Side 27 af 30
My Xbox360 died yesterday. I’ve never had any problems with it until yesterday. It’s been turned off for a couple of days because I sold my big TV, but I was startig to feel the urge again so I conneced it to my small TV.
I played for like 20-30 mins, when it suddenly froze and the audio stopped with a short beep. “That’s odd”, I thought and powered it off, then on. And again I froze this time in the startup animation. “Oh shit”, I said to myself, “This is bad”. A couple resets later I was greeting with the dreaded red ring of light.
So today I phoned Microsoft Xbox Support and they are going to send UPS to collect it. Thats good, but the timing is absolutely ass. I was planning to purchase a brand new HDTV this week, and now I don’t have a gaming console to plug into it, nor a DVD player as my Xbox 360 was double for that. Hopefully I can connect my Media Center PC without a hitch.
In Denmark the government is pushing the use of a digital certificate to identify against most government websites, etc. and for signing and encrypting email. I kinda like the idea so I signed up for one back in ’04. It expired last month, though so I have renewed it, although not without my fair amount of trouble. Apparently Linux and/or Firefox isn’t as supported as they would like the general public to think. (Or perhaps it’s, as usual, my own fault for using beta software – Firefox 2 and Ubunty Edgy).
Anyway, I booted Windows and got the certificate renewed and created a backup. Back in ’04 the backup was actually the PKCS12 certificate file, but that is not the case anymore. Nowadays it’s a plain old HTML file with some in-line javascript that loads the “required” software to install the certificate. PKCS12 is pretty standard and doesn’t require any additional software, so I don’t get why I can’t just have the file directly.
The usual path for the PKCS12 file is to load the certificate in Internet Explorer using the html file, and then export it. But for some reason it’s not possible to export the private key, only the public key. I tried this both running Internet Explorer in Windows and through wine, but with no luck.
At this point I was kinda pissed and figured the html file must have some information regarding the PKCS12 file and surely it did. Looking at the javascript there’s a variable with the name “pkcs12”. This variable is base64 encoded though, since PKCS12 is a binary format. So I quickly hacked together a little python script that extract and converts the certificate, so it’s ready for use by Firefox, Evolution, etc.
If you have the same problems as me you can get the script here and run it like this:
./extractpkcs12.py backup_file.html output_certificate.pkcs
This year I had the opportunity to participate in the JAOO conference sponsored by my employer, which was quite nice. I was able to join in on Tuesday and Wednesday and my plan was to follow the Performance in Modern Enterprise and Open Source Enterprise Java.
Tuesday
Tuesday’s keynote was held by Guy Steele where he presented a new programming language he’s working on at Sun, namely Fortress. Fortress is designed with parallel computing in mind which means that by default for-loops, etc. will be parallel instead of sequential. Also the language is made for scientific computation, which pretty much means maths out of my league, so I didn’t quite get the computation of vectors, etc. he talked about, since I’ve never worked with that before. Anyway, the first half of the presentation was quite interesting, but in the second half Guy went into too much details with the maths.
After the keynote I heard the first four talks on the Performance track. The highlight was definitely the talk on Performance Anti-Patterns by Kirk Pepperdine, which had a couple of interesting points and I have to say, at least some of the code I write fits all too well with these patterns. Kinda bad 🙂 Anyway, the talk inspired me which is a huge plus in my book.
The talk on The Art Of Micro-Benchmarking In Java by Angelika Langer wasn’t too exciting, but the part where she talked about the Java HotSpot VM was quite interesting and I learned a lot.
The rest of the day I switched to the Java Rich Client Development track, which meant the talks on the Google Web Toolkit by Bruce Johnson and the Echo2 framework by Tod Liebeck.
The Google Web Toolkit (GWT) is bad ass and caught my interest from the beginning and Bruce Johnson was quite good at entertaining the listeners and getting his message through. In many ways GWT is AJAX made easy, as it wrap the entire JavaScript thing in well-known Java code.
The Echo2 Framework was in many ways the same thing in a different wrapping. Unfortunately for the presentation, Tod Liebeck seemed very nervous and he had a hard time getting the message through. Still the Framework looks quite interesting, but doesn’t run quite as smooth as I would’ve expected on my machine. (I’m running the development version of Ubuntu Edgy, so perhaps it’s my own fault!)
Wednesday
On Wednesday I was supposed to followed the Open Source Enterprise Java track, but I decided to listen in on the Hot Old Ideas – Experiences Of An Old Country Programmer by Dave Thomas. Dave Thomas talked about all the various programming languages he had worked with or at least have touched in some way during his career and this was quite a few. It caught my interest and I felt like following the Back To The Future track, but I figured it would be of mostly nostalgic value, so I decided to follow the Open Source track as planned anyway.
I heard a talk on JMS and Apache ActiveMQ by Bruce Snyder and after that a talk on Spring and Patterns by Eberhard Wolff, where he talked about how Spring uses patterns. I really like working with Spring, so I had high expectations for this talk, but (obviously) I was disappointed as I didn’t really learn anything new.
Next up was Are We There Yet? by Rod Johnson. Rod talked about how Java Enterprise have progressed since 2003 to where we are today, and talked about which direction Java Enterprise could potentially go in the next years. This was interesting and gave me some insight into technologies I haven’t worked with before such as Aspect Oriented Programming (AOP) and Spring 2.0.
That was the last real talk on the Open Source track, so I decided to follow my co-workers to the Kevlin Henney talk on the Architecture Quality track. This turned out to be a great decision, since Kevlin made some really good points and did it with a sense of humor that was very entertaining.
Finally I went to the keynote panel on How Will We Be Programming in 2016?. This panel turned out to be quite entertaining as well and the listeners had a few laughs, but we didn’t really get a definite answer on the question, which was kinda expected I guess 🙂
Overall the two days at the JAOO Conference were great and I look forward to next years event.
Danish rock(ish) band Nephew have finally released their follow-up to 2004’s success USADSB. The first single Igen & Igen & was an instant hit for me, but the new album is not though, but neither was USADSB.
The new album is titled Interkom Kom Ind, which is a play on words in danish. It’s more raw that their previous album, which had a more popish sound. At this time I’ve listened through the album a couple of times and I have a feeling it’s growing on me, which is pretty much what happened with USADSB, so I think it will frequent my CD player quite often in the coming days.
I guess this means I’ll recommend it to others, so have a look at their website over at nephew.dk.
This year we had our ten year anniversary from elementary school and back in July we held a party to celebrate. Back then we decided to meet up later in the year and watch various videos recorded back then. I had the chance to digitize them and they are now available for download right over here. Quality is average, keep in mind the videos are from the late 80ies and early 90ies.
The videos are mostly from elementary schools – 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th and 6th grade (at least that what we call them in Denmark) – where we read a story and usually sing a song. The last one is actually in English, which is quite fun to hear. There is also one video, where we are performing at the annual school party. Good times indeed.
I don’t remember what we felt back when it was recorded, but I bet we hated it 🙂
Still it is quite fun to watch these days, so I’d like to thank our teacher for giving us this opportunity. Without her we wouldn’t have the recordings today. Thanks!
Oh yeah. That name of the school is Skolegades Skole – have a look.
I downloaded Windows Vista Pre-RC1 today. A 2.5 gb download – good thing we have a fast connection at work.
I figured, since we have to return our laptops at work, why not test run Vista on it now. It sucks we have to let the laptops go, but we got some badass desktop machines instead, much better suited for software development. Anyway, the Vista install went pretty smooth, but a couple of drivers were missing, like audio. The cool thing though is that they were installed automaticly the first time I connected to the internet. Neat, and you don’t have to worry about proprietary drivers like you do on linux – since all of them are proprietary. Not nessecarily a good thing, but did make my life easier at least for a little bit.
Vista’s Areo interface is really nice and the effects reminds me a lot of Mac OS and XGL on linux. My 1.6 ghz laptop was measure as a 2.0 with Vista performance tool. The radeon M300 was dragging everything down in the rating, but still Windows feels responsive – so maybe not that big of a deal. Overall Vista is great, but I dislike the fact the everything at the top of the screen – menubars, etc – turn black whenever you maximize a window. It feels like the top inch of your screen is missing.
They funny thing with Windows – when you’re done installing, have run a few of the included programs but not really satisfied with eg. mail program, word processing, etc. you don’t have the option to just download and install something better or different. That’s what I love about linux, apt-get is your friend!
So it finally happened. I got home after work and a nice swim and there they were. The big 80.0 digits on the weight. Finally all the cycling, swimming and other stuff I’ve been doing the past couple of months have payed off – rawks! 😀
Back when I started on all this I was on around 86-87 kg, so this is really nice. I guess the next goal should be at least a couple of kilograms below 80, but it would be nice to be around 75. We’ll see how it goes 🙂
I’ve been tired of the default brown Ubuntu theme for a long time and for the past couple of months I’ve used a blue-ish theme with this wallpaper. This was getting kinda old too, and looks to similiar to Windows I guess. So I search the web once again for a new background for my computer ‘s screens.
I ended up liking this one quite a bit, and ironically it fits very well with the default brown Ubuntu theme.
If you have a dual monitor setup there’s a bunch of nice wallpapers over here that’s worth checking out.
Once in a while I need to convert some video files so they are playable on my Ipod. I can never remember all the parameters I need to specify to ffmpeg, so I hacked together a small scripts that does all the magic. It does a two-pass encoding of the video file and the quality is quite nice.
You can get the script here. If ffmpeg complains about missing codecs, etc. simply get it from Debian Multimedia.
If you insist on running ffmpeg directly you can try these parameters, that’s what I used to do before I made the script.
ffmpeg -i [in file] -vcodec xvid -b 384 -s 320x240 -qmin 2 -qmax 5 -bufsize 4096 -acodec aac -ab 96 -g 300 -pass [1 or 2] -passlogfile /tmp/ffmpeg.stats -f mp4 [out file]