UnderworldLabs.org

Recently fiddling with some favicon creation. I usually use The GIMP to do my image work including favicons but for whatever reason recently, one I was working on just would not render in Firefox (…IE was fine – go figure).

In my subsequent travels i found Favicon Builder.  Simply upload a gif, jpg or png image and it generates a favicon that rendered perfectly. The generated download is a zip archive with a readme file, animated icon as a gif, favicon ico and a couple of scaled png files. Very nice

A recent [documented] change in the debian kernel-package effectively rendered the –initrd flag to a kernel build all but useless (a little harsh, i know). In actual fact, it now only notifies the hook scripts that an initrd is required – however one is no longer created.

This created a little bit of fuss on the various lists and a few bug reports at bugs.debian.org. Some of the more informative ones can be found here and here.

In short, the change was documented in the package NEWS and README files with hints to check out the post script sample scripts and apply these to the relevant directories in /etc/kernel.

I copied over the following:

/usr/share/kernel-package/examples/etc/kernel/postinst.d/initramfs

to

/etc/kernel/postinst.d

and

/usr/share/kernel-package/examples/etc/kernel/postrm.d/initramfs

to

/etc/kernel/postrm.d

From there just a normal build and install and all was well.

I’ve used a few build servers now including Continuum, CruiseControl and Bamboo. I recently started using Hudson and immediately found it easier to set up and use than any of the others. It supports Ant and Maven builds very nicely as well allowing any sort of script or batch execution. Build notifications can be configured using email and RSS.

Uncle Bob of ObjectMentor has posted a quick demo here.

You can download either a WAR file or pre-packaged for your distro including RPMs and Debian packages. Well worth a look.

As my 2 year-old would say – ‘thats a little bit funny’…

From a post with the same name, check out this entry from Joel on Software.

Cracker!

Few things annoy me (and most people I know) more than censorship in all its hideous forms. We are fortunate to live in a country [Australia] and in a time where a plethora of information is available freely, quickly and easily. We honour those who gave their all to provide us with this freedom as we do those who continue to protect it. It confounds me how a democratically elected Government in an apparently free country aims to scuttle that right and freedom as it attempts to force ISPs to censor the internet for all Australians. It is a ridiculous plan and a complete waste of tens of millions of taxpayer dollars that will only slow down internet access and make it even more expensive for everyone.

Support the No Clean Feed campaign by submitting a letter of protest to the Minister or your local Federal MP or simply sign the online petition.

The time and money could be spent in better ways to improve Australia’s (rather poor) digital infrastructure and better educate parents about the risks their children face online. I (as a parent) will monitor and censor what my children can and can not see and do – not the Government.

Please support the No Clean Feed campaign.

Object assemblers for domain to DTO transformations are perhaps one of the more tedious components of your typical n-tier application. They’re rather boring to write, ridiculously laborious and for whatever reason I always seem to need to defend their use – especially in this apparent age of rapid application development.

Frankly, the case for DTOs is well and truly closed – take a look at Martin Fowler’s entry for a good description of the pattern from his book Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture. There’s a heap of other references from a simple Google search.

In this light, I was recently directed to a new assembler library by Rob Monie that he described on Back to Front. Its very easy to use and allows you to manage the process of traversing the object graph quite easily relying on convention over configuration techniques. It goes a long way to taking most of the tedioum of providing an assembler and transformation mechanism for your domain and DTO objects. The project is free and open source on Google Code. Definately worth a look.

I had recently been getting some rather odd segmentation faults when running webalizer against some (not all) of my domains. Problem was that it wouldn’t always happen so i didn’t pay a great deal of attention to it. I later figured the up – then down – then up was related to my log rotation (yeah – duh!), so something in the logs was causing the process to fail.

After some serious digging (it drove me a little nuts) and a plethora of less than helpful tips and references I stumbled across this:  Webalizer – Web Server Statistics “how to”.

Apparently it has something to do with the way browsers accessing the site report their name and that some have multiple parens (‘(‘ and ‘)’) in it. This had the affect of confusing the mangle agent that reports agent names accessing the site. The fix was specifying a MangleAgents value other than 1 (zero or 2 worked fine). I set it to 2 and all is well – I now have all my stats working again.

A recent conversation with a friend reminded of an article i read in Wired magazine back in November 2006 on the genesis and development of the iPod.

I recall it being a really intersting story and it prompted me to look it up on the Wired site so here it is: The Perfect Thing.

Well after some serious stuffing about i finally gave up on vmware. My latest kernel upgrade to 2.6.26.x just wouldn’t play nice regardless of what i did. Advice was sought from relevant places to no avail – even though the number of people with a similar issue was (is) growing. A colleague with an identical issue upgraded to the vmware 2 release candidate and the issue was not noticed there.  There was no inclination to go down that road – its a 450MB+ download, runs in a browser window, and looks like a rather bloated setup compared to the 1.x releases  No problem though as i’ve discovered VirtualBox.

After a little bit of stuffing around to get the bridge networking up and running (vmware did this for you on startup quite nicely), i’m all good now with a couple of guest operating systems installed and running with no issue. Some useful docs and info for setting up with Debian can be found on the Debian Virtual Box wiki here. A huge plus is also that it comes with a neat script to build the vbox module for the running kernel.

Overall, so far VirtualBox is more than a suitable replacement for vmware. Give it a shot if you haven’t already.

Perhaps a recurring theme…

In any case take a look here: http://groups.google.com/group/vmkernelnewbies/web/how-to-install-vmware-in-2-6-26-linux-kernel

Theres a new vmware-any-any patch that fixes the build error under kernel 2.6.26.