Martin's Blog

German Landscape Architectures founded business

2009-10-26T17:11:00.003-04:00

My little sister's boyfriend Jörg Schneider, together with Eric Ballerstedt, has founded a business called "BS Landschaftsarchitekten" (BS Landscape Architects, BS stands for Ballerstedt and Schneider). They will be operating from a city in the southern part of Germany (Lindenberg, Allgäu).
Currently, they have temporary website up which can be seen at http://www.bs-landschaftsarchitekten.de/. This website is in German as the newly found company focuses on the German speaking market.

Please apologize for the next paragraph being in German...
Jörg Schneider und Eric Ballerstedt haben die Firma BS Landschaftsarchitekten (http://www.bs-landschaftsarchitekten.de/) gegründet. Die junge Firma wird in Lindenberg im Allgäu (Süddeutschland) sitzen.

Copy&Paste under Windows just like under Linux!

2009-03-13T22:05:00.004-04:00

I found the tool I talked about in my previous blog!

http://fy.chalmers.se/~appro/nt/TXMouse/

Run the little executable, and can now copy&paste using your mouse just like under Linux:
Highlight it with the left mouse button, that will already copy it.
To paste it, simply hit the middle mouse button.

Awesome!

Moving windows under Windows just like under X

2009-03-13T21:49:00.002-04:00

Ah, what an eye opener!
One of the most annoying things under Windows XP/Vista is that you cannot move and resize windows in an efficient and comfortable way.

Everybody who has worked using a window manager for X (i.e. KDE, GNOME, etc) knows that you can move and resize windows using the Alt key in combination with the left and right mouse button. That way you don't have aim for the title bar or for the small and skinny edge/corner of the window you want to move or resize. Under X, it is enough if the mouse pointer is anywhere within the window borders.

Today, I thought that it is enough with getting mad whenever I develop under windows (I am developing almost exclusively under windows lately).
So I googled and I found this tool:

KDE-style resizing/moving for Windows XP/Vista.

I immediately downloaded and ran the executable. No need to install it! So you can use it even if you don't have Administrator rights on your Windows box.

It works like a charm! My productivity under Windows has gone up by 100%. ;)

The next thing I need to find is a tool which puts text into the clipboard by simply highlighting it with the mouse - just like under linux. Ah, and the middle mouse button click would paste it, of course.
If I find a tool for that (I may have to code that myself), then this world should be a better place!
Maybe somebody already knows about a tool like that!

My wife is now a French Tutor in Guelph

2008-09-01T20:31:00.002-04:00

I created her a webpage on which she offers French lessons as a tutor in Guelph.
Check it out and spread the word: http://french.mkoebele.de. (yes, I will get her a new domain name ;))

New keyboard!

2008-11-19T09:21:00.003-05:00

I got a new keyboard at work... and I am loving it.
Really, keyboards, mice, and joysticks are the best things MS can make.
I got the Microsoft Comfort Curve. It is simple, cheap ($20), and it feels really good. Love the gentle curve in it since I don't like the economic ones which are broken in half and than re-attached.

Obviously, I had to configure the few multimedia keys under linux.
Using xev and looking up the proper description of the keys in
/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/XKeysymDB I put that in my .bashrc:


xmodmap -e 'keycode 236 = XF86Mail'
xmodmap -e 'keycode 176 = XF86AudioRaiseVolume'
xmodmap -e 'keycode 174 = XF86AudioLowerVolume'
xmodmap -e 'keycode 162 = XF86AudioPlay'
xmodmap -e 'keycode 160 = XF86AudioMute'
xmodmap -e 'keycode 161 = XF86Calculator'
xmodmap -e 'keycode 233 = XF86AudioNext'
xmodmap -e 'keycode 234 = XF86AudioPrev'

Now you can configure your amarok or other applications to use those keys as they now appear in any key short cut configuring dialog when you hit those special buttons.

Under KDE 3.5.x, a special thing happens when you hit the volume up and down buttons. Using kmilod, kmix listens to those button events and changes the volume of your entire system. Haven't quite figured out yet how to get rid of that key shortcut association and let amarok only use those two volume keys.
I could turn off kmilod entirely with kcontrol -> services.
But I think I like that I now have shortcuts to control the global volume and different shortcuts for amarok's volume.

DNS Zone Check

2008-10-07T09:58:00.000-04:00

While I was configuring some CNAMES and A records for my mkoebele.de domain using EditDNS (http://www.editdns.net), I had first problems with telling my domain provider (1und1.de) to use new domain name servers - the editdns' ones.

Luckily, the 1und1 tech support was switched on this time and gave me actual a very helpful url:
DNS Zone Check: http://zonecheck.denic.de/

It is a tool which makes sure that the settings on your new DNS are appropriate for denic's requirements.

Very neat. That tool should help you to use any hosting service or dns management tool with your domain registered via denic.

find in Windows! Found something useful!

2008-09-09T06:36:00.007-04:00

My Development job at Navtech, I get to develop under Windows. Yesterday, I needed to solve a standard problem, a software developer needs to do like once a week at least:

Count the lines in a text file which contain the string ""

Under linux: No Problem:
grep "<value>" file.xml | wc -l

Under windows? I fought my temptation to copy the file over to linux and to do it there. I really though, ok, what if I was a windows developer who didn't know about linux or cygwin... There should be a way!

One suggestion was to use Find & Replace and usually there is a dialog box at the end saying "Replaced 486 occurrences".

But I thought, that can't be it. I did some googling and was surprised!
Windows has a find in its good old MS DOS shell!!

C:\> find /C "<value>" file.xml

Wow, it returned the number of occurrences formatted in a weird way. But it works.
Crazy...

I should use Windows more often...

joomla 1.5.6

2008-09-01T20:29:00.001-04:00

They said, I should upgrade my joomla to 1.5.6 because of some security issues. Did that. It took me an afternoon to do that. First uploading takes a long time and then I erased my entire database accidentally....my entire page was GONE! Thank God to godaddy.com who back up the database daily... so I could restore the database and everything was back in place. Phew.

Sarah Palin - life time NRA member

2008-08-29T12:58:00.006-04:00

The US elections don't fail to surprise and entertain me. Not necessarily in a good way. McCain has announced his running mate: US Governor from Alaska: Sarah Palin. Mother of 5 and life time NRA member.
Oh dear... the NRA in the seat of the White House. Presidential support of the NRA.... What's next?
Obama on the other hand is the strongest opponent of the NRA the NRA will have to face should Obama become the next president. Obama has great plans of changing and reverting the 2nd amendment. Closing 90% of gun shops, increasing the federal tax of guns by 500% etc. Nice. The states seem to refuse to learn lessons. Columbine, West Virginia etc... Why is it still so easy to buy guns?

Lovely US... can't drink beer in public, but you can buy a gun without a license. Geez, imagine somebody bought a gun while drinking beer! That would be a disaster!
Good thing beer in public is illegal...

Clinton's Speech at the DNC

2008-08-27T10:51:00.003-04:00

Hillary Clinton held her speech yesterday, Aug 26, 2008 in Denver at the Democratic National Convention.
I thought her speech kicked-ass. The way she was presenting herself and the way she held her speech really impressed me. A Delegate said on CNN "this was a presidential speech". I totally agree with that Delegate. You could really tell, that is a senior politician, knows how to talk to a crowed, knows how to be on stage and present herself. Obama seems to be more of a junior politician to me. Obama needs to make sure that he has more than a great speech tomorrow. If he doesn't present himself presidentially, I am not sure, what the Delegates are going to do.

"No way. No how. No McCain." [H. Clinton]

"Animated" desktop wallpaper

2008-08-27T08:41:00.003-04:00

A colleague of mine always has a neat satellite image of the north American continent on his desktop as his wallpaper, the desktop background.

So I had to get that too... He actually post-processed the image using ImageMagick do make it darker. Fortunately, I use KDE 3.5.9 (he uses gnome) and let kdesktop blend it with black so make it less intrusive. I actually use a vertical blend, so the image is darker at the bottom, which makes it better for my transparent task bar.

We download the image every twenty minutes and update the wallpaper. Here again, KDE lets me do that easily by using the slide show functionality... A slide show consisting of 1 picture. My desktop always shows the latest satellite picture of North America :)

Then he raised the bar again by archiving all downloaded images. He then rotated through all archived images (past 2 days) and updates the wallpaper every 2 seconds.
Obviously, I had to do that too....

Need two scripts for that

The first one is ran as a cronjob, every twenty minutes. It downloads the image, appends a date string to it and checks whether the image has changed (if no, delete the old one).

The second script is ran manually and can be sent into the background.
It loops through all images and sets the wallpaper to the next picture after 2 seconds.

In order to set the wallpaper using a script, I use the dcop call to kdesktop:

dcop kdesktop KBackgroundIface setWallpaper 1 $filename 6

I do that for all 4 desktops. Unfortunately, kdesktop eats my here, so I had to decrease the sleep time between changing pictures from 1 second to 2 seconds.

Does anybody know of a faster way to set the background image?
xsetroot does not work, as the window manager takes control of the background.

As you will notice, the script downloads two other IR images of Eastern Canada and Eastern USA. I was hoping, I could set the image for the left and right head of my monitors individually, however, it seems that the KBackgroundIface does not provide that functionality.

post-review

2008-08-20T14:51:00.003-04:00

While creating a presentation for my company about review-board, I started playing around with the tool post-review.
post-review is a command-line tool (python script) with which you can
- create a new review request
- update a diff of an existing review
- create a review request of already committed code using the -rRev1:HEAD syntax.

Loving it!

Here is how to use it:
http://code.google.com/p/reviewboard/wiki/Using_PostReview

And here is the actual script
http://reviewboard.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/reviewboard/contrib/tools/post-review

Review board

2008-07-04T15:44:00.000-04:00

At the company (Navtech) I work for, I introduced a code review tool called "Review Board". An open source tool mainly developed
by vmware and used by many companies such as Google (Google Code Summer), Yahoo, Vmware,..
And now, my team and our adjacent team use it as well.
Very neat! Subversion integration, neat diff rendering (syntax highlighting), and the possibility to have good discussions about lines of code make it a very good tool for code reviews.

MySQL: Delete a subset in a table quickly

2008-07-04T09:07:00.000-04:00

I found a fast way to delete a small subset of rows in a very big table (hundreds of thousands or millions).

See my comment on MySQL's DELETE Syntax page.

Firefox javaplugin insists on symlinks

2008-07-04T09:10:00.000-04:00

If you were wondering why your java plugin doesn't work, it might be because
you copied

libjavaplugin_oji.so

instead of creating a symlink to it:

ln -s /javapath/jre/plugin/i386/ns7/libjavaplugin_oji.so \
$HOME/.mozilla/plugins/.

Not sure why it works only that way.