Occasional Thoughts

Using Blogilo with Serendipity

nospam@example.com (Carsten Schlipf) — Fri, 26 Feb 2010 17:08:00 +0100

KDE 4.4 comes with a great native editor for your blog: Blogilo. Out of the box it supports Blogger1.0, MetaWeblog, MovableType and Google GData. So Serendipity users may feel left out. However you can use Blogilo with Serendipity anyway since there is the XML-RPC plugin available. You just need to know how to configure it.

Continue reading "Using Blogilo with Serendipity"

Build Groovy++ with Maven

nospam@example.com (Jörn Schimmelpfeng) — Fri, 26 Feb 2010 16:22:00 +0100

If you are already a fan of Groovy you probably will also be a fan of the rising star Groovy++. Even people that dislike the dynamic magic of Groovy must agree, that this is cool stuff, mixing the power of Groovy with the safety and performance of classical Java. Since Groovy++ is still brand new it lacks of any Maven support today. In the following I will show how you can tweak the GMaven plugin for using the Groovy++ extensions.

Please be aware that this is just a very quick work to get it running and might not be stable. For example I did not verify all the necessary dependencies. So further work has to be done.

Continue reading "Build Groovy++ with Maven"

Top Ten of Missing Features in Adobe ActionScript (Updated)

nospam@example.com (Carsten Schlipf) — Wed, 17 Feb 2010 22:05:00 +0100

Update 2010-02-17: Many thanks to James Ward for sending me the pointers to a couple of Jira Issues in the Adobe Bug and Issue Management System that cover the points below. I have added the links to these issues.

As a Java developer, who worked for more than a year with Flex I suffered from a couple of pain points - features that I am missing badly in Action Script 3.0. Here is my personal list of things that I wish Adobe would incorporate into Action Script 4.0:

Continue reading "Top Ten of Missing Features in Adobe ActionScript (Updated)"

The Value of Open Standards

nospam@example.com (Carsten Schlipf) — Tue, 16 Feb 2010 23:18:00 +0100

...or why HTML 5 will fail as replacement for Flash (at least for the next years).

But first let me make clear that I am not a fan of closed standards and closed source. I love Open Source and I use Open Source software wherever possible. However sometimes it's better if there is one instance that has the control nut just over a format, but also about the interpreter and renderer.

With the announcement of Apples iPad a big discussion started regarding the non-existence of Flash on it. Steve Jobs responded. He claims that Apple won't support Flash since they claim it's buggy and responsible for a lot of crashes on Mac OS, but what really makes me upset is that sentence:

No one will be using Flash, he says. The world is moving to HTML 5.

Also in blogs postings that talk about this topic several people mention that HTML 5 will be the future and that no one needs Flash.

Bullshit! Will people never learn from the past?

Continue reading "The Value of Open Standards"

Kubuntu Karmic Koala on a HP EliteBook 8530w

nospam@example.com (Carsten Schlipf) — Sun, 15 Nov 2009 21:31:22 +0100

I already wrote about my experiences with Jaunty Jackalope on a HP EliteBook 8530w. Now this article is a delta update for Kubuntu Karmic Koala (9.10).

All in all hardware support is much better now. I did not had to install updated NVidia drivers (and still have no problems at all - even the random artifacts after waking up are gone) nor an updated firmware for WLAN. Even the function keys are partially working.

Device	Status	Comments
Graphics	Works out of the box
Audio	Works out of the box
LAN	Works out of the box
WLAN	Works out of the box
Suspend to Disk	Works out of the box
Suspend to RAM	Works out of the box
fn Functionkeys	Partially Working	Brightness can be adjusted using the keys. Sleep, battery and monitor switch do not work.
Specials Keys	Works out of the box
Memory Card Reader	Works out of the box	Only SD cards tested
Smart card reader	Not tested
CD/DVD Writer	Works out of the box	See below for information on how to get lightscribe working.

Continue reading "Kubuntu Karmic Koala on a HP EliteBook 8530w"

Fun with Spring Actionscript and Maven (Updated)

nospam@example.com (Carsten Schlipf) — Sat, 14 Nov 2009 16:14:00 +0100

Spring Actionscript is a great library - no question. It makes it much easier to mock Cairngorm service delegates and rewire them for testing with FlexUnit. Testing the full event/command/delegate workflow is pretty easy.

However today I had quite some "fun" with the Maven artifact and it's transitive dependencies in combination with Maven 2.2.1. Spring Actionscript has some dependencies to these artifacts:

as3commons-lang
as3commons-logging
as3commons-reflect

All these required artifacts are available from the yoolabs.org repository so it's pretty easy to include these artifacts into your build. But today I struggled with two hefty problems.

Continue reading "Fun with Spring Actionscript and Maven (Updated)"

HP Compaq 615 with Kubuntu 9.04

nospam@example.com (Carsten Schlipf) — Sun, 18 Oct 2009 22:28:00 +0200

My mother wanted a simple laptop, which is sufficient for browsing the web, writing some emails and some letters. So I haven chosen a HP Compaq 615 since it has a very low price but does it's job. As I don't want to bother my mother with viruses and I wanted the flexibility to setup a system that just fits her needs, I installed Kubuntu. Therefore the next advantage of the HP Compaq 615 is that it has no Microsoft Tax - it's delivered with DR-DOS only.

Ubuntu is supported very well on this laptop. After some tweaks, I managed to get everything working but some function keys that are not really required.

Continue reading "HP Compaq 615 with Kubuntu 9.04"

Kubuntu Jaunty Jackalope on a HP EliteBook 8530w

nospam@example.com (Carsten Schlipf) — Mon, 28 Sep 2009 20:46:00 +0200

Some days ago I got my new notebook that replaced my previous HP Compaq 8240: An HP EliteBook 8530w. Of course the first thing I did was to shrink the Windows Vista partition to make room for a fresh Kubuntu 9.04 Jaunty Jackalope installation (32 Bit).

Out of the box hardware support is pretty good - I just had some minor problems that I have sorted out in the meantime.

Device	Status	Comments
Graphics	Works	Had to install Nvidia drivers manually due to missing proxy settings during installation.
Audio	Works out of the box
LAN	Works out of the box
WLAN	Works	Had to install new firmware and replace knetworkmanager by wicd
Suspend to Disk	Works out of the box
Suspend to RAM	Works out of the box
fn Functionkeys	Not working	Can't adjust brightness of screen (but this works with the KDE power management settings)
Specials Keys	Works out of the box	Volume slider works like two buttons
Memory Card Reader	Works out of the box	Only SD cards tested
Smart card reader	Not tested

Continue reading "Kubuntu Jaunty Jackalope on a HP EliteBook 8530w"

Road Warriors Proxy

nospam@example.com (Carsten Schlipf) — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 15:22:00 +0200

Do you have a Notebook running Linux?

Do you frequently use it in different network environments with different proxy configurations?

Are you sick of frequently reconfiguring all the applications that have their own proxy settings like the web browser, the Java IDE, the desktop and the applications that uses its settings, the other desktop environment that uses other settings... and so on?

If your answer to these questions is yes, yes and yes then read on. The solution I present here allows you to configure proxy settings in any of your applications just once and will even change the proxy settings automatically as soon as you connect your laptop to a network.

Continue reading "Road Warriors Proxy"

KDE 4.3: Enable Desktop Search in Kubuntu 9.04

nospam@example.com (Carsten Schlipf) — Wed, 05 Aug 2009 14:13:46 +0200

Desktop Search configuration in KDE System Settings.

So you just installed KDE 4.3 on Kubuntu Jaunty and would like to explore the new features of Nepomuk and it's integrated desktop search? But, when you want to enable the desktop search in the Desktop Search configuration applet, Strigi always refuses to start with some error messages? Luckily I've found the solution spread over several comments in a bug report on launchpad.

Continue reading "KDE 4.3: Enable Desktop Search in Kubuntu 9.04"

Accessing Google Calendar from KOrganizer

nospam@example.com (Carsten Schlipf) — Sat, 04 Jul 2009 21:45:35 +0200

There are already some documented methods on how to access your Google Calendar with KOrganizer.

In case you really want to have a (almost fully working) 2 way sync, you may check out the solution using the GCALDaemon that is described here. The GCalDaemon is a server that runs locally on your system that serves as a kind of proxy to Google Calendar. However it's major drawback is that it is written in Java. Thus you need to have a JVM running all the time just to be able to access the server. Well, I don't want to waste these resources on my Laptop.

Another possibility is to simply access the ICal address using a remote calendar directly. Well, this has the drawback that you can just access the calendar read-only. But for me a read-only access is OK. Google Calendar provides a nice web UI to enter events so I am fine with that restriction. I am more interested in getting Reminders for my events as I tend to forget the time while I am working.

But both solutions mentioned above have a major drawback: They only work while you are connected to the Internet. There are so many occassions, when I just wanted to check my calendar when I don't have an internet access like on the hallway when I just would like to see where the next meeting is located. So for me it's more important to have a calendar synchronization that syncs with offline data. But the solution is simple and may work not only with just KOrganizer, but with every application that works with ICS files. So here it is:

Continue reading "Accessing Google Calendar from KOrganizer"

Size of Flex RSLs with dependencies to other RSLs

nospam@example.com (Carsten Schlipf) — Sun, 21 Jun 2009 16:47:00 +0200

Maven module structure of the project.

Recently I had switched a complex Flex project that previously used all libraries as statically compiled SWCs to dynamically loaded Runtime Shared Libraries (RSL). In the picture on the right you can see the module structure of the whole build, which was done using Maven and the flex-mojos plugin.

You can see that there is one high level library (library A) that is shared across all applications and a more specialized library (library B) that is providing components and classes to a certain subset of other applications.

Library A contains a couple of embedded images containing various icons and a lot of components, while Library B contained just a few components. So after compilation the obvious expected result would be to have an RSL file of library A that is much bigger than the RSL file of library B in case library B uses library A as RSL and not as statically linked SWC.

Well the dynamic linkage worked well for all the applications, which where just a couple of KBs in size after the change in contrast to more than 1 MB before the change. However this was not the case for the libraries. Library A had a size of 1.2 MB but library B had a size of 1.25 MB???

Continue reading "Size of Flex RSLs with dependencies to other RSLs"

App of the Whatever: Choqok

nospam@example.com (Carsten Schlipf) — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 12:00:00 +0200

Choqok KDE Twitter Client

Seems like I have a personal problem: I just can't stand a crowdy desktop. Everything must be cleaned up and reduced to the essential. As such a human I never felt much in love with desktop widgets like Plasmoids or SuperKaramba (only exception: Folder View plasmoid).

So I tried the KDE Twitter plasmoid. But Twitter is really not so important to have it on the desktop all the time. In addition KDE Twitter provides basic Twitter access only. There is no possibility to access other services like identi.ca or an integrated access to twitpic. I wanted a Twitter client that is not restricted to just Twitter, but lives in the system tray, is running unobtrusivly in the background, but always there at a keyboard press to publish a thought.

As a Linux user the search was over pretty quickly: You have a problem, you google an Application to solve this problem and a nice soul has already the answer for you. Then an apt-get install and you're happy.

In case of Twitter my solution is Choqok.

Update: In case you do not get updates anymore upgrade to Choqok 0.6.1.

Back from Vacation on Fehmarn

nospam@example.com (Carsten Schlipf) — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 17:15:17 +0200

Fehmarn is located in the east sea of Germany.

I and my family visited my mother, who recently moved to the isle Fehmarn, for one week. It was way too short (as every vacation) but we will be back soon as Fehmarn is a very beautiful isle in the east sea of Germany just right before Denmark. We visited almost every possible beach on the isle and every single beach was different. From a sandy (but artifical) south beach to a rocky east beach.

And of course I had my camera with me and took a lot of beautiful pictures. In my opinion two of them are very suitable as wallpapers and here they are.

Dunes of Fehmarn

Grass in the dunes of Fehmarn

This time I've packaged the wallpaper in the KDE 4 wallpaper format, which includes multiple file sizes. KDE will automatically select the appropriate size after installing the wallpaper. Please see below for more information on how to install it or how to use the wallpapers on non-KDE systems.

And here is the download link for the Dunes of Fehmarn wallpaper.

Canola and Poppy

A field full of canola and poppy on Fehmarn

Just like the wallpaper above also packaged in the KDE 4 wallpaper distribution format.

Here the download link for the Canola and Poppy wallpaper.

Continue reading "Back from Vacation on Fehmarn"

Flash is the Future

nospam@example.com (Carsten Schlipf) — Thu, 21 May 2009 10:54:07 +0200

Now who said, that the Flash platform does not have a future? It even powers the consoles of the U.S.S. Enterprise.