I just discovered the perfect solution to one of my biggest problems in recent memory, i.e. controlling playback of my music playing on my Home Entertainment Computer. It’s called mpd and I love it. I love it I love it I love it I love it. Why didn’t anyone tell me about this earlier? It lets me remote control music playback on my entertainment machine from virtually any device in my flat. Well, I don’t think there’s an mpd client for coffee brewers yet, but still.
Archive for the 'Linux' Category
As I mentioned earlier, my MacBook broke down and went for surgery. It has now been discharged to my workplace with a clean install, but since I’m currently enjoying my last 1.5 months of vacation before I quit the job, I can’t be bothered to start using it again before I definitely have to hand it over to my successor.
The unclean exit of my Mac usage process has resulted in at least one problem so far. I was happily using iCal to schedule events and remember what has happened and what is going to happen (my calendar has always been an extension of my own memory). Before I sent my Mac away, I wasn’t so smart as to export all events into calendar-specific .ics files. On the other hand, I wasn’t even able to do so since the only backups I got was through single user mode. So I decided to export my calendar events myself and start using Google Calendar instead.
Continue reading ‘Exporting iCal events from the Library to Google Calendar’
I just upgraded my Wordpress along with all my active plugins, and apparently the WPG2 plugin has broken my blog. When trying to read a full blog post, you are instead redirected to my gallery’s front page.
I’ll try to fix the problem asap.
Since I began using the IRC about 3-4 years ago, I’ve come around to write a couple of scripts for my bot. They’re still not really stable nor user friendly, but they do what they’re supposed to. If I’ve got time and motivation, I might continue the development at some point.
One is a simple “battle/vote” script, that takes a set of candidates as argument and “calculates” the winner. The outcome is displayed in percent. You can battle anything: Batman vs Penguin, bananas vs mangos, youtube vs work vs coffee break. But if you throw in Chuck Norris in the fight, he’ll always win.
The other is a reminder script that someone actually might find useful. It can be set to remind anyone of anything at any time (not in the past, though). The time syntax is really liberal, you can tell it to remind you on a specific date and time or in a relative time in the future (like “5 hours”). You can also ask the script to show all active reminders and cancel reminders.
You can find them on the Projects page.
This week I’ve been fiddling around with my thesis application, trying to get it up and running again after a hibernation period of almost a year. A lot of things had changed since I last used it, both on the department server and in our database, so I was in for some serious glueing, duct taping and debugging. Most of the problems were quite straight forward to fix, such as the database being out of date, some protocols having changed and so on. But there was one thing I just couldn’t understand.
When my web application tried to create an HttpSession object by calling getSession(true) on the HttpServletRequest instance, it returned null! According to the servlet 2.4 specification, the method must return a new session if it doesn’t exist, so this was just insane behaviour. By reflex, I started Googling for some answers, and it actually took me a while to find the solution.