Author: rolfje

Open Letter to Tim Cook

2011-09-20 rolfje No Comments

Dear Tim,

I am certainly not the first, nor the last to congratulate you with your new position at Apple. I’m sure there will be many great things to come for Apple and it’s customers.

Apple has become the doctor that doesn’t fix the pain, but cures the illness and improves our daily digital lives. Please make sure Apple keeps it’s focus, perseverance and good taste in the endless search for true quality.

Tell Steve and Jony I said hi, and keep up the good work. If there’s anything I can help you with, you know how to reach me 😉

Cheers,
Rolf

Apple

Linked-In not really Opt-in?

2011-09-07 rolfje 1 Comment

Recently there was some kerfuffle about LinkedIn silently changing privacy settings. In fact, they didn’t do that “silently”, nor was it “recent”. Remember that large chunk of text nobody reads with the “Agree” button you clicked on? Those were the new terms, and deeply buried in them was this privacy settings stuff. LinkedIn’s Eric Heath blogged about that, bringing it as “more control over your LinkedIn information”. Sadly, the default setting for this new “control” is “rather open”. But you can change that.

Uncategorized

iMovie Beat Markers and the Clip Trimmer

2011-09-05 rolfje No Comments

This weekend I tried to add beat markers to a video for a colleague. But the beat marker menu option was grayed out, and I spent some time searching for the “Clip Trimmer” everybody was talking about. I was in a bit of a hurry and all the right-clicks, top menu, gear-icon popup menus, and shortcuts made me overlook the thing I was looking for. Maybe you overlooked it too. It’s not much of a tutorial, but if you need to add beat markers to your background music, here’s how to get to the correct “Clip Trimmer” in iMovie ’11.

Apple

How to fix a Krups XN2001 Nespresso machine

2011-08-27 rolfje 79 Comments

Maybe the title of this post should read “how to open a Krups XN2001 Nespresso machine”. The Krups XN2001 is almost identical to the newer XN2002 and XN2003. While the XN2003 has normal Torx screws, Krups was a bit more “protective” when they built the XN2001. It has screws that can not be gripped by any screwdriver. Still, there is an easy trick you can use to get headless screws out of any machine.

Hardware

Aeroccino Motor Replaced

2011-08-162025-10-17 rolfje 48 Comments

Months ago, I got this broken Aeroccino milk frother for free. This week I fiddled with it for a few hours, and got it to work:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kNEqWH3ILDc]

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Hardware, Workshop

Fixing Photo Creation Dates

2011-08-15 rolfje 2 Comments

You know how it is on vacation. You take your camera, shoot pictures, and when you get home you see that you forgot to set the date/time on your camera. Even worse: your wife also took a camera with her, and she actually read the manual and set the time correctly. So now you have two sets of photos with mismatching date/times. Now what?

It turns out that there is actually a pretty simple trick to solve this, and you don’t even haven to install exiftool or do funny command line voodo. If you have iPhoto and a mouse, here’s what you do:

Apple

Add some magic to Eclipse

2011-07-30 rolfje No Comments

The top feature of the eclipse IDE is the very impressive refactoring possibilities. It makes code feel like play-doh, allowing you to knead it in any shape way or form you think fits the current situation. A close second to that is the impressive templates and code assist. Yes, Java is verbose, but I think 80% of the characters which make up a Java program was never actually typed. All the readability without the labour, brought to you by eclipse’s powerful templates.

What many people don’t realize is that you can easily add to this magic by creating your own templates. One of the first templates I always add to the environment is the one which adds a private static final log4j logger. I thought it would be great example to share with you.

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Software

Replacing Dropbox with Spideroak

2011-07-03 rolfje 38 Comments

After lies about Dropbox Employees not being able to see your files, then proving that they do not do regression testing on their security, the latest change in terms of service really was the last drop. So I dropped dropbox.

I had become dependent on Dropbox to transfer files between my private and work machines, having my notes, configuration files and (encrypted thank god) password databases handy at all times. Searching around, there is really no other service like it. Although lots of products claim to have the same functionality, the “share this folder between all my machines” feature which dropbox proviced is really unsurpassed.

I had to find an alternative solution which would meet the following criterea:

has to be a single, native folder, instantly syncing with all other machines
has to be free or *really* cheap, minimum 2GB
has to use an encryption technology where no one else can ever read my files, not even the hosting party, not even at gunpoint
has to have client software for Windows, Mac and Linux
accessing data on my iPhone would be a nice bonus.

After some browsing around, there are two solutions that come close, one is Wuala, and the other is Spideroak.

For one additonal GB of storage for life, use my referal link to register at SpiderOak. Read the whole article to add another 5GB to that.

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Software

Why Jenkins does not detect Failures

2011-06-20 rolfje 4 Comments

Jenkins, the brilliant Continuous Integration build server, has a bit of a problem with the Maven surefire jUnit test plugin. Last sunday, I discovered that our Jenkins build server suddenly started ignoring test failures. While the logfile clearly states that the Unittests contain failures, Jenkins marks the builds as “stable”.

After some digging around, I found that even though Jenkins explicitly tells you in the logfile that it will fail the build, it will not do so if the Surefire XML reports are not generated. In our case, somebody in the team decided that the generation of the XML Surefire reports was taking too long and had disabled them in the Maven pom.xml.

In order to solve this, I re-enabled the XML reports and voila, Jenkins happily started reporting errors again. Here is the correct Surefire plugin configuration for you to use in your maven pom.xml file:

&lt;plugin&gt;
  &lt;groupId&gt;org.apache.maven.plugins&lt;/groupId&gt;
    &lt;artifactId&gt;maven-surefire-plugin&lt;/artifactId&gt;
    &lt;version&gt;2.8&lt;/version&gt;
    &lt;configuration&gt;

      &lt;!-- Please note that Jenkins needs Surefire
           XML reports in order for detection to work.
           Keep this property set to false. --&gt;
      &lt;disableXmlReport&gt;false&lt;/disableXmlReport&gt;
    &lt;/configuration&gt;
&lt;/plugin&gt;

Software

^H(eaven) key binding in Eclipse

2011-06-19 rolfje No Comments

As a long time user of Eclipse, I have never understood the any of the tabs of the Search panel in Eclipse. JavaScript search, Java Search, Remote Search, they all make no sense to a modern man who is used to a single search box which searches everything. So I always use the “File Search” Tab, which does exactly what I want 99% of the time.

File Search always requires mouseclicks. To open the Search window and select the correct tab. It was not until recently that I realized that I could actually reassign the ^H (Control – H) key combination to pop up the File Search tab. If you are an avid Eclipse user you’ve probably already done this, or know how to do this. If you are new to eclipse, or lazy like me, read on to see how you can re-map this key binding.

Software