The tale of unfriendly people who don’t give concrete answers, of people who loose their objectivity when it comes to enemy-bashing, and those who behave totally inappropriate

When I review my past weeks, these are the things that come across my mind (besides the fact, that my last ten-or-so postings where totally technical).

[Pentaho] Spoon/Kettle doesn’t start aka. “No swt-win32 in library path”

I just want to post this information as I couldn’t find anything on it in the internet. It’ll just be a “shorty” and applies to you if you’re using a 64bit Windows system, such as my Windows 2003 Server 64bit as a basis for your Pentaho BI system.

…

Finally it seems like there’s a light at the end of the tunnel.

This weekend’s there to regenerate, then there’s gonna be a plan, some missing information to fit in, and after that, in addition there’s going to be loads of free time… the last miles to run, the last steps to take, just some more months, and then that’ll be it!

Looking forward to it.

[Linux] “0.107 No irq handler for vector” aka “Problems with my PCIe Port”

As you may have already guessed, I was currently building a new Kernel for my PC (a md8818), and while doing so I encountered a strange problem, which I didn’t quite understand.

Of course, first thing to do is to ask Google, and I found out that I wasn’t the only one having that trouble, but it also seems like no one really had a solution to it (except for suppressing the symptoms). It took me 11 Kernel builds, until I finally eliminated the problem, so to help you not go through all this mess yourself, I’d like to present the problem plus solution.

Fascinating spambot

I just encountered a fascinating spam bot on my blog. It looks quite normal (just having that URL of a casino-bank-whatsoever page with a thousand of pop ups, and… well you know that stuff), and especially the sentences are well chosen!
It randomly posts something, such as:

Krass, hätte ich nicht gedacht.

An sich ne gute Sache, ich frag mich nur, ob das auch dauerhaft brauchbar bleibt

Ich merke gerade das ich diesen Blog deutlich öfter lesen sollte- da kommt man echt auf Ideen.

It get’s funny when you read such entries on every second posts, and it even get’s funnier, when you find the second entry on a post like the one I made about being from Hamburg…

Anyhow I guess, people could really fall for this one!

[Linux] Arrrgh, strg+s, again!

If you use screen a lot, you may have encountered that when pressing strg+s you cannot do anything on your console anymore. As the accidental strg+s in screen also happen to me a lot, I just figured, to blog about the trick that is explained at Munky Morgys.

In general it’s about countering the strg+s effect with strg+q (no, you do not have to kill your screen session for that ). It also explains the background of this (quite vaguely) – if you are interested in more detail, just have a look at the Wikipedia article.

Still a cool thing is that at Munky Morgys you’re offered some tweaks. Also the comments have some interesting further readings.

Worth a look….

[Linux] Before building a Kernel

This entry is about a little something I wrote down on what you want to do, before building a Kernel. It is aimed for users with some Linux experience that want to build their first Kernel (and fail). It’s not about the building process at all, but about the information process that needs to take place even before building the Kernel!

[Article] New media and the old industry

While looking up some background on the quote I provided on my last entry, I found this really extremly good article by Patrick Pricken in Die Freie Welt (actually Patrick Pricken also posesses a quite interesting personal blog, which I am probably going to add to my blog role). The article is called Drei Hürden für Verlage and it ingeniously puts my thoughts on the music and film industry into words. Although it’s about publishers and their strange behaviour towards the internet and eBooks, you can one-to-one transcribe it to music and movies.

Unfortunately all of this is in German. Maybe (with guidance of these articles ), I’ll write something on my own in English some time…

No good ever comes from the Internet

“I’m a guy who doesn’t see anything good having come from the Internet, period!” (Sony Pictures Entertainment CEO Michael Lynton)

Blogging code

I’ve already written about the problems you’ll encounter, when needing to HTML-ify a source code. The presented solution by Dan Kogi is a work-around solution, if you’ll need special characters to be transformed into HTML entities. Anyhow, if you’ve got a wordpress.com account, there’s a more elegant way. I just found out, that wordpress.com has a widget installed, that allows you to post code, that’ll get syntax highlighted, so, it’ll be possible to post something like this:

/* A little Hello widget application in Java */

public class HelloWidget {
   public static void main(String[] args){
       System.out.println("Hello, Blogommunity!");
   }
}

Pretty neat, isn’t it? I especially enjoy those small icons on the upper right corner (you’ll need JavaScript enabled for this to work!) that allow you to copy the text into clipboard or just let you view it, as is (ideal for copying parts of it, without having to mess around with the line numbering).