Have you ever started a shell script which takes a while and you keep monitoring that window because you really need those results? If you are working on a Mac, you can use the Mac’s power of speech to tell you a command is finished. Here’s how:
./yourreallyslowbuild.sh; say "really long build is finished"
With a little curl and shell scripting magic, I told my Mac to constantly monitor our Jenkins buildserver, and bug everybody in the office when the hourly build is failing:
Devoxx 2012 was nice. 3400 nerds invading Antwerp to talk about new frameworks, languages, and geek out over a set of RaspberryPi‘s. But it also confirmed a new “pet peeve” this grumpy old architect is developing.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DZh4aSszD5k
Today Steve Job’s yacht was launched from a dock a few miles from my house. I went there with some friends and we shot some awesome footage of this incredible ship. Through the glass, we could see the 7 iMacs which are used to control the ship. There are also large doors on the side and the back, I suspect these will be used to launch boats or jetskis into a nice warm Mediterranean water.
Lorenzo had a great idea. In stead if being one of those “having fun at the bar” ideas that never actually see the light of day, Lorenzo followed through. Did you ever have that urge to just take a gun and shoot that fly that is constantly buzzing around your head or food? Well now you can. Check out his invention at www.bugasalt.com.
Seeing his gun, I remembered making pea-shooters at high school from a roll of tape and a party balloon. I adjusted the idea for flies (smaller nozzle), and it works beautifully. It only holds one shot, and it looks not nearly as cool as the shotgun idea of Lorenzo, but if you can’t wait to start shooting those flies, here’s how to make your own low-budget, one-shot salt shooter. Enjoy!
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gjI9rTNCRqs]
My sisters in law bought a beautiful 2006 Toyota Corolla Verso. They could not get the iPhone to pair with the car’s Bluetooth system. The dealer told them that this was an iPhone problem, but after some fiddling, it turns out there is a simple workaround. If you want to pair an iPhone to your car, and the car says “pairing failed” as soon as you tap on your iPhone, this simple trick might help for you. This article contains detailed steps for the Toyota Corolla Verso, but on other cars this might work too.
If you have worked in IT as long as I do, you probably have noticed that developers have a tendency to not be on time. They are late for meetings, late for lunch, and on other days they are in at 6am or (and) they work until 3am the next morning. If you ever wondered why this is, I might have some answers for you.
You might also find this post interesting if you are trying to figure out why you can’t get your time zones working in MySQL.
An informative article for webshop owners this time, all about how to make people blog about your company. Everything you need to know about online customers, the power of the internet, and how good old moral values still work and can be leveraged to your advantage. Or not.
This weekend I tinkered around with Apple Keynote. I thought I’d make something useful. In this video I’m trying to show you how much money the bank makes on your mortgage. Banks like you to pay a low monthly fee on your mortgage because it keeps the loan higher for a longer period of time. This way the bank can cash in on the interest rate, and then cash in again at the end of the mortgage contract, when you are still hopelessly in debt.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EI6N583mBEw]
“Financial advisors” working for the bank will throw sand in your eyes, saying that keeping your debt high gives you all kinds of tax breaks. But in the end, it’s them who get better of that construction, not you. Don’t fall into this trap. Understand your mortgage contract, learn how the model works, and check your model against the bank’s model (without that financial advisor or the lady at the helpdesk talking to you). You have more room than you think. Use it.
Like many people, I like to dine in a good restaurant, where the mood is mellow, the waiter is a fine host, and the cook is passionate about good food and nice presentation. The courses are perfectly timed with your appetite, and each shiny polished plate of food contains the best looking, smelling and tasting food with the nicest textures. After desert, you get the best fresh mineral water coffee, and just sit there, satisfied, happy, in good company. The waiter discretely places the check on the table, and you happily pay whatever that check tells you to pay, and add a big tip for good measure, to show you had a great evening.
This week I created a jMeter test setup for distributed testing. I thought it would be straight forward but I ran into some interesting things you might want to know if you are considering distributed testing using jMeter.
In my case, I had to test an application which was inside our corporate network, while working from home through a VPN and a firewall. Normally that is no problem, but jMeter has this funny construction where the slave (jMeter server) wants to connect back to the master (jMeter gui). It took some fiddling with iptables, the jMeter configuration and ssh tunneling to get it to work. Here’s my setup: