Occasional Thoughts

Subversion & Certificate Problems with Ubuntu Precise Pangolin

nospam@example.com (Carsten Schlipf) — Wed, 02 May 2012 17:28:33 +0200

For quite a while the Ubuntu subversion package suffer from bad user certificates that do not follow the standards strictly. In case you have to authenticate with such a certificate subversion will return such an error message:

OPTIONS of '<url>': SSL handshake failed: SSL error: Key usage violation in certificate has been detected. (<url>)

The root of this problem is that the Ubuntu packages link against libneon-gnutls, which handles certificates in a stricter way than libneon. A easy workaround in the past was to simply replace a replace the library link of libneon-gnutls to point to libneon:

sudo mv /usr/lib/libneon-gnutls.so.27 /usr/lib/libneon-gnutls.so.27.old sudo ln -s /usr/lib/libneon.so.27 /usr/lib/libneon-gnutls.so.27

However once you do this in Ubuntu 12.04 Precise Pangolin you will get a another error message instead:

OPTIONS of <url>': SSL handshake failed: SSL disabled due to library version mismatch (<url>)

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Wanna Share One of My Pictures?

nospam@example.com (Carsten Schlipf) — Thu, 12 Apr 2012 22:47:50 +0200

Recently I've talked with a friend about the legal notice [de] with added costs against a Facebook user. A third user has posted an image of a rubber duck on that users timeline. However this image violated the copyright of a copyright owner. Yes, you've read correctly: In Germany you can be sued for a photo that someone else has posted on your Facebook timeline.

This triggered the question whether it should be allowed to sue unlicensed usages of only private usage context? Should it be allowed that private users are sued for downloading and posting picture a picture on their Facebook page?

At first I thought about that like a user and my immediate response was "no", fair, non-profit usages of images should be allowed and not be subject to legal actions.

However recently I got more and more into photography and therefore became also part of the copyright owner side. So I dug deeper into the topic and soon found critical problems around this thinking.

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Pecha Kucha Timer

nospam@example.com (Carsten Schlipf) — Fri, 25 Nov 2011 10:04:07 +0100

Yesterday I and a couple of colleagues held a couple of Pecha Kucha sessions. Pecha Kucha is a presentation methodology that limits the presentation to 20 slides where the next slide is displayed after 20 seconds automatically. During the preparation and for the presentation session we felt the lack for a decent timer that counts down from 20 to1 for each slide and gives a clearly visible feedback before the time for the current slide ends.

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Hey Spammers! Congratulations!

nospam@example.com (Carsten Schlipf) — Tue, 30 Nov 2010 14:38:39 +0100

You won! Be proud of yourselves, you stinkers!

I am not a big fan of blogs that moderate every single comment. This hinders active and timely discussions and can be seen as a kind of censorship. Unfortunately my blog seems to have gained the interest of spammers and since their comments seem to be manual posts, captchas do not help. During the last days I had to delete about 10 spam comments per day, while there were were just about a few comments during the last weeks.

Since the effort to delete SPAM is higher than to accept valid comments and I really do not want to support some obscure sites just because I didn't check my mails for a few hours I decided to turn moderation on.

I promise that I will do me best to confirm any valid comments within a few hours.

At least you get easier to read captchas in return.

Mark Zuckerberg Uses KDE

nospam@example.com (Carsten Schlipf) — Wed, 27 Oct 2010 22:20:35 +0200

Dear David Fincher, Director of The Social Network,

yesterday evening I saw your great movie and I must say that I enjoyed it very much.

Besides the very interesting plot I was very happy that you have chosen KDE as Desktop environment for Marks computer (that does not prove that Mark is using KDE in real-life, of course - but as Mark is a smart guy, I would not wonder). At least you haven't followed the rest of Hollywood and gave him an Apple or made him use Windows.

I was very delighted that you did your homework and showed us the magic of wget and perl and no unrealistic Hollywood typical computer voodoo. People that did not know how to fetch a bunch of images from a website really learned something. Thank you very much for that.

But... really... was it necessary to ruin this good impression with the close up of the terminal session, where Mark had typed

> ping localhost
PING localhost.localdomain (127.0.0.1) 56(84) bytes of data.
64 bytes from localhost (127.0.0.1): icmp_req=1 ttl=64 time=0.031 ms
64 bytes from localhost (127.0.0.1): icmp_req=2 ttl=64 time=0.041 ms
64 bytes from localhost (127.0.0.1): icmp_req=3 ttl=64 time=0.045 ms
64 bytes from localhost (127.0.0.1): icmp_req=4 ttl=64 time=0.036 ms
64 bytes from localhost (127.0.0.1): icmp_req=5 ttl=64 time=0.047 ms
^C
--- localhost.localdomain ping statistics ---
5 packets transmitted, 5 received, 0% packet loss, time 3996ms
rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 0.031/0.040/0.047/0.005 ms

I guess Mark knows that his computer is up and running, while he sits in front of it surfing Facebook.

Watch out! ActionScript Bumps Below

nospam@example.com (Carsten Schlipf) — Tue, 26 Oct 2010 23:03:53 +0200

When reading through ActionScript code I frequently see two ActionScript mistakes that are likely to cause runtime misbehavior and confusions. Sometimes thing do not appear at first glance what you might think at the beginning. However both ActionScript bumps can easily be driven around.

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Maven Housekeeping: Cleanup your local repository on Linux

nospam@example.com (Jörn Schimmelpfeng) — Mon, 19 Jul 2010 16:46:05 +0200

For all those that where seeking for a method to roll out outdated artifacts from their Maven repository like me, but could not find a solution. Here is a simple shell script doing that work for you.
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Adobe to Drop MacOS Support Starting With CS6

nospam@example.com (Carsten Schlipf) — Fri, 30 Apr 2010 23:20:00 +0200

Some thoughts of what could happen if that headline above could become a reality.

Most probably you've already heard about Steve Jobs dislike of the Adobe Flash Player. A War that started when it was announced that the iPad will not support Flash and his claims that HTML 5 is superior to Flash (I already blogged about this topic). The current climax is the change in the famous section 3.3.1 of the Apple developer contract that forbids the use of any programming language which is not approved by Apple directly targeting towards the Flash Packager contained in the Creative Suite 5 (CS5). This Flash Packager can create a native iPhone application from Flash code.

This change in the Apple developer license domination eventually forced Adobe to throw away their work in the Flash Packager shortly after its announcement and a refocus on other platforms as written by Mike Chambers.

Understandably this caused quite some uproar and finally Steve Jobs has felt the need to comment on this on the Apple web site. However his Thoughts on Flash contain several falsehoods and half-truth. Jesse Warden has written a long post commenting several of such points. I recommend reading this for the details and I do not want to repeat this. Just some points I would like to highlight and add.

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Official Maven support for Groovypp

nospam@example.com (Jörn Schimmelpfeng) — Fri, 02 Apr 2010 14:11:01 +0200

I'm glad to be able to depricate my own post Groovy++-with-Maven a couple of weeks ago. The Groovy++ team has already taken action and provides the groovvypp libraries in a commonly accessible repository. They also provide a preliminary version of the gmaven plugin that supports statically linked Groovy.

For details see Using-groovypp-with-maven and also the related update Using-groovypp-with-maven (update).

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.

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Build Groovy++ with Maven

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

Please see my update Official-Maven-support-for-Groovypp.

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.

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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:

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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 not 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?

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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.

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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.

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