If you run IntelliJ och Pycharm on the i3wm Window Manager in Linux, the popup dialogs have an annoying tendency to get closed before you have a chance to actually open the file. They close as soon as there’s even the most minuscule mouse event, even as small as the mouse trembling a bit due to you typing on the keyboard.

Had a problem with the letsencrypt certificate used to secure my Home Assistant computer at home. It was not renewing.

I’m in the middle of moving a REST API cluster from one datacenter to another at work. This also involves moving off bare metal hosts and onto Openstack virtual machines in an internal Openstack cluster.

There are many ways of setting the fully qualified domain name on a Linux machine. Some set it directly in /etc/hostname, something which, after reboot, will make the hostname command return the fqdn:

My webpages started out running Plone, and I think it was on some old machine I kept running somewhere.

Today I’ve spent a couple of hours at MakersLink. I have a couple of MySensors sensors at home, but it’s been a long time since I had time to deal with it. So today I’m starting off what I hope will be a weekly activity - an evening at the makerspace to get some stuff done.

Was trying to connect to zookeeper with kerberos authentication. This was giving me the following “helpful” error message:

Bought a new computer. Had some trouble with the fan controller built into the chassis, so got a couple of PWM fans instead since the motherboard can control 1 CPU and 3 chassis PWM fans.

At work, I use Apache ZooKeeper to coordinate a distributed service. I find ZooKeeper very easy to work with and program against, but as all software, it can be troublesome now and then.

I had the following happen for every new java process on one of my servers the other day:

I’m using Hadoop Streaming a lot. It’s exit codes has been something of a mystery, so today I decided to find out by looking at the source code.

I’m working on a rather large reporting and analytics application that runs on top of Hadoop at work. It has tests. A whole bunch of them, actually. That’s good.

Yesterday some of the servers I care for at work were moved to a different network. After the move, all puppetd runs started to take a very long time. Where it would usually take 10-15 seconds, it now timed out with errors like:

I was rebalancing one of the Hadoop clusters I run at work. It was not running very fast, so I modified the appropriate setting:

apt-get install pwgen

In the category Stuff I really should have learned several years ago, I now know that the keyboard combinations for copying and pasting in gnome-terminal is Shift-Control-C and Shift-Control-V

They never work as intended the first four times you run them.

This website runs on a virtual machine I buy from Slicehost. I’ve also choosen to use their DNS servers for my domain - the service is stable and included in the price.

When trying to get my local development copy of this website running after upgrading my Ubuntu, I got the following confusing error message from the psycopg2 python module:

My girlfriend runs a blog on a cheap hosting firm that doesn’t provide any way of doing proper SQL dumps of the MySQL database used by the blogging software.

For a while, I used Duplicity to make backups to an Amazon S3 bucket. That kind of worked, but I had to do a lot of scripting myself to get it working automatically, so after finding out about Jungledisk, I switched to that. Jungledisk has a nice little desktop applet that keeps track of doing my backups while my computer is on, etc. That’s convenient.

I got a new toy today - a GPS logger. Got it as part of a magazine subscription deal - two issues + GPS logger for about $12. That magazine was not my kind of magazine, but getting a GPS logger delivered home for $12 was worth having to throw away two magazine issues :-). For other people trying to get this to work under Linux, the magazine in question was Aktiv Träning.

Playing with my GPS logger, I wanted to know the distance travelled between all the points in a GPS log. For example, if I went for a bicycle trip and brought the logger, it would be nice to know how many kilometers I have travelled.

If you run a modern computer, chances are high that you have a multi-core processor. That forces us into paralell programming to get more performance, which is much harder than doing serial programming.

I’m on a bus4you with destination Oslo for a visit to Opera Software’s main offices. The bus has wireless internet. That’s good, I’ve been reading webpages on map-reduce, distributed filesystems and other interesting stuff the whole trip.

I went to a seminar about Scrum today at ENEA. It was one of those “let’s have a seminar and then give people free food and beer so they buy more consultants from us” type of events.

The ATI fglrx driver I run against my ATI RS690 chip in my dualhead setup definitely has its quirks. When resuming from disk, both monitors must be turned on when I press the computer’s power button, or the X server will behave very odd.

For a long time, I was a Plone user and developer. I tried hard to keep myself convinced that Plone was the solution to many web-related problems, not only strictly Content Management-related ones, but all sorts of web applications.

I’ve never had any luck with the suspend to disk functionality on Linux, but now, after upgrade to Ubuntu 8.10, it’s working, even at my home workstation with mirrored disk setup.

Today I had the need to calculate the automatically assigned IPv6 adress I knew a host probably had since the network has a router advertisment daemon.

I upgraded my home workstation to Ubuntu 8.10 the other day. I was kind of worried that this would cause trouble with my X Window System setup. I’ve had major trouble with my Samsung Syncmaster 204b before, with its faulty DVI implementation being the major source of trouble.

I’m currently in the process of transferring my CD collection into digital format for use with my Squeezebox. This is a major project when you own around 300 CDs..

As promised in Yesterdays post, here are some data on the performance of Squeezecenter on an QNAP TS-109 II running Debian Lenny.

I have now managed to get Squeezecenter running on my QNAP TS-109 II. Squeezecenter is the server a Squeezebox network music player connects to in order to get hold of its music.

I think I hit Django bug #6681 yesterday. It’s the kind of bug that triggers only if three completely different conditions are met at the same time, where at least one of them depends on timing. In this case:

I bought a second hand Squeezebox the other day. The Squeezebox must read its files from a server running Squeezecenter, and since I don’t want my workstation running all day (it’s consuming energy. I’m trying to be environmentally friendly when I can), I had to find a low-power alternative.

Leif Nixon skriver i sin blogg Tankar från rooten om hur vi kommit ett steg närmare sovjet eftersom SJ ska börja kräva legitimation för inriker resor.

I have been intrigued by IPv6 for a long time. The worldwide challenge of smoothly switching from IPv4 to IPv6 without end-users noting the switch is fascinating.

I realized after some testing that neither Postfix (my MTA), nor Dovecot listened to IPv6 by default. In both cases, enabling IPv6 was easy.

I’ve been using reStructured Text for documentation purposes for a couple of years, but I have never read the full specification, only the quick reference, and I probably read that rather.. quick. So quick indeed that I have always been irritated because I couldn’t find how to write hyperlinks without having to list them at the end of the document.

As mentioned earlier on this blog, I have converted this site from Plone to Django.

I’ve written a Django product which helps integrating ViewVC in a Django Site.

• My 20” 1600x1200 LCD at home feels very small, because I’ve got 24”+19” at work (dual screen setups ROCKS when programming!)
• The lever for regulating the slope of my home office chair is on the opposite side compared to the one of office office chair.

My girlfriend has been studying logistics the past 2½ years. This is beginning to get noticeable. Today I asked her to send me a shopping list for some dinner ingredients via e-mail.

Jag och sambon går promenad. Vi passerar en fårhage.

Yesterday evening was one of those frantic hacker moments when you really really want to get the piece of software you’ve been working on for a while up and running, even if it’s getting really late and you know you have to get up early the next morning. The broken feed, showing pseudo-HTML to the user, was one effect of that. Has now been fixed by use of the safe filter tag.

This is the first post on the rewritten efod.se, now running a set of django apps instead of Plone. Yay!

I came back to work yesterday after four weeks of vacation. Not doing much coding during such a long period of time has its effects. Here’s the first line of a shell script I wrote yesterday afternoon:

I måndags satt jag i en kanot halvfull med regnvatten iförd vadarstövlar, tre lager kläder innanför regnstället och ytterst en flytväst. Kanoten befann sig mellan två rader av i en dyig sjöbotten nedbankade pålar och jag ägnade mig åt att med hjälp av bland annat en i tre platspåsar insvept sladdlös skruvdragare borra hål i och montera reglar mellan nämnda pålar. Regnet öste ned, uppifrån, bakifrån, framifrån, från sidan och dessutom skvätte det in i ansiktet på mig när regnet träffade reglarna och studsade därifrån in under kepsen. Dessutom blåste det. Jättemycket.\

My girlfriend runs a wordpress-powered blog. Yesterday, she decided to upgrade it from 2.0.6 to 2.5. A good decision given the fact that the old version had a known security vulnerability.

After five years at Cendio, it’s time for a change. From 2008-07-01 I’ll be working at Opera Software, with the Opera Mini browser.

Quoting myself from the other day:

For a long time, I have wanted to know which loglevel to set in OpenLDAP’s slapd.conf to get just errors in the log. For many years, I have obviously been too quick in reading the manual page slapd.conf(5).

I just moved this site to a new host, for two reasons - the first being that it is boring to keep physical hardware running, so I’m now running on a Xen slice I rent from Slicehost. The second reason is to be announced soon..

A while ago, I decided to buy a new computer. I had three main requirements:\

Today, I found out that different paragraph styles in OpenOffice can have different languages, which is the reason why the Tools->Options->Language->Languages setting flips back when you change it. You need to modify the language in the popup that appears when you press F11. Right-click on a paragraph style and choose Modify, then go to the Font tab. There it is!

*Dear SonyEricsson.
*

The municipality of Linköping distributes a magazine, DIALOG, to all its citizens four times a year. The articles are about subjects like the new fire station, upcoming big events in the city, etc.

As Tarek noted the other day, I’ve added a template for injecting content types into an existing Archetype product, using Mustap’s
localcommands support for ZopeSkel. \

\

I’vepreviously written about my adventures in getting my Samsung 204b, made in Slovakia, to work properly in 1600x1200 at 60Hz (short story: Can’t be done due to bugs in their DVI implementation). \

When I woke up this morning, the last dream was still left in my head. It was, as all dreams, strange:\

In todays issue of Dagens Nyheter, the largest morning paper in Sweden, an article about pensions caught my eye, not so much because of the subject, but because of the URLs they referred to in the article. Here are the three URLs they referred to:

I had one comment on my last post asking for information about the converter from sourceforge to roundup. \

For over a year, I’ve been working on replacing the bug tracker used by the python project. Earlier, they used the horrible bug tracker provided by sourceforge. Now, since last thursday, they are using their own tracker based on roundup.

Every time there’s a new post on this blog:

As the swedish summer was getting more and more depressing (rain, rain, a minor storm, some more rain, and.. perhaps some rain for a change?), me and the girlfriend bought a last-minute trip to Nessebar, Bulgaria and went there in the middle of july.

Today, I made the mistake of adding a <myproductname>-sv.po file in the i18n directory of my product, which accidentally were marked with

During the last few days I’ve had time to do some programming just for fun. When you combine vacation and bad weather, you can be very productive :-).

About a year ago, the infrastructure team of the python language projectsent out a call for trackers. They had come to the conclusion that the tracker available at sourceforge was not good enough. I can understand that - it’s very hard to use, and since it’s running on sourceforge’s servers, it can’t be customized.

Yesterday was spent moving the computer resources at work (Cendio AB) from our old offices to our new ones. Quite an exhausting day.

One or two years ago, I spent some time trying to understand how to connect Plone 2.0 to LDAP. I really had no luck as things were complicated. Reading out existing users from the directory might have been possible, but trying to create users was a thing never heard of.

Det ringde på mobilen, från någon med dolt nummer. Jag svarade och sa mitt namn.

I spent part of the evening writing the embryo of a python module that will hopefully make it easy to access SugarCRM from Python via SOAP. \

There are so many interesting books I want to read that I often end up reading several books at once. Here’s my current list of unfinished titles:

Bought a book (Web Component Development with Zope 3) on amazon.co.uk. A few days later, I got a mail from amazon with six recommendations for other books they thought I might like.

Yesterday, I read one of the teaser chapters of Pragmatic Unit Testing in Java with JUnit. It was a very interesting chapter, so I eventually ordered the book. \

My girlfriend has a hosting account at one.com for her domain (number of .se-domains owned by the two people in this household: Three). Until now, she has been running static html pages generated by Dreamweaver, but a month or so ago, she decided she wanted to go for Wordpress.

The weather in LInköping is really cool right now. There’s a major storm (weather service warns about 30m/s winds) and some rain. \

Made myself a new fishtank. It has two rather large Salmon Salar.

Note: This instruction is valid for the ATI driver included with Ubuntu Feisty Fawn (7.04). There’s another entryon how to get it working in Ubuntu Gutsy (7.10).\

During the holidays, I came up with some really really really bad jokes.

Windows is full of surprises. Today I removed the DHCP server role from a Windows 2003 Server. The removal process asked me for the installation CDROM.

WHAT THE …
\

Today I had to install Ubuntu on one of the older machines in the computer room. It’s a 1U server without CDROM drive.

Got a new phone at work today, a Sony Ericsson M600i. It’s a 3G phone. Unfortunately, our cellular network provider (Tele2) requires you to change SIM-card to a new one when you want to use 3G instead of just GSM. The SIM-card has been ordered and will probably be in my hands tomorrow.

I finally have upgraded this site to Plone 2.5.1. There’s no big changes for the casual viewer. About the only visual changes are in the blog, which I’ve upgraded from Quills 0.9 to Quills trunk. In the non-visual department, the syndication feeds now contain category names, which will make technorati happier. Speaking of technorati

• I wonder why it doesn’t pick up changes to this blog. \

An excuse to those of my readers who get this blog via one of the syndication feeds (RSS,Atom,etc): I’m sorry about all the “new” entries yesterday and today. I’ve upgraded my blog software and removed lots of spam, and that caused the timestamps of the entries to be updated, which triggered new publication in the feeds.

My neighbours (and friends) Ola and Karin just got their Canon EOS 400D.

I spoke to a customer today. He’s head of the IT department for a middle-sized organization with 6000 users.

Jag sätter mig i planet och knäpper fast fyrpunktsbältet. Går igenom checklistan, kopplar bogserlinan och stänger huven. Ger OK-tecknet till killen vid vingen. Han signalerar till bogserplanet.

Tittade på ett inspelat avsnitt av Fråga Anders och Måns.

For the last days, I’ve been doing some heavy Plone development for a community site that hopefully will be launched sometime during the next few days. Although I have done a fair amount of Plone development earlier, this time, I did learn a lot, especially about ArchGenXML.

Mmm..

Me and my girlfriend ordered a printer a few weeks ago. Today, it finally arrived.

SuSE är en konstig Linuxdistribution. De älskar att göra allting annorlunda och gärna på ett sätt som ställer till det för oss som vet hur man gör på alla andra distributioner. Don’t get me started när det gäller deras kreativa tolkning av hur PAM och NSS ska fungera.

Det här inlägget är en fetdissning. Riktigt rejäl.

I was on a business trip to the east coast of Sweden last week. I took one photo from a place called Timmernabben.

Idag var jag åter en gång tvungen att brottas med vår TV-möbel. Den är köpt på Mio för några år sedan, och jag tror inte de har modellen kvar. Det är bra, för den är nämligen totalpuckad;

Just found out about Kivaoorg, an organization that gives micro-loans to poor people around the world.

I just ordered a KiSS DP-588. It’s a networked DVD-player with harddrive recorder. I have a colleague who has one, and he’s very satisfied with it.

• The correct settings for talking to a Fujitsu-Siemens Primepower 250 (or a Sun VFire 250, or probably any sun) via the serial console port is 9600 8N1, no software handshake, no hardware handshake.

Yay! I’ve started to understand how to use the Zolera Soap Infrastructure to communicate with the SOAP interface of SugarCRM. Todays understatement is hereby delivered: It’s not the easiest thing in the world. It doesn’t help that most of the methods in the SOAP interface of SugarCRM are documented like this:

Some notes from todays work…

Some notes from todays work..

Now and then, I’ve made half an attempt to make my Gnus archive messages in an IMAP box, but so far, I’ve failed with various spectacular error messages.

I’ve started to collect some of my photos for use as wallpapers. Check out http://efod.se/wallpapers for the three photos I’ve added so far.

Det regnar. Hela tiden, och massor.

Igår lade jag ett brev på postlådan. Det var adresserat till Luftfartsstyrelsen i Norrköping, och innehöll ett papper med titeln “Ansökan om utfördande av segelflygarcertifikat”, ifyllt och påskrivet av en av mina segelflyglärare, och underskrivet av mig.

Så lär en anonym socialdemokratisk kampanjstrateg ha sagt till en journalist på Dagens Industri.

Min syster kläckte just en ultimat valslogan:

Blodcentralen i Linköping har ont om blod med blodgrupp 0, och vädjar till blodgivare att höra av sig.

Jag ringer ned för att kolla om jag kan hjälpa till, för jag har 0+.

- “Hmm.. nä, du är inte mogen förrän den 8:e september, men tack för att du ringde!”

Det var väl det jag misstänkte. Jag har alltid kännt mig lite omogen. Men den 8:e september är det alltså officielt slut på det!\

Jag och sambon sitter i bilen och lyssnar på radio. Det är Lena Philipsson som sjunger låten som mest går ut på att “Jag heter Lena Philipsson…”. Den är rätt kass.

Det är grått. Och två plusgrader varmt.

Today I began working on replacing the NIS installation at work with an LDAP database.

…finner vi hos Tele2Comviq, där denne någon kommit fram till att klockan 04 på morgonen, det är en riktigt bra tid att skicka ut SMS med fakturainformation till abbonenterna, för då är risken som allra minst att kunderna vaknar av pipet från mobilen!

Om man knökar ned två vissna krukor basilika högst upp i soppåsen, så luktar soporna sedan gott!

The excellent male choir Lihkören offered me two free tickets to their spring concert at the end of April in exchange for me taking some photos from the Concert. This was an offer I couldn’t refuse! :-)

Today I was lying on the kitchen floor, eating peanuts while boiling pasta, all at the same time! That’s three things: Lying down, eating peanuts and boiling pasta!

På mitt skrivbord på jobbet står nu:

..själv är jag bra på att göra illa mig så att det gör ont.

I was puzzled yesterday when I uploaded a file via WebDAV. Since the file was equipped with a Content-Type header, I expected it to be parsed as reStructured Text. Instead, it appeared as a DTML document. The horror! The horror!

/etc/init.d/zope2.8 restart didn’t work on my Ubuntu Server 5.10. It turns out that it’s using Ubuntu’s homebrewn dzhandle script to handle plone instances. You are supposed to create instances using dzhandle. If you do, there’ll be a file named debian_policy in the etc directory of the instance, and if that file exists, dzhandle will recognize the instance and happily restart it.

Erik pysslar med datorn. Försöker få ljudet att funka.

Redan i femman fick jag veta att jag inte har något bollsinne. Det var min jumpalärare som berättade det för mig och min far på ett kvartssamtal.

För några månader sedan var jag och sambon och skulle handla fiskar till mitt akvarium på en av de lokala djuraffärerna. Eller snarare, jag skulle handla fiskar, och min stackars sambo fick vänta under tiden jag väntade på att få handla fiskar.

A few days ago I visited a customer, installing Fedora Core 4 on a Dell Poweredge 1855, a blade server. This proved to be rather difficult when it came to network connectivity.

Jag har provat.

Yesterday I spent some time evaluating the Open Source version of SugarCRM, since the salespeople at work wants to see if a CRM can help them.

Plone 2.1-2.1.2 has an irritating bug - HTML files uploaded via WebDAV gets the filename as page title, which looks very ugly.

Var ute på promenad med sambon i det vackra vintervädret, och fick se det första säkra vårtecknet - Två snubbar var ute och åkte skateboard :-).

February is the month where you get the papers from the swedish study loan authority with information about how much you’re supposed to pay back this year.

Ibland är man för snäll för sitt eget bästa. Idag var en sådan dag. Min syster är en stor fan av melodifestivalen, och var idag TV-lös, och dessutom var hon trött efter en tenta och det var lite allmänt synd om henne, så jag kom med förslaget att hon skulle komma hem hit och titta på melodifestivalen. Det gjorde hon ju, tyvärr, gärna..

Watched The Brothers Grimm on DVD. Peter Stormare is really the King of Weird Roles. In this movie He’s playing a very Monty Python’ish italian guy, specializing in the art of torture. I also remember him as the weird eye doctor in Minority Report - it’s very funny when his assistant is singing “Små Grodorna, Små Grodorna” :-).

Today, the marketing person at work came and told me that he wanted a signup form for a usergroup meeting we’re planning. Something simple that mailed him with the relevant information.

Gah! Watched Changing Lanes yesterday. It was quite OK, especially since I was quite tired - any movie would probably have done :-).

My Girlfriend is very interested in knitting. Today, she took the What Kind of Knitter Are You test at quizillaccom, and was rated Knitting Guru. I think the best sentence from the motivation was It can be hard to tell where the yarn ends and you begin.

One has to wonder - who invented early mornings?

One of the things that always get me irritated when I have to work with a SuSE-based Linux distribution is the missing locate command.

I helgen har jag monterat hyllor i arbetsrummet, i hörnet. Ena väggen består av sviktande gipsskivor, andra väggen av Stångåstadens patenterade betong, hårdast i världen.

I accidentally poured too much water into my old trusty MS Natural Keyboard (bought sometime in 1999 or so). Very sad, since I very much enjoyed it. I still use this kind of keyboard at work, though.

Found a link to this blog entry in the blog of Bruce Schneier. It’s about research showing that countries with limited liberty are good at producing terrorists, while countries that may be poor but with a tradition of protecting civil liberties are less likely to produce terrorists.

Just got back from watching the Narnia movie.

Finally managed to fix the problem with VisitorComments and Quills, so now it’s possible to comment on this blog in a decent manner again.

Jag har en ny last. Bregott extrasaltat är verkligen jättegott!

Wohoo! Just upgraded to VMware Workstation 5.5.1 at work (where I use VMware a lot for testing ThinLinc features on different operating systems).

By randomly following links in deliiciouus, I stumbled into this article about the inner workings of the Death Star on Howstuffworks.

The XDG Menu parser in KDE is, in at least one respect, much more forgiving, than the one in Gnome.

(This entry is in swedish)

I gave away my guppies today to a guy I know from LysKOM. He had a brand new tank and wanted some free fish for it.

At work, I had a .com domain registered with Network Solutions Inc. (from now on referred to as NSI). This was not by purpose, but for historical reasons - it was registered at a time when the only .com registrar was networksolutions.

svn co svn://svn.zope.org/repos/main/PluggableAuthService/tags/PluggableAuthService-1_0_4 PluggableAuthService

Today I’ve moved most of the mail-related stuff as well as the Linux-related and Version Control System related content from Lysator to my Writings Area.

• ZPhotoSlides: Well, seems rather competent. Documentation hints about ability to read photos from file system, but how? Very hard to understand where to find that functionality. That would be very useful, though.

A few weeks ago I bought two plants of Ceratophyllum demersum L. (hornsärv in swedish) at one of the local aquarium shops. I hadn’t seen it before, and they told me it would grow fast and take its nutritions from the water, not having any roots.

Gah!

The sound generated when you use the vacuum-cleaner to clean away a large amount of rice is.. funny!

Emacs is a very good editor (Well, almost religion for some people :-) ), with so much configuration possibilities one could configure it for years, and that’s good !

On a UNIX system there is always some things that should be done periodically, for example backups, locatedb updates and such things. This makes life easier, as you don’t have to keep all the things you should do in your head, or on silly little notes on your desk. Not to mention the fact that you don’t want to sit up all night doing backups.

Have you ever been irritated that there’s a big key between tab and shift that you never use? If not, sometime in the future your left little finger might start complaining about having to reach all the way down to the Ctrl key every time you’re moving around in an emacs buffer. This small tip will let you redefine your Caps Lock into a Ctrl key in X.