Just had my first one and it tastes great! Didn’t know that there was such a thing until I happened to see a bunch of them at Coop Konsum Avenyn in Gothenburg. I bought the last three they had! 
BTW, It’s got nothing to do with my favorite linux distribution expect for the name and the fact that, just like the guys doing Ubuntu Linux, the people behind Ubuntu Cola is trying to make the world a better place.
I’ve been trying hard to get the microphone working on my wife Jenny’s old Dell Dimension 5000 running Ubuntu 8.04. Google wasn’t much help I’m afraid. I finally figured out, after lots of trial and error, that I had to set the option Surround Jack Mode in the Gnome Mixer to the value Independent to get the mic working. Skype seems to be working fine now. Next challenge will be to find a web cam that works…
For your reference, here’s the full output I get when running amixer: Read the rest of this entry »
Some time ago I write about how to use mencoder to rotate videos. After playing around with mencoder some more today I found a better way of doing it, all in one go. Read the rest of this entry »
In his post, Proposed Tomcat Enhancement: Add flag to escape JSP’s EL by default, Matt Raible suggests that Tomcat should add an option to escape the output of EL expressions by default. At Trillian we’ve also run into the problem he’s describing since we needed the output of our JSPs to be valid XML at all times. Read the rest of this entry »
Seems like the Xbox Media Center team are working on a Linux port! Apparently they have only been working on it for a couple of months now but it’s already beyond just being a tool for skinners and plugin developers. Remote control support using LIRC is in there and it already plays most audio and video files. Even DVD ISO’s over Samba! Read the rest of this entry »
tela has posted a SEO checklist for Drupal websites. If I've managed to configure drupal correctly this post should get a nice URL alias automatically from the title. I'm using drupal's pathauto module.
Hibernate’s SchemaExportTask ant task always gives very informative error messages (not! 
). Here’s an example:
BUILD FAILED build.xml:267: Schema text failed: Could not parse mapping document from file SomeClass.hbm.xml
To get some useful info on what went wrong we need to specify a log4j configuration file:
niklas@niklas:~$ ANT_OPTS=-Dlog4j.configuration=file:///path/to/log4j.properties ant some-task
Don’t forget file://!
Here’s a simple log4j.properties file you could use:
log4j.rootLogger=DEBUG, consoleAppender log4j.appender.consoleAppender=org.apache.log4j.ConsoleAppender log4j.appender.consoleAppender.layout=org.apache.log4j.PatternLayout log4j.appender.consoleAppender.layout.ConversionPattern=%d [%t] %-5p %c %x - %m%n
I’ve just uploaded the patch I was talking about in my previous post to Spring’s issue tracker. I just hope they won’t be too hard on me.
The page is right here: http://opensource.atlassian.com/projects/spring/browse/SPR-2539.
It’s going to be very interesting to hear what they think about it.
I’m a big fan of Spring and I’ve been using various parts of it now for the last two and a half years. Using the Spring dependency injection container has indeed made my life (as a programmer, of course 
) a lot easier. In this post I will demonstrate a technique which could be incorporated into Spring to add support for constructor injection using named parameters. The same technique could also be useful for scripting languages like Jython and Groovy to add support for calling Java methods using named parameters. Read the rest of this entry »
I tried to watch this YouTube clip the other day but found that my flash player had a hard time synching the audio and video. Very annoying! And as far as I can see YouTube doesn’t provide a download link to let me download the movie and play it directly from my hard drive. I really wanted to see this clip but couldn’t stand the audio lagging behind. I figured there must be a way to hack that flash thing they are using to play the movie. It turned out to be quite easy! Read the rest of this entry »