Javability (Java, Zaurus, Linux, Live) by Jean-Marc Autexier, Saarland/Germany
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31.12.04 20:49 How to use apt-get through a proxy server (with Suse Linux) ( , , , )

Linux: I use apt to keep my Suse linux box up to date. If you can'T access the apt repository through a proxy, set the environment variables ftp_proxy to and http_proxy (for example "http_proxy=http://proxy-ip:port").

You may also have an active ftp prolem. Use -passive-ftp in this case.

Get more information about apt4rpm under http://linux01.gwdg.de/apt4rpm/.
There is also a good (German) forum at http://www.linux-club.de/viewforum.php?f=62.

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16:34 Install xfce4 on Suse 9.2 with apt ( , , , )

XFCE is a desktop environment like KDE and Gnome (and many other). The main difference to KDE and Gnome is that it is very fast and lightweight, visually appealing and it follows the freedesktop.org recommendations.

Even if you are very happy with your desktop manager, give xfce a try. You will be surprised. I've used KDE for years and love it. But yes, it is a little bit slow and memory consuming. Now I use xfce and love how fast it is. Still I use many KDE application under xfce (kontact, k3b, ...).

suser-ollakka has released xfce4 packages for Suse 9.2. Packages are also available through apt.

Installation

Add suser-ollakka to your /etc/apt/sources.list file.
My file looks like this:
rpm ftp://ftp.gwdg.de/pub/linux/suse/apt SuSE/9.2-i386 rpmkeys update-drpm update-prpm update suser-rbos suser-gbv packman packman-i686 suse-people suse-projects security-prpm security ximian misc mozilla funktronics kde3-stable suser-ollakka


Execute apt-get update, start synaptic and choose all xfce4 packages. Let synaptic resolve all dependencies and start installation.

In login dialog, choose XFCE as desktop manager and login.

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28.12.04 20:25 Asia Tsunami: help victims ( , , , )

It's difficult to think at something else when you see pictures of regions affected by the tsunami.
News (1, 2, 3, 4) are full of horrible pictures.
Some bloggers comment what they have seen or express what they feel.

Please give some donation to help organization and help people which really need it now.

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14:00 Snow in Saarbrücken ( , , , )

Finally we got some snow in Saarbrücken. It's snowing since since morning. Bad for the excursion to Frankfurt that I've planned tomowor with my girl friend.

View from my work room:

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26.12.04 16:04 My Office Desktop ( , , , )

At home, I use since 4 years only Linux and open source applications. Read my previous post.

At the office, I use Windows XP pro. And even if some of you (and specially some of my friends) will kill me for this, I really think that Windows XP is a good desktop operating system. The major problem is still the lack of transparency that I love on Linux/Unix. You don't know when you change something what it will affect. Sys-V OS with their /etc configuration files are much easier to understand (at least if you want to understand what happens in he background or when you try to identify the source of an error).

Another question is which application I'm running. And here I must say that I see no need for MS anymore.

Mail: I'm used to Outlook because it is the standard at work, but most of the time I use thunderbird, and also kontact on Linux. They offer many advantages that I miss with Outlook. Security, mouse gestures, customization, plenty extensions, themes, very good Bayesian junk mail filter, spell checking, digital signature/encryption, cross platform, message labeling, search folder, ... And all this build in or very well integrated. You don't care about X third party products you have to add to your mail client before getting this functionally.

Browser: not much to say here, Firefox is better than IE in all aspects. Security, accurate rendering, very good html printing, tabs, popup blocker, search without window, extensions (I use weather, blog this, gestures, switch proxy, download manager tweak, rss). All plugins are working nice (java, flash, shockwave, real, acrobat).

Office: OpenOffice 1.x is already quite good, even if sometimes not everything is as expected: look and feel not such nice as other windows apps, few MS office import filter problems, no numbering in tables, ... But it is already very usable. Impress (presentation) worked well most of the time (import of PowerPoint presentation was mostly no problem) and Calc (sheet/excel) was exactly what I needed. But now comes OpenOffice 2.0 and everything I complained about previously is on the roadmap and (more or less) implemented: application looks very nice ("Native System Theme Integration"), no problem for now with any MS Word document, tables look much better and lists/sub-tables are working, more wizards, context sensitive toolbars, digital signature and last but not least: access like database front-end with build-in database (works on external database to through jdbc/odbc). OO Base offers table creation/change, query editor (graphical), forms editor and reports. Try it out, you will be impressed.

Development: being Java developer, I use Eclipse, even though JBuilder is great to (never used IDEA, sorry), but expensive. Eclipse is my development 'workspace'. It integrates Java, C/C+ dev tools, debugger, profiler, web development, database, J2ME, Junit and graphical GUI editor. I missed many thing, so check out Eclipse by yourself and add plugins you prefer.

Updates: Windows update works fine for me, even if I would like not only use it for update but also for installation. I love apt-get, time to port it to Windows :-). FireFox, Thunderbird, Eclipse bring there own update mechanism.

Web editor: Even if NVU is quite new and only beta for now, it offers exactly what I need to maintain my homepage.

Audio editing: Audacity is nice. What I miss is save of midi files, but it is planned.

Project management: I don't think MS Project is good for project management, but at least it makes nice gantt diagrams which are good to explain the schedule other peoples (you should not use it for resource management, automatic schedule ...). A good alternative is Ganttproject. It can build gantt diagrams, assign resources to tasks, export as html, PDF or csv. It is actively developed and you can try the webstart version (no PDF export in this version). Big missing features are: no MS project import/export, focus. Many features are on the wish list.
Update: Open Workbench seems to be a good alternative. Will try it out and blog about it soon.

Charts: I didn't found so far an alternative to Visio. On Linux, kivio is nice, on Windows I tried SmartDraw which I don't like (but at least it is much cheaper than Visio). I saw also Dia but didn't try it out so far. If you know some, let me a comment.
Update: for UML, JUDE seems to be an alternative.

As you see, there are also many good alternatives on Windows to proprietary Software.

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11:09 Best of Praxis: Windows individuell ( , , , )

Best of Praxis: Windows individuell is a collection of (German) Windows tips which explain how to change storage location of Windows directories: temp directory, application, favorites, dllcache, ...
Years ago I used to partition Windows installations into 3 disks: C) system, D) application, E) data.
I gave up because it never worked as expected. There was always an application writting something where it shouldn't. With this list of tips I may try it again.

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25.12.04 18:07 Blogging Year 2004 in review ( , , , )

Few blog entries I wrote in 2004.
January: none
February: faster internet without ipv6 with suse 9.0
March: Mp3 and Ogg with Java sound API
April: build own linux system, Embedded linux introduction, J2ME tutorial
May: Boot linux from windows bootloader
June: Software patents
July: JMimeMagic, Jetty, Compiling Java on Windows
August: Convert anything to text/RTF/HTML
September: (Java) Quality recommendation, JNetStream performace, Oracle multibyte Unicode and Java
October: JCapi
November:, JSMSEngine, OpenEmebedded links, Plustek OpticPro with Kernel 2.6, InetAddressLocator Test
December: Qindows swap file tweak, Java: loop midi file,

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23.12.04 09:15 Jazillian: Why Java is Better than C ( , , , )

Article: Jazillian: Why Java is Better than C. YOu will find other interesting articles about C to Java conversion on the Jazillian page.

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21.12.04 22:31 Pastebin ( , , , )

Pastebin is one of those very helfull services on the net.
Whenever you need to share quickly some code , log file, dumps ... with other people on the net (I mainly use it while chatting), just paste your code and send the URL to your interlocutor.

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20.12.04 13:37 Windows: turn swap off to improve performance ( , , , )

After reading "The Roundup August 2004" and "KeepResident Eclipse plugin", I've decided to give it a try.

I have turned of swap on my Windows XP laptop.

And to my surprise, not only my Java applications are much faster, but the entire desktop is much more responsive. Eclipse is always available, it doesn't stuck for few seconds after it was minimized or in background.

As Keep resistant do it by calling Windows API (SetProcessWorkingSetSize() and VirtualLock()), it would be nice to have such functionality as library which you can call from your application. This way, you could add it to your application and are not dependent of swap memory configuration of the PC.

Update
Checking further, I found the following Swap file tweak: "Open the System Configuration Utility by typing msconfig.exe in the RUN command. There in your System.ini you have to add "ConservativeSwapfileUsage=1" under the 386enh section."
It tells Windows not to use any Swap File until there is really no more free RAM left.

I have turned on swap again and set ConservativeSwapfileUsage. Works fine so far (runs only since few minutes), Eclipse is available immediately after maximize.

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19.12.04 13:07 Easy google on blog titles ( , , , )

You may have noticed the new "Google It!" link under each post. I saw it on Kevin Jones blog and think it is a very good idea.

It allows to quickly search google for similar articles.

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16.12.04 18:43 Java: Play midi file in a loop until stop ( , , , )

The code below allows to select a midi file for endless loop playback until stopPlay() is called. It is more or less identical to this one.

The special thing is: how to loop a MIDI file?
The simplest way is to register as MetaEventListener and catch Midi events (see Midi Event class diagramm)

MetaMessage type 47 signals end of track. When called, playback will be restarted.


private Sequencer sm_sequencer = null;
File midiFile = null;

public class LoopMidiPlayback implements MetaEventListener
{
public LoopMidiPlayback(String strFilename)
{
midiFile = new File(strFilename);
}
public void startPlay()
{
try
{
Sequence sequence = MidiSystem.getSequence(midiFile);
sm_sequencer = MidiSystem.getSequencer();
sm_sequencer.open();
sm_sequencer.setSequence(sequence);
sm_sequencer.addMetaEventListener(this) ;
             
sm_sequencer.start();
} catch (Exception e)
{
e.printStackTrace();
}
}
     
public void stopPlay()
{
sm_sequencer.stop();
sm_sequencer.close();
}

public void meta(MetaMessage event)
{
if (event.getType() == 47)
{
startPlay();
}
}
}

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12.12.04 18:23 Booting Zaurus from the SD Card ( , , , )

Booting Zaurus from the SD Card by Derrick R. Oliphant. This is pretty cool if you just want to test new images without reflashing your Zaurus. Btw: most of this work was done by Daniel Steen

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11.12.04 11:54 Skype, Google alert and Garfield ( , , , )

Browsing around, I decided today to give Skype a try. All I heard until now is that it use end to end encrypted communication and the voice quality is quite good.
Skype is free internet telephony. As with other services (I mainly use siggate), you are charged when you call ordinary phones and it is cheaper than using regular phones (examples: Mauritania €0.291/min, France €0.020/min, USA €0.020/min). You can buy credits using your credit card.

The nice thing with Skype is the user directory. Just enter a name/location and let skype search. Once found, you can add the skype user to your contact list.
The sound quality is really good, subjectively I is better for me than sipgate (which us standard voip).

Please download, install and register on Skype and call me. I don't have many people yet to talk with (most people I know use standard voip).

Google alert is a service which send you an e-mail each time your search keyword appear in news. Pretty usefully when you want to be informed about every good and bad news of your company (or whatever else) without checking all news sites every day. Once you did enter the keyword, you will receive a mail and have to confirm for the registration. From now on you receive a mail each time your keyword appear in the top ten of google news. Read the FAQ for more information.

Check Yahoo comics to be sure to not miss your favorite comic. See Garfield

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9.12.04 18:38 Africa trip - Camel, tea and sand ( , , , )

Back from my Africa trip. This was an impressive experience for me.

It was my first time on African continent, my first desert (I've never seen such beautiful sand), my first personal camel contact (only saw them in zoo so far) and I really love the tea they are drinking every few minutes (green tea with mint and sugar).

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4.12.04 14:48 Wonka ( , , , )

The development of Wonka, a cleanroom Java implementation targeting specially embedded systems continues.

Binary builds for arm and x86 will be available soon, for now you have to build them by yourself.

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