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Windows 7 without IE

admin — Sun, 14 Jun 2009 19:04:11 +0000

That’s a shame. Internet Explorer is an excellent tool for downloading Firefox!

Read the press release here:

http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5hGWpt2Jl279bg2BaPZz52moEnlnA

Stupid default setting in NetBeans

admin — Fri, 15 May 2009 23:43:54 +0000

One thing is that NetBeans wants to expand tabs into spaces, at least thats a hot topic. Although, why the hell would anyone use spaces when the keyboard actually has a dedicated key to produce a nice indentation is beyond me. But why in the name of all that is holy isn’t line numbering turned on by default?! I know it’s a minor thing, but it’s stupid non the less!

A first look at Mercurial – Bye bye Subversion?

admin — Sun, 10 May 2009 00:39:28 +0000

I’m so sick and tired of Subversion! A couple of days ago our repository server was down which caused the f… stupid svn client to hang. Not even pressing Ctrl-C would stop it. In the end I had to kill it the hard way. This obviously messed up the svn locks. You should think that they had implemented a timeout and sensible error message by 2009? And don’t even get me started on all those .svn directories laying around!

Anyway, this finally pushed me to have a look at alternatives. I’ve been wanting to try out Mercurial for some time now and this pushed me over the edge. My first impression is really good! I obviously have to spend some time getting used to the distributed model, but it seems like it might be worth it. Everything was looking rose red until I figured out that it doesn’t support tracking of empty folders!? It does make sense when I think about their architecture built up around sha1 sums, but I still think that it’s strange. I often create a directory structure before I start coding. The workaround seems to be creating empty files inside each folder, which sounds a little annoying to me.

That’s it for now. Man it felt good to shout and scream a little about Subversion!

NetBeans 6.7 is looking good!

admin — Fri, 08 May 2009 20:45:39 +0000

I’ve been trying out the beta build of NetBeans version 6.7 and it’s looking very good. The PHP support is becoming very good.

Even Grails support is coming along with support for Grails 1.1. Rumors has it that even debugging is supported now! Nice work!

Tips! Cheap Gillette razor blades

admin — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 00:28:37 +0000

I don’t know about other countries, but in Norway you get ripped of when buying razor blades. Imagine my thrill when I found out that Dealextreme.com are selling the same blades (with Chinese packing, but who cares?!) for 1/3 of the price!

Enjoy cheap shaving!

Webservices in Java EE

admin — Tue, 11 Nov 2008 23:39:21 +0000

I had no idea that webservices were this easy in Java EE! Just smack on two or more annotations. Annotate the stateless session bean with @Webservice and the methods you want to expose with @WebMethod and you got yourself a webservice! That’s really nice!

Ubuntu 8.10 Intrepid Ibex released!

admin — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 17:12:47 +0000

Once again it’s time for my six months upgrade tradition. I’m really impressed with how much better the Linux user experience has gotten the last two-three years!

Haven’t tried Linux yet? Give Ubuntu 8.10 a chance!

Dropbox + EncFS = Fast and secure synchronization of data

admin — Tue, 23 Sep 2008 21:16:51 +0000

I’ve tested the really neat Dropbox project for some days now (www.getdropbox.com). It offers really fast synchronization of data between multiple computers running Windows, Mac and even Linux! The only drawback, it does not support encryption of your precious data.

Recently I stumbled across EncFS (http://www.arg0.net/encfs). EncFS offers an encrypted user-space file system. The only drawback is that it only runs on Linux, but hey as good as recent Linux distributions are who needs Windows?

Mini how-to:

Set up Dropbox as instructed on getdropbox.com (really easy). When you’ve done that create two new folders, one new directory inside your dropbox folder (for example /home/kimble/Dropbox/Encrypted) and another to mount the encrypted filesystem in (for example /home/kimble/EncryptedDropbox).

When those are in place install EncFS. If you’re running Debian or Ubuntu it’s as easy as:

sudo apt-get install encfs

Then it’s time to mount your encrypted file system. The first time you run this command EncFS will ask you a few simple questions where one of them is the password you want to protect your files with.

encfs /home/kimble/Dropbox/Encrypted/ /home/kimble/EncryptedDropbox/

That’s it! Now you do the same on your other Linux computers and enjoy both fast and secure file synchronization! The next time you run that command it will just prompt you for the password before mounting the file system into the chosen folder.

Cons: These files will not be accessible through the web interface, not will they be accessible from Windows or Mac (suckers!). ;D