Sunday, July 29, 2012

O'Reilly Media book: OS X Mountain Lion Pocket Guide

OS X Mountain Lion Pocket Guide:
This handy guide is packed with concise information to help you quickly get started with Mountain Lion, whether you’re new to the Mac or a longtime user. Once you learn the essentials, you can use this book as a resource for problem-solving on the fly.


got it on 2012-07-29.

Winston Churchill: This is just the sort of nonsense up with which I will not put

[Link]

Friday, July 27, 2012

Google Contacts' "Imported ..." groups

If you happen to select one of those "Imported dd/mm/YYYY" groups, they tell you:

These contacts have been imported, but not yet merged. Find & merge duplicates. …

But you may already have them incorporated properly into your collection. It's just that they want to remind you, that there are imported contacts, and that you should assign proper categories to them.

SUSE Studio: "official" openSUSE AMIs in Amazon EC2

SUSE Studio: Public AMIs based on openSUSE 12.1

I call them "official", as they are created by the openSUSE Studio team.

Wednesday, July 25, 2012

upgrading my home server to openSUSE-12.1

As always I wonder, which difficulties I am going to face and how easy it will be to overcome them. Wish me luck!
Next computer to upgrade will be my ASUS laptop then.

Update 13:MM:
Watching the installation log output and noticing all these packages, that will quite likely never get made use of, it's always intriguing to consider removing lots of those packages. But then: remember dependency hell! You will only get rid of packages with a fresh install. And you usually do fresh installs only, if there is nothing to upgrade from, because essentially you have to make all your old adaptions again and again. And that's what you rather want to avoid at all.

Update 2012-07-28 10:00
The crontab had gotten screwed somehow: /usr/bin/crontab is no longer editable for others, instead the trusted users now have to be a member of the trusted group.

Update 2012-08-12 08:45
I had not been able to log in to this machine using "ssh -X" since the upgrade, i.e. there was no "$DISPLAY" to display X applications on the originating machine.
I had a separate article created on this blog on the "ssh -X" issue, and I completed this story over there as well.

On the target machine side this appeared in syslog, whenever I logged in using "ssh -X" instead of simply using "ssh" without "-X":
"sshd[PID]: error: Failed to allocate internet-domain X11 display socket."
Apparently there are two different ways to fix this on the target machine side:

Fix#1:
  • add "AddressFamily inet" in /etc/ssh/sshd_config; "inet" stands for "use IPv4 only";
  • adding "AddressFamily any", in order to allow both IPv4 and also IPv6, did not work for me;
  • of course: stop+start (or whatever) the sshd in order for this to have any effect.
Fix#2
  • enable IPv6;
  • this path looks far more future oriented to me.
Sounds to me, like these recipes are not to be used together.
I found the recipes (using DuckDuckGo) on ubuntu and opensuse forums (Latin plural is "fora").
First I went the fix#1 way, afterwards the fix#2 way, that's what has been successfully in place since then.

Update 2012-08-15
"Of course" the mail server set-up did not work any longer, although it had worked until the OS upgrade. Getting that working again (through YaST) wasn't a big deal, but yet another P.I.T.A. .
I just hope, there is no more trouble with the OS upgrade.

watching Blue Bloods, season 1, episode 18

Blue Bloods (TV series) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Monday, July 23, 2012

Grace (prayer) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Grace (prayer) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Watched "Blue Bloods"; wanted to understood a little better, what they mean, when they say "Grace!". Fixed a typo in the Wikipedia article.

Wednesday, July 18, 2012

ISTQB - International Software Testing Qualifications Board

Certifying Software Testers Worldwide - ISTQB® International Software Testing Qualifications Board

O'Reilly Media book: Software Testing Foundations, 3rd Edition

Software Testing Foundations, 3rd Edition - O'Reilly Media

got it on 2012-07-29.

I'm trying to delete apps from My Android Apps, but they don't let me

Contact Google Play about Android Apps - Google Play Help

There are apps, that I purchased resp. downloaded once, and that I removed meanwhile from my Android devices, but I still get updates offered again and again, and that way I am not able, to select "update all". So I thought, it's more adequate to get them removed from "My Android Apps" entirely, but:
At this time, there is no way to permanently delete or remove apps from either My Apps or My Orders.
We're always working to improve functionality of My Apps and My Orders, so stay tuned!

Gary Taubes and his interesting work on nutrition

about the Maleo and how its population is being conserved

Animals - Maleo - O'Reilly Media:

… Nesting grounds are being more rigorously protected, recruiting local community "egg-diggers" to become paid guardians. Forest corridors are being repaired and moratoriums on egg harvesting are being negotiated with local communities. Agricultural practices are being modified and, in some areas, used to generate income to fund conservation activities. …

Monday, July 16, 2012

Blue Bloods (TV series with Tom Selleck)

good to read: "why to create a test suite" by Marcel Grünauer

How to fix a bug

how do I get rid of the occasional "Google translate – View this page in …" on top of a page?

I am not sure, when and how often it happens, but once in a while, this suggestion gets displayed on top of a web page within Firefox.
I don't need it, I don't like it, I would like to get rid of it, but I can't find a way.

Update:
Of course I know, apparently I can decide to determine to not get translated web pages in a specific source language. But I am quite sure, I already decided and determined that more than once, when this "Google translate …" appeared on top of a page. So, why don't they respect my decision "for ever"?!?

Tuesday, July 10, 2012

The Pragmatic Bookshelf: Deploying with JRuby

Deploying with JRuby:
Deploy using the JVM's high performance while building your apps in the language you love. JRuby is a fast, scalable, and powerful JVM language with all the benefits of a traditional Ruby environment. See how to consolidate the many moving parts of an MRI-based Ruby deployment onto a single JVM process. You'll learn how to port a Rails application to JRuby, get it into production, and keep it running.

bad, I missed this message: "YAPC::Europe 2012: early bird price till 2012-07-08"

early bird price till …
  • There are only 3 messages on that blog resp. Atom feed,
  • this one is the 3rd, and it's dated 2012-06-27,
  • the 2nd is dated 2012-02-06.
  • I have no idea, when the prices page was published.

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.