I have decided to move my blog to wordpress. This will also be the new home of the pages related to my hobby projects:

• Text Complete
• BDAdmin
• OpenID Consumer for coldfusion

cfavatar.wordpress.com

The posts which I still consider relevant will be transfered to the new home.

cheers

Marcel

I am currently playing around with openid, I have released my first attempts of rolling my own consumer here.  cfkitopenid.riaforge.com/ Feedback is wanted.

cheers

Marcel

I am currently attempting to get our development environment as close as possible to production with a minimum of cost. Steps we have take so far is to virtualize our production servers, we have also started the migration from windows 2003 to linux.  A major factor here was the difficulty involved in cloneing a windows based machines.

Having a virtualized environment allows us to download the production servers reduce the memory in the VMs to suit and the run the same servers as development machines.

The next step was deciding on the best way to connect to these development machines for coding. I decided to experiment with SSHFS and it;s working out very nicely so far.

We use subversion for code management and one gotcha was to specify the sshfs options  allow_other and workaround=rename.  Without the rename option subversion would throw an error when trying to work with the files. The command we used for mounting look something like this:

sshfs marcel@192.168.1.11:/var/cfml /home/marcel/mount/bd1/ -p 22 -o allow_other,workaround=rename

To get the cfchart component to display charts when using apache2 ensure the apache servlet mapping
include the .cfchart extension the complete entry should look something like this:

Oh Joy Oh Joy,
After several weeks of intense searching and crawling through forums I finally found a "firmware" upgrade that enables me to once again watch all the DVDs in my collection.

I spent a long time living in another part of the world and also do a lot of traveling. So when I am sitting in a hotel and the weather sucks I like to be able to buy/rent a DVD and watch the same on my laptop.

Unfortunately some fuckwits decided to invent region restrictions, what that means to me is that if I buy a 'standard' DVD player I can nolonger watch the DVDs I paid good money for if the region on the DVD does not match that of the Player.

Back in the ugly days when I was using windows I bought a tool called regionfree. The $20- cost is well worth the price.  When I switched to Linux regions where not an issue, smart people build linux, nough said.

For my MacBook things are tricky as the DVD player hardware itself is locked down. That is until today.

The following forum lists a firmware driver that set the region code to 1 = Region Free. Yahhhooo

P.S. Read the usual warnings. Applying a firmware update may KILL your drive.

The Firmware update worked for my 15" Intel Santa Rosa Mac Book Pro.
MATSHITA DVD-R   UJ-857E Firmware ZA0E

http://forum.rpc1.org/viewtopic.php?t=43082

A HUGE THANKS TO THE GUY HOW BUILD THIS FIRMWARE UPDATE YOU ROCK!!!!

Hoochi mama,
After waiting several weeks I finally got a hold of my new mac book pro. The first impression on firing up Mac OS X  was refreshing. The OS looks and feels fresh and sexy.

So after the first couple of days getting my feet wet and playing around it was time to start migrating my data and applications so I could get back down to business and start getting productive. 

I was hoping for a smooth migration from my kubuntu set up to OS X and indeed with a bit of googling I managed to get all the tools I needed.

This included:

• Firefox + Plugins (Old habits die hard, safari is supposed to be nice but i've been with firefox sind firebird times.)
• Thunderbird
• Eclipse (Nuff said, the ultimate dev tool for my Java, Coldfusion and Flex needs.)
• Neo Office (I only found this today – simply put it's open office for Mac OS X Tiger)
• Bluedragon Server (CFMX does not run yet on intel macs.)
• Fusion (Awesome VM-Ware for Macs, helps me run both Windows and Kubuntu)
• TSClient (When forced to work with Micro$oft Servers)
• Cyberduck (Apparently a good FTP client for Mac OS X)
• VLC  (Nice cross platform media player)

The Mac OS workflow seems quite different from the windows and linux environments, and I must admit being frustrated a lot of the time. Here is hoping that I “get” the mac way of doing things. Currntly I am missing my fully customized KDE set-up.

So here goes my current top hates:

• Why can't I just pin any window to the front. I installed a utility for this but it only works in a couple of apps.
• If I want to use an external monitor at native resolution I can not just press fn + f7 but have to close the lid wait for standby and the wake the laptop with an external keyboard. Thats just dumb.
• Connecting my logitech keyboard maps the command key to alt resulting in me having to contort my fingers for saving, cut and paste and undo. This SUCKS.
• The way the home and end keys work is stupid when you are used to Windows/Linux environments.
• Why does the command key have to replace control? I am getting used to this but anyways?
• The mac book pro dvd drive is locked to a region. 
• The bash shell for Mac OS X is retarted if you are used to the linux shell.
• Menus always are pinned to the top of the screen. ok when in laptop mode but anoyinng on a 27" Flatscreen.

On the up side:

• The hardware is awesome and stylish, besides soon Leopard will be released and if that does not fix the issues I know sooner or later Ubuntu will run on this beautiful machine.
• The networking stuff works flawless, even getting my mobile working as a modem worked out of th e box.
• Mac OS X is sexy sexy sexy.
• Theire is unix inside. :)
• Ipod, multimedia integration is excellent (suprise suprise).
• The mac remote is actually usefull, always thought it was a gimick until i started using it.
• Backlit keyboard has massiv style factor.

No doubt my next couple of post will be about my getting used to life on the Mac Side of life.

If any one can point me to some sites which explain the mac work flow please post it here. I am also thankful for any solutions to my anoyances listed above.

Google released it's desktop search for Linux a couple of days ago. Google desktop search is something I was hoping for for some time for my Linux installation as I am not hundred percent happy with the alternatives. Until now I have been using Beagle Search but never really got it to play nice with my Thunderbird mails. Here is hoping that Google does a better job.

First up installation:

Installation is a snap especially for Ubuntu users as Google provides a custom package for installation on Ubuntu systems . Easy to follow installation instructions can be found here: http://www.google.com/linuxrepositories/ubuntu704.html

Some problems I had:

Could not use the preference pages. (Pages not showing)

Clicking links on the Google Desktop Preferences pages were breaking, and Firefox would show a page not found error. The URL would show the page being retrieved from KDE Cache or something along those lines.

Solution:

This was a problem with KDE, the resolution was to launch Firefox with the suffix %U, (e.g. firefox %U) I also did the same for the launch script for Thunderbird. This fixed the problem and the preferences screens now work as expected.

Googledesktop was not indexing Thunderbird mails or Firefox Websites.

Solution:

Both Firefox and Thunderbird need extensions (add/ons) for them to work with googledesktop,
on a standard installation this is taken care of by the package installer. However I manually installed the latest version of Firefox and Thunderbird by hand, so the extensions did not get installed. The installer can be found in the google desktop binary folder.

On my installation this was in:

/opt/googledesktop/bin

The installation scripts can be started with command line parameters which point to a custom installation. In my case I executed the following commands, and voila everything is working nice.

Note: I have installed Firefox and Thunderbird in a apps folder within my home directory.