Details

Created: 09 August 2010

For some reason Debian and NetBeans doesn’t go hand in hand. At least not on my machines. I haven’t been able to get updates through NetBeans – or get any other Java program to connect to the internet after switching to sun-java6.

The solution is quite simple. Try adding this to the end of netbeans.conf in /usr/local/netbeans-6.x/etc/ (depending on where you installed NetBeans of course):

-J-Djava.net.preferIPv4Stack=true

It should be append to the end of netbeans_default_options.

If this doesn’t work, try running this command (one line!):

sudo sed -i ‘s/net.ipv6.bindv6only\ =\ 1/net.ipv6.bindv6only\ =\ 0/’ /etc/sysctl.d/bindv6only.conf && sudo invoke-rc.d procps restart

The problem is that sun-java6 and Java applications on Debian is f*cked up due to ipv6.

Details

Created: 26 May 2010

At work we just hit a jar hell thanks to maven2 dependency management. We have this jar, xml-apis-2.0.2, which has been relocated to 1.0.b2, but in this jar we do not have all the classes we need. E.g. we’re using some functionality added to 1.3.x, but even though we include this version (depend on it) maven doesn’t care. It should be closer in the dependency tree, but we just keep on getting this error:

[exec] [DEBUG] While downloading xml-apis:xml-apis:2.0.2
[exec]   This artifact has been relocated to xml-apis:xml-apis:1.0.b2.

[exec] [DEBUG]       xml-apis:xml-apis:jar:1.0.b2:compile (selected for compile)

If I figure out whats wrong I’ll let you know…

Details

Created: 10 March 2010

A colleague of mine had a BSOD (blue screen of death) during boot. Suddenly his machine rebooted and then he got a BSOD causing the machine to reboot, new BSOD, reboot, and so forth. As he couldn't read the BSOD (force reboot on BSOD was enabled as it is by default on the Windows platform).

I did some searching on google and found a solution - press F8 during startup. This way you get a longer list of possibilities to choose boot method. One of these methods is "Disable automatic restart on system failure" thus giving you a chance to see the BSOD error message.

Hopefully this will help some poor people stuck on the Windows platform :)

Details

Created: 11 November 2009

When working with jQuery it is very easy to disable right click (context menu) on a web page:

$(document).ready(function(){
    $(document).bind('contextmenu',function(e){
        return false;
    });
});

Thats it! Simple enough for you? jQuery is pure power.

Details

Created: 14 October 2009

One great way to improve performance is to define how swap space is used. A swap partition is where the Linux kernel caches data in virtual memory to quickly swap into RAM as and when it's needed.

A dedicated partition isn't compulsory, but the space is also used to store your machine state if you choose to hibernate. The effects of this tip depend on your system and whether you have a swap partition, but if you have plenty of RAM you'll find that reducing swappiness will give you a noticeable performance boost.

This will allow the kernel to cache data in memory for faster access and reduces the amount of data being swapped in and out of swap space at any given time. Simply open /etc/sysctl.conf in a text editor with root permissions, then append the following line to the bottom of the file:

vm.swappiness=10

Details

Created: 25 September 2009

At work I'm kinda stuck on the Windows platform. For some reason unknown to me the company is in love with Microsoft - I'm just trying to live with it.

Anywho, I would like to monitor our projects under SVN - or at least some of them. To do this I use CommitMonitor - a pretty neat tool. I could write a lot about it but instead I'll just link to a blog entry on toughtblog.com: "Need to Monitor your SVN projects? Use CommitMonitor

Small yet useful. Currently last commit was on 30th of August - 2009! So it seems like its still active :)

An alternative to CommitMonitor could be SVN Monitor, which seems like a great project. Unfortunally for me I don't have the time to play with it, so CommitMonitor is fine for me for now. SVN Monitor looks as if it is a bit larger and not a "simple" monitor of commits, but can also detect conflicts in your current project. If this is the case, then thumbs up! :)

Details

Created: 18 October 2009

Perhaps you are using maven2 locally. If this is the case, then perhaps you don't want to run the tests each time you are building. In this case you can build using 'mvn -Dmaven.test.skip=true', but if you're a bit like me you forget this. But wait, simply create a system environment variable called _MAVEN_OPTS_ (Windows, Linux, likewise):

-Dmaven.test.skip=true

Mine looks like this (a bit of memory management as well):

-Xmx1024m -Xms512m -Dmaven.test.skip=true

Details

Created: 25 September 2009

A colleague of mine got this error some time ago and after goggling for some time he almost gave up, but luckily for him he found the solution thus this entry.

It might seem that there exists some problem of some sort with the certificate, but this is not the case. The signtool is simply of a very old version (when it works, why upgrade??). What this version does it to look for msjava (that being the Microsoft version of the JVM). This version is long gone from Microsofts own pages and it can be somewhat hard to find. Hint, search for "msjavx86.exe".

Details

Created: 17 September 2009

Sometimes it is not possible to alter the apache conf thus making caching and gzipping close to impossible. But wait, this is not a problem, simply use .htaccess :)

For enabling caching you should add the following to .htaccess:

# 480 weeks
<FilesMatch "\.(ico|pdf|flv|jpg|jpeg|png|gif|js|css|swf)$">
Header set Cache-Control "max-age=290304000, public"
</FilesMatch>

# 2 DAYS
<FilesMatch "\.(xml|txt)$">
Header set Cache-Control "max-age=172800, public, must-revalidate"
</FilesMatch>

# 2 HOURS
<FilesMatch "\.(html|htm)$">
Header set Cache-Control "max-age=7200, must-revalidate"
</FilesMatch>

This will cache pdf, jpg, css, js and so forth for 480 weeks. You can always change this, if this isn't what you prefer (it probably ain't). xml and txt files will be cached for 2 days and finally html and htm files will be cached for 2 hours. You can create your own rules, this just gives you an idea.

Then gzipping, this can really speed things up thus being a good idea. On of the downsides is that the user could feel that the page is a bit slower as he could (depending on browser impl.) be looking at a white page until the entire page is loaded... But this shouldn't be considered a downside imho.

Add the following to your .htaccess and your ready to go:

<IfModule mod_deflate.c>
<FilesMatch "\.(js|css)$">
SetOutputFilter DEFLATE
</FilesMatch>
</IfModule>

This will gzip js and css files. Again, you can extend as you like :)

Details

Created: 15 August 2009

After upgrading to KDE4 on my laptop I noticed that my mouse doesn't work as I wanted it to. Scroll didn't work - but the solution is here. I created a small script for this:

#!/bin/bash
synclient TapButton1=1
synclient VertEdgeScroll=1

All you have to do is create the script (remember +x) in _~/.kde/Autostart/_. Then it will be executed on startup :)