bits4life

I am using misterhouse to drive my home automation system in my house. One of the things I like is to receive alerts on certain events. For example when it starts raining and one of the windows is left open I like to know.  A good way to receive alerts is via SMS messages on my mobile phone.  I started coding so that misterhouse can sent SMS alerts.  In the misterhouse code there was already some code to use a service at www.smsboy.com Because I am using voipbuster for my VOIP needs I changed the code for that. Read the rest of this entry »

Today I upgraded my Ubuntu installation to the newly released Karmic Kaola. Except for a couple of glitches during the upgrade process (maybe later more about this), I was able to login to my updated system about an hour later. I opened up Eclipse (running 3.5 – Galileo) to continue my Java development tasks. But very soon I noticed the upgrade introduced severe issues with my favorite IDE, most notably, the buttons on most dialog boxes could not be pushed anymore. Here’s how I managed to fix it …. Read the rest of this entry »

Trac is an enhanced wiki and issue tracking system for software development projects. It integrates your changesets in source repository, roadmap, continuous integration and much more. For a standard installation, tickets in Trac follow a basic workflow which you can see below. The problem with this state diagram is, that there is no explicit Q&A stage.  Developers close tickets, and testers re-open them. But when you are using Scrum, you want to finish your sprint with all tickets ready for testing.

Luckily, this is easy to do in Trac since version 0.11 … Read the rest of this entry »

This site is powered by Wordpress running on Ubuntu. Some of you might have noticed we recently changed the permalink structure. Permalinks are the permanent links to the posts or categories in a blog site. Permalink can be used to link to your article or category by other blogs or sites, or to send a link to your story in an e-mail message.

The permalinks now all have the structure /%year%/%monthnum%/%postname%/ where the previous the structure was /%post_id%. Permalink rewrites are based on the Apache Rewrite engine and there are a few caveats when changing the permalink structure. Here’s a checklist to get you going…

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UPDATE : for builds after 3.0.194.0, the directive  ”–enable-plugins” is no longer activated by default, so you need to pass this option to enjoy flash.

UPDATE : Bad news : the latest updates (3.0.195.0~svn20090714r20617-0ubuntu1~ucd2~jaunty) break flash again

Good news for chromium-browser users on Linux.

As of today you can get Flash to work. Make sure you have the latest version installed, pay special attention to the date and build (20090710r20374).

koen@d820:/usr/lib/chromium-browser/plugins$ apt-cache policy chromium-browser
chromium-browser:
Installed: 3.0.194.0~svn20090710r20374-0ubuntu1~ucd1~jaunty
Candidate: 3.0.194.0~svn20090710r20374-0ubuntu1~ucd1~jaunty
Version table:
*** 3.0.194.0~svn20090710r20374-0ubuntu1~ucd1~jaunty 0
500 http://ppa.launchpad.net jaunty/main Packages
100 /var/lib/dpkg/status

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After more than two years running Feisty on my Dell Latitude D820, I finally decided it was time to upgrade my Ubuntu distribution to the latest release tagged Jaunty. I started to lack a couple of essentials like Firefox 3, Flash Player 10 and I wanted to get my hands on the Google Chrome browser too. Installation was super smooth and within 20 minutes I could login to my new system.

Now, the webcam issue : I have a QuickCam Messenger webcam, which is recognized correctly by Ubuntu, but it does not work with Skype or JMF (Java Media Framework) applications. Read the rest of this entry »

Trac is a great project management tool. You get a project website with a wiki, your source repository and a ticket system.

Cool stuff, for instance :

• If you write the name of a Java class in your Wiki, Trac will recognize this and link to your source repository.
• If you checkin code into your SVN repo and use comments like #235, Trac will link your SVN comments to the right ticket.
• Visualisation of the branches via revtree en mergeenhancer plugins.
• and much more…

They do eat their own dog food as the Trac project website is build with … Trac. I have Trac-0.11rc2-py2.5.egg running on my VPS. Today I’m trying to get Trac XML_RPC to work.

Ultimate goal : integration with Eclipse Mylyn. Read the rest of this entry »

I recently bought a nabaztag and discovered a cool app for my G1. Nabaztag is a “toy” rabbit with some elektronics onboard. It connects to the network with wifi and can receive commands to blink leds, speak text and move his ears. You can make it read your emails, the weather, the time etc … With the wabbit app for the google G1 android phone you can send text to your rabbit or change the positions of the ears with your mobile. Big fun, nothing else

Several users of Eclipse Ganymede out there are reporting a java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError for class SWTResourceUtil. That’s because some plugins (like the Hibernate Tools and Subversive) are still relying on the presence of this class that was present in older versions of Eclipse.

Here’s how you can fix this. Read the rest of this entry »

I have installed an EIB based home automation system in my home. EIB (European Instalation Bus) is an open standard, but I found it very hard to find good documentation and tools for it. If you plan playing with this system a good starting point is the Institute of Computer Aided Automation. For the moment I use the EIBD server to interface my KNX IP BAOS 770 EIB module with misterhouse. This works great for me. If you are interested in more EIB related info, let me know. Maybe I write a post on this blog about my setup.