Andreas Aronsson

These two are terrific and should be spoon-fed to anyone who neglects the importance of OOAD:
http://web.abo.fi/~peholmst/DecouplingJavaClasses.pdf
http://www.mockobjects.com/book/
Plenty useful.

Also this is a goldie:
http://www.javaworld.com/javaworld/javaqa/2000-03/02-qa-innerclass.html?page=2

For about a year now I have had a very annoying problem with my file server. One of the two Seagate drives simply disappeared from time to time. It was never the same one and I couldn't tell what pattern the disappearances followed. The system log looked something like:

Jul 11 18:55:02 hostname ata5.00: exception Emask 0x10 SAct 0x1 SErr 0x190002 action 0xe frozen

Just noticed that for two of my posts, drupal reports 1000+ reads;
this one http://www.aron.nu/?q=node/20 and this one http://www.aron.nu/?q=node/14.
I guess that gives an indication as to what's more interesting posts.

Sometime when I was updating drupal from 6.10 to 6.11 I thought I was going to be clever and
update as soon at the core module was available upstream. Not to wait until it reached portage. I

The editor emacs continues to amaze me. For some time now I have been using emacs as a day-planner in the excellent org-mode. Once you get used to the commands it's a breeze to create documents with structured headlines, internal and external links, etc. It's also very versatile in that it can export the same document to different formats like html or ascii.

So I decided to spice up my Gentoo work station a little. I was having a little too much crud lying
around like ldap and mysql support anyways. To get a more complete control over what was installed,
I started moving away from using a list of use flags in make.conf by doing a

 emerge -evp --columns world >> tmpfile

with that format it was easy to use an openoffice spreadsheet and insert from file with fixed width
delimiters cut and then go through the file with emacs and do some search and replace to end up with

As I am nowadays using the keyworded gentoo-sources, I am already using the 2.6.29 kernel with promised updated ext4 stuff and some more goodies. However, after doing my normal upgrading routine with make oldconfig and sifting through all the new options, running my 'build kernel and drivers'-script, my system wouldn't boot =|. Unable to remount read-write dmesg said. A wee bit stumped, I went back to 2.6.28 for a few days but now I had a go again and took a look at my fstab. In the mount options, I had put "extents, barriers=0".

It's been a bit too long since I did a post so I thought I'd post some thoughts about the creation
of software and cooperation in a small group with tools we're using like UML, design patterns
etc. I'm assuming that a sufficiently thorough analysis has been made and that the group comprises
about two to four developers. This would be the optimal course of action for my personal taste and
knowledge level at this time.

Finally I made the leap.
Used the stopwatch to get the boot time from BIOS POST to login screen: 1:02.4
Added

sys-apps/openrc ~amd64
sys-apps/baselayout ~amd64

to /etc/portage/package.keywords
Emerged them and followed the guide:
http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/openrc-migration.xml

No problemo. New boot time:
00:48.4
Sweet. Thx Roy!

First post after upgrade =)
Just upgraded from 5.12 to 6.6
In short (NOTE! not a proper instruction just a debrief);
* put in offline mode
* backup database and htdocs
* emerge new version
* use 'updated' module to find the correct modules version for the new major version
* uninstall as many contributed modules as possible
* run webapp-config
* copy back sites directory (.htaccess and robots.txt too if modified)
* unpack the modules you want in the modules dir
* run the www.yoursite.com/update.php
* try to poke around as much as possible

What I experience when I grasp a subject or when I discover that I've achieved some level of mastery at something, that's how I percieve what happens. First contact with a software project or product is often daunting in my mind. There are so many details that your working memory rapidly becomes overloaded. After time, your brain manages to do what it does best; filtering the avalanche of data we're exposed to and effectively extracts only what's needed for the conscious part of the mind to make sense of the object of our interest.

When you grow up with Gentoo, you mostly only ever need to use the loadkeys command in the console. This led me to believe that there only existed one command to change the layout you're currently using. Now I know better (like five years or so after learning about loadkeys...): loadkeys are for console only. setxkbmap is what you use for switching in X. You'll see below what finally made this obvious to me, or rather what I was doing when I realized it.

When the computer geek in me grew up, I was excusively using Gentoo for all my needs. When I first started out learning about free software operating systems, I had used windows 98 for little more than playing Fallout and some other fun games.

In my early days (in like 2002, which is not very long ago I admit) as a GNU/Linux zealot I was installing from a minimal CD and going from stage-1 tarballs and working my way up. Wasn't very exciting watching glibc compile on a PII 400hz.

I finally gave up trying to keep my hordeinstallation alive. It's been alot of work installing and upgrading the package and every time I've failed to retain my data. I was recommended Zimbra by a friend. It turns out it's a complete suite with mta, imap, spam- and virusscanner. This meant that I'd have to give up my carefully configured mail services. After bracing myself for a number of days, I got to it.

For a very long while now, several years actually, I've been a bit annoyed by the behaviour of terminals under X when you doubleclick links. What the UI considers a word is selected. Selection 'starts' at the point that is doubleclicked and 'spreads' in each direction, stopping at a char it considers to be a word delimiter. A space is probably always considered a delimiter. Sometimes a '?' too, and often ',' as well.

A couple of years ago, I was sifting through the manpage for bash. I was at the time looking for something else, but my attention was caught by the section about command substitution, I. E. the art of letting a command be substituted by the output of it's execution. In shells, there are two ways in which this can be accomplished; backticks /backquotes or braces. When I read it, it said backticks were old style. I searched for a bit and found a reference that it was deprecated.

I just read tsunam's blogpost and it sparked a thought. He's calling for more ideas for improving user relationships and quite neatly describes the Gentoo community through parallels to George Orwell's 1984. Now, as the topic says, I've always regarded it as a Gentoopia.

Just got myself a "SyncMaster 245B". Samsung FTW! This beauty is capable of 1920x1200 wide screen resolution. While I was at it, I switched from VGA to DVI cable too. While configuring I made some interesting notes;
When X starts with the VGA cable, I have to put

Option "UseEDID" "FALSE"

Option "UseEDIDFreqs" "FALSE"

Option "UseEDIDDpi" "FALSE"

Option "ModeValidation" "NoEdidModes"

I just found myself asking me that question. Allright, I am a nerd and I'm fine with that. Allright, I'm very persistent about orderliness and I've come to accept that as a part of my personality. Now, when using the commandline and bash in particular and you've written a command that you decide that you don't want to execute, how do you go about clearing the cli row?

Time goes by and sometimes gentoo hands you a new update to kde-base as happened today and it's compile-time again. When I first began using gentoo I sometimes watched the scrolling lines and kind of get stuck much like watching a burning fire. It would give a cosy feeling and time flew by. Nowadays I never do that for some reason, I just want to be done with it. Having invested in a Reserator, I thought I'd make good use of it and hence overclocked my CPU.

I have to say my impression is that the gentoo devs maintaining the kernel sources does a damn fine job. New versions appears in the three at a very nice rate and keeping up with the relentless pace of vanilla. At the time of this writing the latest stable kernel is 2.6.23.14 and portage just gave me 2.6.23-gentoo-r6. Good stuff. I've been compiling gentoo-sources for a few years now and it has never been smoother. A simple emerge -Nqa world * copy the old .config to the new source dir * swap the symlink make oldconfig

Through the years I have met a number of colleagues with leadership tasks and managers. More often than not I've been left wondering how on earth they managed to trick their way into that position or fooled themselves that they are fit for the task for that matter. How is it possible to weed out the unfit-for-management individuals? In the following thext I'm trying to make a couple of valid remarks. First off, business is about making money. If you don't make any money off of it, it's not worth

Inspired by Brian Carper (programming in general) and Diego Penettó (C/C++), I started configuring a
setup to do some programming on a private project. I decided I'd go for Eclipse, Subversion and
Trac. First time I single handedly abandon my beloved Emacs. Eclipse has got a number of plugins

It was too obvious for me this time perhaps. I simply forgot to change grub's arguments from the disc to the RAID1 device. Now I can continue to expand my logical volume across both partitions and add the remaining root partition to the RAID as well.

Finally had time to finish all my data migrations with the new discs.

The original setup was (tip: use smartctl -i /dev/sdX to get the disc info):

Bought myself a couple of new disks. I want redundancy on the servers and now my economy has caught up with my needs. One of them is the latest WD Raptor and I wanted that one for the workstation so i ended up dd'ing the windows partition and making a new filesystem (ext3 with journal_data_writeback for speed) for my gentoo installation. Using dd to copy the MBR apparently wasn't enough (or maybe I didn't copy enough bytes) so i had to boot with a livecd and run grub from there. But it's all good now and I can use the old disk for my new RAID1 installation of the server running this site.

Some people, more often than not they are performing managerial tasks but that's by no means a rule, claim that software somehow gets better and more trustworthy because they can lift the phone, dial a number and bark at some person on the other end. Well, I can't honestly say I've bought that many copies of microsoft licenses but I have had the urge to bark more than once when dealing with their software. However, anyone honestly believing that my disappointments aired with them would in any way affect their next release? I do not.

When patents were once created, the purpose of patents were to improve innovation and make the results available to society. Before patents were introduced, people would try to protect their inventions by keeping the details as secret as possible. Patents are supposed to get them to reveal the details by getting a timelimited monopoly in return. Then others can keep innovating by building on top and eventually the inventions will become free for everybody to use. It's important to keep in mind that companies are construed to serve society. We created them to fulfil a certain role.

As my experiences from the IT-business and the professional life in general grow in number and volume, certain observed behavioral patterns become increasingly salient. One is concerning the recruitment of new employees. Listen in, ponder and try to draw relevant conclusions pertaining to this particular subject:

I've refreshed my personal website to suit my ever growing need to express myself. Enjoy.