Friday, June 29, 2012

the Adium Twitter interface started working again

For almost 2 days it had refused operation saying this:
Unable to update timeline: Your credentials do not allow you access.
Now it just works again – starting around midnight 2012-06-28/29 (CEST).

Wednesday, June 27, 2012

OS X: accidentally switched my desktop to "white on black"

It took me quite a while to find the right group of system preferences, where to switch it back to "black on white": Universal Access.
Apple Universal Access is a component of the Mac OS X operating system that provides computing abilities to the blind, deaf, and handicapped.
Update 2012-10-01
It happened again (in a rather uncomfortable situation), and it took me a little to get here and read this. Success.
I don't want it to happen again, and I switch off all these Universal Access keyboard shortcuts.

Adium: Twitter suddenly stopped working

cocoaforge • View topic - Twitter suddenly stopped working

The warning message (shown by Twitter) says this:
Unable to update timeline: Your credentials do not allow you access.
The Adium folks are after it, keep updated by re-reading the above forum thread!


update 2012-06-29 01:00 CEST:

all of a sudden the Adium Twitter interface started working again here for me w/o any change at all.

Monday, June 25, 2012

BaseX is a light-weight, high-performance and scalable XML database system and XPath/XQuery processor, including full support for the W3C Update and Full Text extensions

BaseX | Free Development software downloads at SourceForge.net

how errors crept into the Bible and what can be done to correct them

Searching for the Better Text – Bible History Daily

redirecting incoming phone calls to /dev/null on the FRITZ!Box

Within the last couple of weeks I have had business calls from  a specific phone again and again. The first couple of calls were quite polite. But they all went the same way and ended unpleasantly. Now finally I created a call forwarding rule on my FRITZ!Box, that makes all calls from that phone number to go to my message recorder (that's almost like "/dev/null"). I guess that will help my peace of mind a lot.

Tuesday, June 19, 2012

O'Reilly Media book: VMware Cookbook

VMware Cookbook:
With scores of step-by-step solutions, this cookbook helps you work with VMware ESXi in a wide range of network environments. You’ll not only learn the basics—how to pool resources from hardware servers, computer clusters, networks, and storage, and then distribute them among virtual machines—but also how to overcome the stumbling blocks you’ll encounter when you monitor systems, troubleshoot problems, and deal with security. This expanded second edition covers recent advances in vCloud Director and vShield cloud security.


got it on 2012-07-29.

Wednesday, June 13, 2012

that disk did not die the clicking death

When I put a FRITZ!Box 7390 in place here more than 2 years ago, one of the features I discovered with big joy and that I started to make use of, was that it powers down USB attached ATA disks after a user defined period of inactivity. You can also have a USB hub in between, and I started making use of that as well.

The ATA disk (#1) I attached, is actually a notebook disk with its own external housing. It got formatted with ext2, because I prefer that over the DOS file system.

In the beginning of 2012 that disk (#1) was no longer accessible. First I was sure, that it had died the clicking death. But when I attempted to replace it with another one (#2),
it turned out, the source of irritation was actually the USB hub, because after eliminating the USB hub and attaching disk #2 directly to the FRITZ!Box disk #2 was "perfectly" accessible again.

So I gave disk #1 another try, mounted it somewhere else, and that worked without problem.

I thought, I should note this somewhere, because it might occur to others as well.

Of course, why should live USB hubs live for ever? But I was rather, rather astonished to understand this scenario.

Well, it's not absolutely unlikely, that disk #1 will die for ever after being in use in another environment for another while. That's a behavior I found documented elsewhere.

No, the housing (external case) wasn't the reason for the problem, at least it worked with other disks.

Friday, June 8, 2012

O'Reilly Media book: What Is DevOps?

What Is DevOps?:
The continuing NoOps/DevOps controversy is a tempest in a teapot that arises from a misunderstanding of what "operations" and, in turn, DevOps, means. Both sides essentially agree about the future of operations. As more and more large applications move to the cloud, infrastructure becomes code. That's been a theme of the Velocity conference since the beginning. But operations means much more: it also means resilience engineering, reliability engineering, system monitoring, and yes, answering the pager when things break. Operations doesn't disappear; it evolves. And that evolution involves development and operations teams working even more closely together.


got it on 2012-07-29.

PacktPub book: Selenium 2 Testing Tools: Beginner’s Guide – announced for 2012-09

http://www.packtpub.com/selenium-2-testing-tools-beginners-guide/book