This might be Karim's blog ...

jquery and everything surrounding it

2012-01-23T13:40:00.000-08:00

BTW, I'm totally hooked on jquery, jquery-ui and surrounding stuff. A brand new world.

upgrading Ubuntu... the sequel

2012-01-23T13:37:00.000-08:00

Here we go again. I decided to give my virtual Ubuntu install an upgrade shot. Last time I tried, was when upgrading from 10.10 to 11.04, which was quite bumpy as you can read in a previous post. This time I tried to upgrade 11.04 to 11.10. The install went quite smooth, I restarted on request and got my brand new 'unity' desktop after network configuration timed out. So I executed the vmware-config tool to make sure I got the network (and X) drivers compiled for the new kernel (3.0) and restarted again.
Guess what. The network configuration still timed out and instead of X I got a nice black (like blank) screen...
So I started googling. I could still press ctrl-alt-f1 to get a tty login screen, which is good news. After some research I found that Ubuntu migrated from /var/run to /run and a bug in the upgrade scripts caused networking startup and X failures.

Following the steps described in the mentioned post, solved the issue for me. Luckily!

Developing html5/javascript based RIA's

2011-08-24T08:51:00.000-07:00

Lately I was looking for different approaches to develop RIA's based on html5 and javascript. I came across multiple frameworks, some only focussing on the widget side, some tackling the complete dev stack from coding, over testing to deployment.

I'm impressed with sproutcore (JS), rails (ruby) and grails (groovy, spring, hibernate), but Cappuccino (Objective-J, Javascript superset inspired by Objective-C/cocoa) really caught my attention because it integrates with XCode through XCodeCapp-Cocoa so you can actually draw your UI's.

XCodeCapp-Cocoa is currently not yet included in Cappuccino v0.9.0, but it will be merged in the next release. So for now it's a separate install.

Watch the video, it's really cool!

Partition Linux Resources

2011-06-09T06:18:00.000-07:00

I always wondered how to limit processes on linux to a certain % use of CPU. It seems control groups, also called cgroups, provides this feature since kernel 2.6.24. Good to know! And it provides more then 'partioning' CPU ;-)

Check this nice article or the wikipedia page on this subject.

upgrade from Ubuntu 10.10 to 11.04 stuck on grub prompt

2011-05-03T05:42:00.000-07:00

Ok, so I upgraded from the moment 11.04 was released, curious at the unity experience, but...

When doing the initial reboot after the upgrade I got stuck at the grub prompt. Clearly something was broken.

I managed to instruct grub with the root device, pointing to the appropriate 'new' kernel and new initrd image. Something like, if I recall it correctly:

root (hd0,1)
linux /vmlinuz-2.6.38-8-generic root=/dev/sda1
initrd initrd.img-2.6.38-8-generic
reboot

This allowed me to boot the new, upgraded and fresh Ubuntu 11.04.

I had to add a couple of actions to make the fix persistent. After checking on the Internet I found the issue occurs when 10.10 was itself upgraded from 10.04 and grub was never upgraded.

So fire up a terminal and do the following:

sudo grub-install /dev/sda
sudo update-grub

When you reboot the next time everything should be fine.

CDE seems like magic

2010-11-16T03:44:00.000-08:00

No, it's not the archaic Common Desktop Environment. CDE is a Linux application which creates a package out of whatever command that you run and allows you or someone else to run the same command on another Linux box. At least if it's running the same major kernel version (e.g. 2.6.x).

Maybe you'd think this is just trivial, but it's not. CDE makes library dependencies and environment differences between platforms transparent for the user. And CDE solves this issue not only for native binary applications but also for interpreted stuff like complex Python scripts.

Just watch the video on the CDE site to be even more impressed.

In addition to the way you can use CDE as explained on the CDE site, one could also use it to run applications on older infrastructure and platforms if the platform teams don't move fast enough to support your dependencies. Just package the complete CDE package of your application in the platform required format (e.g. rpm), hand it over and you're done. Sounds great!

Browsing 'secure' sites is like being in the Matrix. Security becomes very subjective!

2010-09-24T01:16:00.000-07:00

Reading this article about some key Tomcat 7 features I got really scared about the security related issues which have been tackled. Take a look to the cross-site request forgery (check also the wikipedia explanation of CSRF) and session fixation attack mechanisms. When understanding these issues you'd be really doubting if you want your browser to store private information for ease of use. I don't trust it anymore!

Where is my content?

2009-08-22T05:34:00.000-07:00

It's more then a year now since I blogged the last time. The reason is all my entries are now on the internal blog of the company I'm working at. That's not that public of course. Doesn't matter he.

JEXIN: a framework to test the exception behavior of your Java application

2008-06-02T07:23:00.000-07:00

I just stumbled on this functional testing framework which allows you to inject exceptions so you can test the exception behavior of your application.

Check JEXIN and this article on TSS.

2008-02-09T06:20:00.000-08:00

Cobra is a programming language intended to contain a lot of the nice features of a whole set of programming languages. Now this sounds like a mish-mash and a mission doomed to fail. Right? But if the language is designed from the ground-up just to achieve this bold goal, then it might have a chance. Definitely worth to analyze and maybe try out. Time is ticking...

2008-01-05T05:24:00.000-08:00

Check this great article if you want to have a glimpse on how magic happens in Apple's small design team led by Jonathan Ive. It's quite inspiring, not only for design teams.

Presentation Zen

2007-10-08T16:51:00.000-07:00

He, he... Learning how to make and give presentations from the masters: check Presentation Zen.

LCD monitor test images

2007-09-17T13:18:00.000-07:00

If you want to test your LCD screen, check this site with a lot of interesting test images.

Mac OS X VPN client and Cisco ASA/PIX firewall

2007-08-31T15:12:00.000-07:00

Once I'll be using a Mac laptop to connect to my companies Cisco VPN server. For now I'm using VTUN and it works like a charm on my iMac 17". Apparently their seem to be some quirks to integrate the Mac OS X L2TP/IPSec client with the Cisco server. This article and associated threads however depict some workarounds for these issues.

The Cisco Mac OS X client has apparently an ugly interface design, so nex Umoja created a beautiful GUI on top of the Cisco command line tools in Mac OS X style. Check their site.

Keyboard shortcuts to control windows on macosx

2007-08-11T09:41:00.000-07:00

I've been / I'm a long time Linux user. Since two years I'm an avid macosx user, but what I miss a lot while using macosx are some of the window management features like keyboard shortcuts for maximising vertically windows. Finally I found some solution for this by combining an applescript with quicksilver on this guys blog entry. It's a hack, but whatever, it's a nice solution until Apple finally includes these features in their window manager.

Zoomable User Interface SDK

2007-04-26T13:51:00.000-07:00

Several times I encountered the problem of visualization of a big set of data. Most of the time, depending on how deep a user wants to dig into the data, a different view is needed, such that the view stays informative and not too bloated. Suppose you could zoom in and out on a GUI to see more or less details. Enter the ZUI. Indeed, the Zoomable User Interface.

While surfing around and checking some Human-Computer Interaction stuff, I stumbled upon a software development toolkit supporting this concept. Check the Piccolo site for more information.

Hamachi, a cool P2P VPN solution

2007-03-04T08:22:00.000-08:00

This VPN's architecture is a bit different then usual. Normally a VPN is set up through a VPN server, resulting in a connection from several VPN hosts to a central VPN server. All connections between the peers go through this VPN server.

Hamachi's architecture is different as, a central server is only used to securely discover VPN members, while the secure connection is set up between each host individually in P2P style. Once the connection between peers is set up the mediating server is not required anymore.

Clients exist for several OS's. A cocoa macosx front-end is also available.

Check the Hamachi site and the HamachiX front-end.

KVM: Kernel-based Virtual Machine for Linux

2006-12-27T05:37:00.000-08:00

This is yet another virtualization implementation on Linux. But it seems to be very easy to use. Look at how simple it is to install a (Linux/MS Windows) guest...
To make it even easier, the solution will be included in the standard 2.6.20 Linux kernel. For now, a kernel module can be build for 2.6.16+ kernels.

Writing documentation the DITA way

2006-10-29T11:24:00.000-08:00

Everybody knows it is hard to write good software documentation. Even harder is to manage this documentation and generate several kinds of documentation (eg. high level design, references, help pages) based on the same source of consistent and up to date information.

DITA, the Darwin Information Typing Architecture and the DITA Open Toolkit offer an infrastructure to help with this.

The idea is that any document is build up from different elements (topics) within different domains, which then can be glued together as lego blocks using topic maps.

Check the following article: an introduction to DITA

Tau Ceti

2006-08-19T09:07:00.000-07:00

As you probably observed, the name of the blog contained in the URL is Tau Ceti. This is an alias I used since I was a child, because Tau Ceti intruiged me... big time. Tau Ceti is the name of a close in distance star, with a close spectral and physical (mass and size) fit with our sun, relatively high chance of having planets, hence potentialy hosting life. That's why this star is contained in several top 10 lists of systems to observe in search of extra-terrestrial life.

For more info, google around or check:

Moved away from bloglines

2006-08-19T04:18:00.000-07:00

I used to have a blog on bloglines.com, but I'm discontinuing that one in favour of a blog hosted on blogger.com. The only reason is because the style on this service is much more aesthetically pleasing than the first world war style used by bloglines. Bloglines should definitely add some reasonable templates a user can choose from.
Please move your feed subscription to this blogs feed, if you are still interested ... you never know what the future will bring.