Digital Breadcrumbs

File system visualization

Andy Signer — Fri, 04 Jan 2008 04:01:35 +0000

My 120GB notebook hard drive is almost filled up - but why? This tedious task can easily be solved with WinDirStat, a clone of the Linux application KDirStat. The file system is visualized with colored blocks in different sizes. The colors represent the file type and the block size the memory a file uses. At a glance large files and huge directories can be identified.

Rise and shine ALSA #2

Andy Signer — Wed, 19 Dec 2007 04:42:12 +0000

Yesterday I uninstalled the new compiled ALSA driver but I did not succeeded. So I uninstalled them. Suddenly my OpenOffice stopped working. I thought that this was maybe in conjunction with the installation of the Gnome Desktop. This morning I started my openSuse again and suddenly my Firefox isn’t working.

/usr/lib/firefox/firefox-bin: error while loading shared libraries:
lib asound.so.2:cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

Looks like Firefox is using the shared asound library. That’s what I removed yesterday. My decision was now to update the ALSA stuff again with Yast to the latest version from the openSuse repository (download.opensuse.org). The ALSA revision in the repository is

1.0.15.hg20071218-1.1

I updated all ALSA components to the latest revision. After that the sound was still not working and there was an error during configuration with Yast. So I switched to the command-line and invoked

alsaconfig

After that I jumped back to Yast. It was time to pump up the volume and it was working! This was music to my ears.

Sorry for this quite fuzzy description. But hopefully it might help some of you to get the sound running on your Acer Aspire 4720 notebook.

openSuse and ALSA #1

Andy Signer — Tue, 18 Dec 2007 06:59:10 +0000

Finally I found some information about my sound problem and a solution as well. Yesterday I tried to install the 1.0.15 version from the openSuse update repository. The system was not very happy with this decision so I stepped back to the old 1.0.14 driver.

Today I found a new how to solve this problem on the openSuse website. Sadly it didn’t worked for my Acer Aspire 4720 but at least all three alsa source packages have a uninstall feature in there make scripts:

make uninstall

So I’m back on square one. Next thing is to update the kernel to the most recent version. But I’ll leave this task for tomorrow and start to work.

Linux on Acer Aspire 4270

Andy Signer — Tue, 18 Dec 2007 03:17:21 +0000

Windows XP is now working on my notebook. My Debian is nicly running in the VMware player but a native OS is much more fun. That’s why I gave openSuse 10.3 a shot. The installation was pretty much straight forward. Sadly my WiFi was not working and after two hours my ecstasy turned into disappointment. A day later I booted my Linux again and I’m connected to the net. I thought those reboots were necessary in the old Windows times.

The happiness factor reached new heights. Now my favorite tune and I’m on cloud seven - Silence! I checked the volume, for muted speakers. Everything is fine there. I tried to update to the latest ALSA 1.0.15 driver. But this requires that I compile the kernel. No thanks! Maybe a wait till tomorrow and maybe it’s just working (dream on dreamer).

For the rest - it’s working as a charm!

Embed iTunes artworks in ID3 tag

Andy Signer — Tue, 18 Dec 2007 02:50:51 +0000

Some might hate the way iTunes 7.x stores the downloaded artwork, and some like it. There were already big discussions which is the right way to do it. Personally I prefer to store the images directly in my MP3 files as ID3 tag. There is a trick to manually embed all the images in the MP3 files, but actually I’m not so bored that I’ll update all my MP3 files by hand. What I need is a automatic script for this tedious task.Fortunately a simple NASA rocket scientist has written a handy script suite for this and many other tasks - and it’s running under Windows. If you are an Apple user you can use Doug’s script for the same task.

Diving Theory

Andy Signer — Sun, 16 Dec 2007 07:41:19 +0000

During my research of decompression theory I found some interesting websites. On the Dir Diver site there are some nice article on various topics. More about algorithms I found on the decompression.org site through a nice page with links to several articles.

Some really interesting stuff can be found on the public ftp server of decompression.org.

Writing Robust Shell Scripts

Andy Signer — Sun, 16 Dec 2007 05:46:56 +0000

David Pashley has some nice tips on writing robust shell scripts. Maybe you’re interested in the Advanced Bash-Scripting Tutorial as well.

And on the IBM website i found another nice tutorial series.

Did you ever fought a HeadlessException?

Andy Signer — Sat, 15 Dec 2007 07:09:51 +0000

Once I wrote some JUnit tests for a framework which referenced GUI components in the model. No worries on my development machine - but as I moved those tests to the test server I’ve got that bloody HeadlessException. At this very moment I felt a bit headless too.
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Locked jar file under Windows

Andy Signer — Sat, 15 Dec 2007 06:57:01 +0000

During the service hot swap mechanism development of NetServe I run into the problem that jar files getting locked by the JRE under Windows.

After some research I found a simple solution for this problem (maybe it’s a performance issue). Before you instanciate a custom classloader you have to disable caching on the URL.

URL[] urls = new URL[1];
urls[0] = new URL(“/path/to/my.jar”);
url.openConnection().setDefaultUseCaches(false);
ClassLoader cl = new URLClassLoader(urls);

After that, your jar’s won’t get locked.

Using command-line Subversion to access project source files

Andy Signer — Sat, 15 Dec 2007 06:47:26 +0000

This is a friendly copy!

Getting started with command-line Subversion

If you are participating in a development project that is using Subversion for version control, you will need to use Subversion to access and change project source files. You can browse the source code online to view a project’s directory structure and files by clicking on the Subversion link in the left navigation pane for the project.

The Subversion page displays with three subdirectories: branches/, tags/, trunk/ and one README file. The README file gives a top level view of the Subversion repository. You can click on Access options to view the Subversion client setup instructions. You must have a Subversion client installed on your local machine.
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