Skeptical Ptarmigan

Schlagerfestivalen, denna årliga orgie i dålig smak och brist på självkritik, når sin kulmen denna vecka. Moskva excellerar med överdådigt sceneri och patetiska programledare. Må bästa låt vinna! Men hur länge sen var det egentligen man röstade på bästa låten? Från början var det en internationell jury som bestämde, och de fick bara höra bidragen, inte se dem. Den begränsningen försvann och med det exploderade låtarnas visuella ackompanjemang. Sen försvann den levande orkestern för ingen brydde sig längre om det ackompangemanget. Och så fick folket vara med och rösta och med det försvann resten. Nästan.

Nu vet vi alla hur det gick med “må bästa låt vinna”. Vi får inte rösta på egna landets bidrag, så vi röstar på grannarna. Norden håller ihop, balkan håller ihop. BeNeLux håller ihop. And finally, from the Greek jury, twelve points goes to … Cyprus! Vi röstar på det bidrag från grannationerna som är mest spektakulärt på scen.

Det är inte bästa låt som vinner längre, utan bästa grannlåt.

I’ve had enough with troubles trying to get wdconsole/consolewd running on my Mac mini with Ubuntu. And the only reason for Linux was that weather logging thing. So I gave up and am now building a mac native weather data logger, with proper USB handling, free from library dependencies and full plug and play as it should be on a mac. Have a working prototype capable of getting all data from WMR100N, but need to complete it with some DB update. Stay tuned!

Update: I’m putting up a new page for this.

Having your own weather station is fun. Making charts of rainfall, UV radiation and temperature is pure porno. But unless you’re kinky enough to consider the GUI below to be sexy, prepare for resistance.

I hope no one takes offence, that software (Weather Display) does what it should, but in my eyes it’s just… uh, Windows 3.11. There is a web add-on you can buy which looks nicer, but that will cost you US$113 which is way off. So I have decided to write my own software where I control the colours. (more…)

I have a few Mac minis now, running various server software. Two on Ubuntu and one still on Mac OS X – but not for much longer since I have found Linux superior when it comes to support for home automation stuff and weather stations. A challenge is to always find the servers when IP changes.

My Web hotel provider Space2u offers a dynamic DNS service and I have registered a few aliases to my servers there. On the Ubuntu servers I have installed EZ-ipupdate to /usr/local/bin, configured with my settings. That takes care of updating the dynamic DNS service. To make sure it’s always running I added it to startup by creating a file “local” like this

sudo nano /etc/init.d/local

and put

#!/bin/sh
/usr/local/bin/dyndns.conf

it it. Then made sure this file is executable and added to the init chain:

sudo chmod +x /etc/init.d/local
sudo update-rc.d local defaults 80

That’s all for dynamic IP handling. Now, to always find the right server when routing through my Airport Base Station I set up port mappings to a fixed local IP, like 10.0.1.222 and added an alias on the server by editing /etc/dhcp3/dhclient.conf and add

alias {  
  interface "eth0";  
  fixed-address 10.0.1.222;  
}

to it. Finish up by hitting

/etc/init.d/networking restart

and Voilá! The Ubuntu server is now listening on a fixed local IP as well but still getting all router and DNS info through DHCP. Next step: install ez-ipconfig on the Mac server, but first some digging in the garden.

Rubrik i svd.se idag:

Ingen ska dömas utan rimligt tvivel

I finally got myself together and dug into layers of dusty and antiquated computer peripherals to get rid of old stuff and reclaim some space in the home office. I found kilometers of unused FireWire cables, USB extenders, various screws for hard disks, two EyeTV boxes I didn’t know I owned, four remote controls, and so on. An old Mac mini resurfaced, a 1.25 GHz PowerPC powered mini with 512 MB RAM and 40 GB HD. Not very impressing these days. Instead of throwing it away, the good friends at 99mac talked me into turning the mini into a server. Good idea. But since Apple has let down the Java community and doesn’t provide Java 1.6 for anything but 64-bit Intels, a Mac OS X based server was out of the question. After all, Java 1.7 is around the corner so why settle for old stuff like 1.5. (more…)

Finally, the Web Framework of web framework, Apache Wicket, now has a bible of its own.

Apache Wicket is an open source, component oriented, stateful web application framework written in Java, created by very smart guys and actively developed by a large, enthusiastic and rapidly growing global community. Out of the box, Wicket comes with full support for creating large, highly scalable, internationalized web applications. Support for AJAX is top of the line, as is support for authentication and authorization, and integration with persistence frameworks. Wicket keeps dependencies between presentation and logic as small as possible, leading to a efficient development process where web designers and application developers can work in parallell to a higher degree than many other web application frameworks. Presentation is plain HTML, and logic plain and pure Java. Goodbye, Tag Soup!

Apache Wicket has been developed since two thousand something and a lively and helpful community is established. The API docs are excellent, but Wicket is based on some core concepts that every beginner must understand, and until now a thorough all-in-one guide helping beginners understand these concepts and navigate from “Hello, world” to a full feathered web application has largely been lacking. This book comes to the rescue and does it with fanfare! I have bought and read the downloadable early access edition and am very satisfied. Martijn Dashorst and Eelco Hillenius are core committers and have been with Wicket for a long time, so they know their baby in every respect, from bits and pieces to grander things like clustering, scaling and deploying of enterprise sized web application. They are also good teachers and present their case step by step, introducing new things when it comes natural.

The book describes all aspects of Wicket application development by building a dynamic web application that makes use of persistence, internationalization and AJAX. The reader learns how to build a high quality web applcation, reuse already made components and how to create and package new components for later reuse. Best practices when developing are described, as is aspects about integration with the Spring framework and Hibernate, activities like testing, catching errors, deploying for production, and so on.

With this book, the Wicket API and the great community, nothing can go wrong! Buy it.

The US election system is a mystery to me. Who is the half delegate?

Mac OS X 10.5 comes with version 2.0.6 of Maven 2 installed. That’s a somewhat buggy version, so upgrade it to the latest version (which is 2.0.8 when I write this). With Mac Ports installed, that’s easy:

sudo port install maven2

Done!

DN skriver om buse med brist för proportioner:

Personen har även stulit flera ägg och eldat upp dessa, med hjälp av 25-30 träd som fällts för ändamålet.