Author: rolfje

Zūmo Mount for Triumph Speed Triple

Posted on By rolfje 10 Comments on Zūmo Mount for Triumph Speed Triple

The RAM mount coming with the Garmin zūmo’s are fine, but I wanted something more elegant to go with my Triumph Speed Triple. This article contains a detailed description of building your own mount for the Garmin zūmo 660. I mounted the zūmo on my Speed Triple, but the mount is universal enough to be center-mounted on any bike which has riser-mounted handlebars.

No guarantees ofcourse, you’re on your own from here. Bring your tools and read on.

WARNING: When I tried to cut one of these rubbers in half, the bottom disk came loose. It was not as securely glued to the rubber as the top disk. When pulling the zūmo on the mount it does not come off, but if you want to be sure order the Garmin 550 mount rubbers (described in article below).

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Hardware, Workshop

Kilometerheffing? GPS-data NEE!

Posted on By rolfje 2 Comments on Kilometerheffing? GPS-data NEE!

Ik weet niet welke lobbyist menner Eurlings heeft verteld dat dit een briljant plan is, maar ik weet donders goed waarom onze regering kilometerheffing wil invoeren. Weer een kraantje toegevoegd aan het vat dat “werkende Nederlander” heet, en als bonus nog wat privacy gevoelige GPS gegevens om in rond te neuzen ook. Mocht je de rest van deze post niet willen lezen, reageer dan wel even op de volgende sites, want Eurlings heeft gezegd dat kilometerheffing “bij gebrek aan draagvlak” (welk draagvlak?) niet doorgaat:

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Uncategorized

Flow

Posted on By rolfje 3 Comments on Flow

Being “in the flow”. The nicest state of mind known to mankind. You act without thinking, and everyone of your actions is the perfect response to the situation. Riding a motorcycle on a beautiful road without a destination can easily get you into this state. With an empty mind, you see the next 2 corners, feel your bike as your brakes hit the disc, smell the forest, and hear the wind as you start accelerating out of the first corner while naturally placing the bike into position for the next.

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Software

Sonar “Close Connection” warning workaround.

Posted on By rolfje 7 Comments on Sonar “Close Connection” warning workaround.

When you use Spring and Ibatis and SQLTemplates, you could have code in your project which looks somewhat like this:

Connection connection = DataSourceUtils.getConnection(getDataSource());
...<do connection stuff here>...
DataSourceUtils.releaseConnection(connection, getDataSource());

Sonar will report that you did not close the connection, while in fact, Spring did that for you. You can not just add a “connection.close()” to the code because the whole point of calling “releaseConnection()” is to have Spring handle all the smart stuff on committing, closing, and returning the connection to the pool if needed.

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Software

iTunes 9: “Genre-Artist-Album” panes restored

Posted on By rolfje 29 Comments on iTunes 9: “Genre-Artist-Album” panes restored

iTunes 9 with 3 panesWhat I loved about iTunes is the three pane “Genre-Artist-Album” on top of my music list. It allowed me to quickly go through my music and find that great Anouk album I was looking for. After installing iTunes 9, it was gone. And I was sad. But I found a way to get it back.

Settings to get the panes back

Look at this screenshot (sorry, it’s in Dutch). In iTunes, select “View”, “Show Column Browser”. Now, put it on top by selecting “View”, “Column Browser”, “Top”. Voila, your trusted browser is at the top. You may need to add “Genre” and “Album” there, but you’ve already seen the options for that now, have you? 😉

Apple

Transactions and Isolation levels

Posted on By rolfje 2 Comments on Transactions and Isolation levels

Safety googlesAt work, we have two applications which connect to the same database. For all kinds of business reasons, we need to make sure that only one of the applications accesses certain data at the same time. To do this, we use a row in a table as a semaphore.

While working on the locking mechanism, we had a closer look at the Transaction Management and the Isolation Levels we were using. There is a lot of good documentation on Transaction and Isolation, but it tends to be over complete, elaborate and therefore hard to read. I’ll try to share our insights with you in a slightly more digestable form (I hope).

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Software

Why you want a Polarizer Filter

Posted on By rolfje 2 Comments on Why you want a Polarizer Filter

I recently bought a 50mm lens with a circular polarizer. I though I’d share some quick examples to show what a polarizer filter does for your photo’s.

The polarization effect is probably one of the few (if not only) effect which you can not reproduce in photoshop or any other image processing program. Most applications try by increasing saturation, which is nowhere near the effect of a real polarizer.

By rotating the filter, you have the luxury of choosing how much effect you want to have, anywhere between 0% and 100%. The shots below give you an idea what the range of the effect is:

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Uncategorized

Starting Java app from Applescript

Posted on By rolfje No Comments on Starting Java app from Applescript

Suppose you have a Java Swing application which you can start by typing the following on the command line:

java -jar myTerrificSwingApp.jar

If you want to make that application start from the Finder in OSX, there are a lot of options which range from ugly to convoluted. If you need a quick fix, here’s how to do it.

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Apple, Software