to get rid of useless limitations some system administrators may have configured to your workstation.
To adapt the system to your needs you have to use two tools:
The group policy editor. To open it run gpedit.msc from the command line.
Last week I removed two mirrored hard disks from my old home server running Ubunut 6.06 LTS and put them into my new VDR. After that I was not able to boot the server again. It always stopped saying something about “… RAID autodetection …”
So RAID autodetection is a nice feature when you want to have your RAID devices available after booting the system but what if you want to get rid of it? I used an Ubuntu 7.10 alternate CDROM to boot into rescue mode. There I first removed the md device entries from /etc/fstab. But a reboot showed that the system still searched for a RAID and was not able to start. Removing the entries from /etc/mdadm/mdadm.conf did not improve the situation either.
Today I experienced a problem with my VDR linux system I never had in the last years on any linux system. I switched on my system and wondered why I could not connect with ssh. Then I realized that no service was running - no samba, no http, no vdr …
I had to connect the PC to a monitor and start it again to see that every time a service should be started the following message was printed:
I did never really bother about what fonts to use for programming. The default of the the IDE was fine for me. Then I came across this article of Coding Horror about a month ago. One sentence in the conclusion of it made me think:
Please don’t use the default Courier New typeface. Be kind to your eyes.
So I took a closer look on what ClearType really means. This wikipedia article and the Microsoft page about ClearType helped a lot. I had ClearType activated on my Windows XP a very long time but I never cared if a font is designed for ClearType or not. There is a tool from Microsoft (the ClearType Tuner in PowerToys) that allows to configure ClearType exactly for your display – it improved my screen a lot.
Yesterday I installed subversion on a Debian server again and I had too look for some guidance in the web again. This time I decided to write it down for myself.
Afterwards the needed modules were already enabled in my apache2 configuration - I looked in /etc/apache2/mods-enabled/ and saw dav.load, dav_svn.conf and dav_svn.load linked. All I had to do was to create a repository by using svnadmin:
Ten days ago I installed my new Linksys Router WRT45G router and set up a wireless bridge for my home network.
I had some problems with getting everything working like I wanted it to - see my post.
Today I took another attempt and was successful. Now I got a secure wireless connection in bridge mode.
I wanted WPA because it is much more secure than WEP and in bridge mode it is easier to reach all my devices. Here is my configuration:
Two weeks ago I moved to a new flat. This means a lot of work - one of my tasks was to set up the home network (while my wife’s task was to think about the color of the curtains 😉
I had to connect five devices: workstation, notebook, XBOX, VDR and a Linux server.
While the workstation and the notebook are situated in my workroom the others are placed in the living room.
Within the last two weeks I had to experience the following BSOD (blue screen of death) several times a day:
The error always came from the win32k.sys file:
*** STOP: 0x0000008E (0xc0000005,...)``*** win32k.sys - Address BF8E270C base at BF800000, DateStamp ...
I did a lot of web searches and found many users writing about similar problems. Upgrading the video
driver as many sites suggested did not improve the situation but finally I found this Microsoft feedback entry. It got my attention because the users were working on notebooks with 2GB memory and Core 2 Duo processors too.
