bits4life

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 …. (more…)

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 … (more…)

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. (more…)

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. (more…)

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. (more…)

As software developer it is very useful to reflect on the UI you are creating before you start coding. That’s when you need create screen mockups. There are many open source and commercial tools on the market. The latest and greatest newcomer in this area is WireframeSketcher.

What makes this product so great ? First of all, it integrates perfectly in Eclipse, the IDE of choice for me and most other Java developers (sorry Netbeans guys). Installation is standard, add the WireframeSketcher update site and click install. At least Eclipse 3.3 is required to use WireframeSketcher.

Creating mockups was never easier. (more…)

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