dolejsky.com » Bits and pieces

iOpravna & Apple rulez!

ludek — Wed, 16 Jun 2010 06:00:35 +0000

After 1.5 years my Macbook battery capacity dropped suddenly (only after about 130 cycles). I’ve contacted iOpravna.cz to ask whether it would be possible to get the battery replaced under my 3 year NBD warranty and they’ve sent technician to test the battery (at my place).

Result is positive: I’ve got new battery (for free) that allows me to work 4 hours again!

Good job!

Java – print stack trace to a String

ludek — Thu, 25 Feb 2010 18:54:10 +0000

Simple and quick one today - what if we need to print stack trace into a String?

PLAIN TEXT

JAVA:

...
catch (Exception e) {
StringWriter sw = new StringWriter();
PrintWriter pw = new PrintWriter(sw);
e.printStackTrace(pw);
pw.flush();
String stackTraceString = sw.toString();
//use the stackTraceString as you need...
}
...

Remote Mic now supports both Mac OS and MS Windows!

ludek — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 12:00:07 +0000

Remote Mix is application that turns your iPhone into a wireless microphone (or a bug).

Today, Remote Mic Console 1.3 has been released for both Mac OS 1.5.x and MS Windows XP.

More information here

GrowlTunes patch accepted

ludek — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 11:08:40 +0000

My small GrowlTunes patch (described here) made its way into official release of Growl 1.1.5:

I am happy to have contributed to such a great piece of an open source software.

GrowlTunes 1.1.4 patch

ludek — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 10:31:15 +0000

I use and love Growl! and especially the GrowlTunes plugin which shows you track info when iTunes song changes.

What really annoys me, though - when listening to radio stream, it shows "(null)." instead of track number and there is also only radio name, not song name in the recently played songs menu.

I created small patch. Or download patched binary. Simply unpack and put into your Applications folder (replacing original GrowlTunes if present).

This is how it looked before:

And this is how it looks like after patch:

Quick ‘n’ dirty – manipulate GIF in Java

ludek — Tue, 11 Mar 2008 21:35:55 +0000

I needed to directly modify pixel values of several images in a special way. First, I looked into Gimp's Script-Fu functionality, but this seemed too complicated for what I needed so I decided to write such one-off utility in Java.

It simply reads all GIF images in specified directory, does some custom transformation of pixels, and then writes images back onto disk. It is really quick'n'dirty so be warned

Source code: ImageManipulation.java

Tweaking XOM parser – element position support

ludek — Tue, 22 Jan 2008 09:49:50 +0000

XOM parser is a great piece of code. I was missing just one feature - to be able to get position of element in source file (line and column). So I did a quick and dirty hack resulting in two new nu.xom.Element methods: getLineNumber() and getColumnNumber().

Works nice when used in conjunction with org.apache.xerces.parsers.SAXParser (but wasn't tested with anything else so take care...).

If you're interested, download the original xom-1.1.zip file, unpack and unpack all files from my xom-1.1.position.patch.zip over original ones.

Serious new Google Analytics security problem

ludek — Thu, 17 May 2007 22:14:33 +0000

I ran into a really disturbing security incident in the new Google Analytics interface today. A friend of mine was making me able to see the stats of upcoming accommodation website www.aboveeurope.com and an error occurred during the operation. What a surprise for me it was when I could see the statistics of totally foreign website in my analytics account afterwards!

I contacted Google immediately and will post any new facts here.

See the screenshot of my Analytics account with the stats of website I shouldn't be allowed to see (I don't know that corporation nor I am in any way affiliated with it):

(click to see full image)

openSuse 10.2 on Lenovo 3000 n100

ludek — Tue, 09 Jan 2007 09:55:38 +0000

Installing openSuse 10.2 on Lenovo 3000 n100.

When choosing installation type, it's necessary to use "maxcpus=0" kernel parameter, otherwise kernel hangs - probably a bug (#231205, #227279).

Hardware

Beware of Wifi hardware switch! When switched OFF, system hangs at boot-time when detecting WiFi card.

For correct 1280x800 display resolution (even after hibernate) set VIDEOBIOS_PATCH="yes" and VIDEOBIOS_PARAMETERS="5a 1280 800 32" in /etc/sysconfig/videobios.

Sound card stopped working after every volume change. Adding "model=3stack" parameter helped. Volume up/down buttons ceased to work after keyboard layout change, didn't try to solve it yet.

No problems with Ethernet or WiFi. There is no support for Web camera yet.

Software

Firefox wasn't able to resolve hostnames. Turning off IPv6 in Firefox (about:config, network.dns.disableIPv6=true) helped. Maybe it is just problem with our router.

Amarok cannot play mp3, you have to uninstall xine-lib and install it again from Packman repository. Everything works fine, then.

Tuning

Enabling Eclipse's Ctrl+F11 shortcut
Eclipse's Ctrl+F11 shortcut (Run last launched) didn't work in KDE because it is defined as KDE shortcut (Switch to Desktop 11). Removing this association helped.

Remapping PrtSc to Home and Pause to End:
1. Change following lines in /usr/share/X11/xkb/symbols/pc:
key { [ Home ] };
key { [ Scroll_Lock ] };

2. Make following change in file /~/.kde/share/config/khotkeysrc:

[Data_3_9]
Comment=Launches KSnapShot when PrintScrn is pressed.\n
Enabled=false
Name=PrintScreen
Type=COMMAND_URL_SHORTCUT_ACTION_DATA

Concurrent remote desktop on Windows XP

ludek — Thu, 28 Dec 2006 20:00:21 +0000

Small hack for Windows XP (SP 2) which allows several remote and one local user to work simultaneously.

http://concurrentremotesessions.netfirms.com/