BPI inside

Category: Uncategorized

  • Still here

    This is the 6th posting in this year now. My output so far is quite below of what I expected from myself. While I blame stress and lack of time for that until the beginning of July, there should have been some time for an update since then. So the only thing preventing postings has been my own lazyness… Ah well…

    Ok, what’s changed or noteworthy in the last months? Maybe the most important thing for me personally is that I’ve purchased a new (used) car. I’ve been passively looking for potential new cars for quite some time now although I’ve been very pleased and happy with my car so far. But this time the costs for the required servicing and repairs approached almost 2k Euros without a guarantee that the costs will be lower for the next service intervals. So I decided to take the lemon, say goodbye to my old loyal and reliable companion and pick up something with lower regular costs. Welcome my new car, a blue Fiat Grande Punto 1.3 JTD Emotion with 90 HP. It’s in excellent shape and I hope it’ll be an as good escort as my previous Fiat which carried me over 180k km in the the almost exactly past 6 years.

    The next noteworthy news is that this year I’m a contestant in the Zwölfkampf which is organized by some friends. It is a series of twelve games where an overall winner is calculated over tracks of 4, 8 or all 12 games. The main event on Sep. 24/25th is preceded by some "sideevent" games in which I made a not too bad impression but they don’t count for the finale 😉

    Communication is the next topic. Back in May I purchased a new smartphone, the LG Optimus Speed (or P990 or LGOS/LG2X). While It worked for some weeks without a hitch at one day it began to show a very special defect where I could not place or receive calls when I’m registered in the 3G network of my provider. I borrowed some other SIM cards from different providers but the problem only exists with the network of mine. Since I’m denied service for it at my provider (it doesn’t have this phone in its portfolio) I have to handle everything myself. Currently (yes, it’s August now!) it’s on its 4th trip to the LG service from which I hope it will eventually return completely replaced. The previous three times the device was only "serviced" and at one occassion the mainboard (without baseband module) and the camera module (wtf?) were replaced. Of course without effect. At the moment my seller and I are just hoping that LG just relents to sending me a new phone instead of useless servicing of the defect one.

    On to the university stuff. Not much to report here, since the last exam in July and last hand-in also in July I pretty much left everything in a standby mode. But I’m warming up already as the next key-dates are approaching and there is still a bit of work to do, exams to prepare for and documents to hand in.

    Some holiday-related stuff now. I took two weeks summer holiday at the end of July. Originally I planned to use that time to firstly do the car stuff and to finish building some concrete walls for a terrace behind the house. The car business took sadly longer than expected as my first seller let me down and sold the car to somebody other. I could get my hands on another one as you already read above and retrospectively this was a lucky coincidence as my first candidate car was not in an as good shape and more expensive. The wall works also could not be finished in these two weeks because the bricks we ordered took longer to deliver than planned and also it rained the whole two weeks but for two days.

    And finally the work news. Project work in the company is running as usual with maybe some changes for me personally in the near future. But as it’s not complete determined, this is all I’d like to say so far. After my holiday I returned in a modified team with three new people and it’s still changing as soon one of our colleagues will change to another team and tomorrow we’ll receive assistance with another new team member. Yeah, bit of change 😉

    Well, that’s it for now. I hope that I can raise my posting interval in the future again but I wouldn’t bet on that as it didn’t work in the past six months….

    P.S.: Ah yes, I’m on Google+ too meanwhile. This time with my real name, those who know me are of course invited at any time to show me their presence 😉

  • sleep($aLongTime)

    Yes, it’s been a long time again. Seems that the period for my postings is not anymore in the day- but in the months-range. Sorry for that, but you have to believe me when I say that I thought of it several times and just had no time or computer near to put my thoughts down.

    University is stressfull as ever (only a slight easing in the recent days, but don’t let my colleagues know!) and my work duties get harder and harder the closer we come to a certain release date of our project.

    So, anything I can find time for currently is to quickly give you a list of some videos I can recommend to relax and recharge your batteries.

  • Easter Cleanup

    And another month went by without much news from me. There haven’t been many changes anyway. University is stressful as always, the amount of work at my employer keeps at a high level and there is only little spare time for relaxing.

    Furthermore over the last week, my laptop computer has been suffering a slow death wich I tried to prevent by repairing the failing operating system several times. Eventually I had to give up when the point came where the installation of some Windows updates rendered several subsystems (networking, graphics, …) unusable.

    I took the bitter pill and bought a new hardisk and installed a new OS from scratch. Currently I’m in the process of transferring all of my data from the old Hdd to the new Win7 installation. This will still take a few more days until I’m again at the point where I can effectively perform real work again but I’m slowly approaching that point.

    And what’s slowing this down too is the fact, that I’m sick since Friday and in bed since Saturday. Happy Easter, ha ha :/

  • Looking for CMS design patterns / best practices

    For some time now (about 8 months) I’ve been working at projects where we had to set up a CMS for managing contents of websites. This had been the first contact of our team with this specific technology and although we had some help we had to dig up the internals and methods of creating a CMS infrastructure almost solely by ourselves.

    At some point of these projects we felt the need that we should not reinvent the wheels over and over but utilize already gained knowledge in that area and looked for design- or implementation guides how to design your CMS structure in ways so that the later users of your pages "have an easy life" while managing their content.

    To give a bit more background on it to make it clearer:

    • we’re working with RedDot/OpenText CMS
    • we create the overall structure of the website, not the actual content
    • we also set up an area, where (at a later time) editors enter and manage the actual content of the webpage

    And the last two points are the area which caused us some headache. How should we implement the structure of the webpage and set up the administrative areas so that it’s easy for the editors to maintain the actual content? Are there any guidelines how to design the implementations so that if editors complain about something we can fix the structure/process without having to overhaul the complete website?

    Searching through the Internet I’ve found a bunch of pages on how to design a CMS system itself, but none of them covered my questions…

  • First term almost over

    Last Saturday was the last lecture of this term. There is still some work to do and some exams lie ahead but the stress has lowered a bit nevertheless. So far the exams and projects went quite ok and I hope the upcoming ones stay within the trend.

    I have to admit, that I underestimated (again) the required effort for studying in parallel to my day-to-day work. It wouldn’t have been such of a problem if my project environment would have stayed the same since I started studying. But it changed and we got very challenging projects which needed more attention and time than I expected. Today another project started which promises the same requirements, which would be sort of good because it plays in favour of our team. Nevertheless now I hope that I’m a bit better prepared for what lies ahead and I’m confident that I can pull through.

  • Lifesign

    Yes, the last posting is more than a month in the past. Just giving a sign of presence here, nothing more. I’m very busy and exhausted because at work the pile of stuff to do hasn’t gotten smaller and on the university side there is the same situation. I just occassionally find (or rather take) time to have a fast visit to the cinema and relax a bit. The end of the term is coming near and the exams happen and projects and works have to be finished, not much time to think of an appropiate topic which I can quickly type down and post here.

    Suggestions for quick writedowns are welcome but I make no promises for their realization 😉 Don’t know, when I’ll actually have some more spare time again.

  • Merry Christmas!

    Merry Christmas to everyone! I wish you all relaxing days and a nice time together with the people you love.

  • Coding trick: Toggle code with comment switch

    Some time ago I stumbled over a neat trick in programming languages which understand C++-like comment lines (single- and multi-lined comments). This allows toggling between two different blocks of code by just adding or removing a simple ‘/’ character in the first line.

        /*  <<- Add/remove one '/' here to toggle active code block
    String mode = "release";
    /*/
    String mode = "debug";
    //*/

    I found this somewhere on Stackoverflow.com but couldn’t locate the article containing this again. I found a reference to this here but I guess this trick is much, much older than this article.

  • Solution for my resizing resolution issue on Windows XP

    Some time ago I had to deal with a very strange issue on my Windows XP installation on my laptop. Everytime my computer turned the display back on after rebooting, hibernate or even standby it changed its resolution to 1024×768 pixels. This was really weird because the native resolution of my display is 1920×1200 pixels and so the resizing was very disturbing.

    I’m having a Nvidia Quadro FX 770M chipset but searches on the internet indicated that this issue also applied to other chipsets and were likely more of a deeper and complicated driver issue where some setting somehow flipped and caused this behavior.

    There were a lot of descriptions and suggestions how to get rid of this issue (including re-installing the driver) but none of them worked for me. Finally I came across this posting in the Nvidia forums which offered a procedure to resolve this issue. I did not try the full procedure at first but took a shorter route (with less reboots) and this already resolved the problem for me:

    1. reboot/hibernate/standby&resume to reach 1024×768 (low resolution) state
    2. do NOT change resolution or open the Windows display panel but open the NVIDIA Control Panel via the icon in the Systray
    3. go to "Display->Change resolution" and change to the correct resolution there, apply

    It is important to NOT enter the Windows display control panel for changing the resolution, even if the Nvidia control panel is entered afterwards from there. Nevertheless, after this procedure the native resolution persisted on my notebook even after reboots/resumes.

  • Windows XP explorer changed behaviour on SP3

    Yes, I know, Windows XP is already almost at the end of its life and there isn’t much more to add to it. But since I got a new notebook at work to try out and I’m currently in the process of fitting it to my needs, which also involves installing an alternate shell, I’m writing down a small finding for which I found no additional information on the rest of the internet.

    The behavior of the "/e" parameter for the Windows Explorer (explorer.exe) has changed between Service Pack 2 and Service Pack 3. This change only has an effect, if there is an alternate Windows shell active. Until SP2 if there is no explorer.exe process running, a call to "explorer.exe /e" starts the shell and tries to open the folder "/e" which obviously leads to an error (and a started Windows shell). If there IS a running "explorer.exe" process found, a call to "explorer.exe /e" opens the file manager window. With SP3 the "/e" is interpreted in a consistent manner and the explorer starts in the File Manager mode regardless if there is already an "explorer.exe" running or not.

    So if you’re running an alternate shell, want to wire the Windows+E keyboard shortcut to the file manager (or file explorer) using "explorer.exe /e" and experience the Windows Shell starting over your shell with an error, make sure that you install the Service Pack 3 (which you should anyway, regardless of your shell).