http://www.neverpanic.de/blog/ CoffeeBreak, the neverpanic.de blog en Clemens Lang Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 Germany License 2010-07-30T22:55:01+00:00 http://www.neverpanic.de/blog/single/christs-resurrection-in-little-switzerland/ http://www.neverpanic.de/blog/single/christs-resurrection-in-little-switzerland/#When:22:55:01Z Seen in a village in Little Switzerland: The text reads “Christ’s Resurrection”. I had a thorough look, but couldn’t spot what that sign was trying to point me to… maybe it’s stating the obvious: Jerusalem is located in Little Switzerland? Personal 2010-07-30T22:55:01+00:00 http://www.neverpanic.de/blog/single/whatthecommit.com-git-hook/ http://www.neverpanic.de/blog/single/whatthecommit.com-git-hook/#When:17:23:52Z whatthecommit.com generates commit messages for the lazy… but being one of the laziest people, this isn't just easy enough!I currently use Git for most of my version control needs. I'm keeping all of my hand-ins for university under version control to be able to sync them between university and my laptop easily and to make it easy for others to contribute (and sometimes they actually do!). But those of you using version control systems know what the biggest problem with version control is: Thinking of a commit message. Wait no moar! The ultimate solution is here! whatthecommit.com is a website that provides you with a fresh commit message every time you load it. So all you have to do, is copy and paste the line into your commit window. Still too much work? That's why git comes with hook scripts. Paste the following code in .git/hooks/prepare-commit-msg in your working copy and make the file executable and you'll be provided with a wonderful commit message every time you type git commit automatically! #!/bin/sh## A hook script to prepare the commit log message.# Called by "git commit" with the name of the file that has the# commit message, followed by the description of the commit# message's source. The hook's purpose is to edit the commit# message file. If the hook fails with a non-zero status,# the commit is aborted. case "$2,$3" in ,|template,) line=$( wget http://whatthecommit.com/ -O - 2>/dev/null | grep -o '<p>.*$' | sed 's/<[^>]*>//g' ) file=$( sed '1d' "${1}" ) echo "${line}" > "${1}" echo "${file}" >> "${1}" ;; *) ;;esac Development, Linux 2010-07-03T17:23:52+00:00 http://www.neverpanic.de/blog/single/windows-7-on-msi-k9n-platinum-nforce-570-sli/ http://www.neverpanic.de/blog/single/windows-7-on-msi-k9n-platinum-nforce-570-sli/#When:00:41:28Z Recently, a fresh Windows install[1] was due on my home PC primarily used by my parents and family after my switch to a MacBook about a year ago. However, whenever I tried to start the installation routine, the setup would boot into the "Windows is starting"-screen with the nicely animated glowing 7-logo[2], but stay there indefinitely without an error message. When starting the setup in safe mode (I had to press F5 or F6 during start-up IIRC), the setup would just hang after Loaded: Windowssystem32driversdisk.sys I started searching the internet for similar problems and found a couple of recommendations related to nForce chipsets. Some told you to disable your on-board LAN ports (which I happen not using anyway) and a lot of similar disable-some-hardware tips, which, unfortunately, did not help at all. I had almost given up on Windows 7 and re-installed XP, when I decided to try a BIOS-update as a last resort. After using MSI's rather comfortable LiveUpdate[3] the Windows 7 setup did work fine[4]. [1]: MSDN-AA is one of the benefits of being a student [2]: http://images.google.de/images?q=Windows%207%20boot%20screen [3]: It's an Internet Explorer Active-X plug-in optimized for IE5 and 800x600, but other than that, it works pretty good. I can even update your BIOS from within the OS (does a hard reset after finishing, but that's probably the better alternative to shutting down on a possibly non-working BIOS) [4]: Sorry for the excessive usage of footnotes 2009-12-26T00:41:28+00:00 http://www.neverpanic.de/blog/single/rapidshare.-completely-unusable/ http://www.neverpanic.de/blog/single/rapidshare.-completely-unusable/#When:23:59:27Z A friend of mine wanted to share a video he made prior to publishing it at some video portal. He uploaded it to RapidShare. And that's where the problems started…RapidShare is changing it’s free download limits (as in speed, time and size) like others are changing their underwear. Their current setup however, is the worst I’ve experienced so far and makes RapidShare almost completely unusable without a client software. I had to reload about 20 times and wait around 15 minutes, before I even got a download ticket. I had to wait 90 seconds after I got the ticket for the download to finally start. For each reload I had to click twice, after I got the ticket it took another click to start the download. In total, that sums up to 20 * 2 + 1 = 41 clicks on a website that advertises itself as “1-CLICK Web hosting - Easy Filehosting”. The download itself took 43 minutes 25 seconds for a total of 114.83 MiB, that’s about 45.14 KiB per second. Compare that to a test download I did from a full-speed server that delivered 657.37 KiB/s for a 30.6 MiB file in 48 seconds. That’s more than 1400% as fast as a download from RapidShare, not counting the waiting time. The numbers speak for themselves – in my opinion RapidShare is completely unusable at the moment (and even more for less tech-savvy people than for me). Personal 2009-12-25T23:59:27+00:00 http://www.neverpanic.de/blog/single/bon-appetit-at-the-erlangen-canteen/ http://www.neverpanic.de/blog/single/bon-appetit-at-the-erlangen-canteen/#When:17:31:53Z It’s no secret the canteen on the Erlangen university’s southern campus is not the best – but I haven’t seen something like that before. A little bit disgusting if you ask me – I was lucky, it wasn’t my meal, though… Personal 2009-09-29T17:31:53+00:00 http://www.neverpanic.de/blog/single/xcode-from-null-to-100/ http://www.neverpanic.de/blog/single/xcode-from-null-to-100/#When:16:24:41Z I was recently browsing the new iTunes 9 Store and somehow ended up in the podcast section. I had a look around the featured podcast and noticed a somewhat new podcast about Xcode called “Xcode von NULL auf Hundert;” (the podcast is german and, as such, has a german title). Ever since I switched to a Mac I have wanted to learn some basics of Cocoa programming. I started reading some resources on Objective-C programming a while ago, but didn't finish any because most of them were pretty technical and theoretical and thus getting boring pretty fast. The “Xcode from NULL to 100;” podcast does a lot more learning by doing – e.g. they guide you to build a (graphical!) calculator and explain memory allocating and releasing using that example. The podcast targets absolute beginners – if you already have a background in programming, some of the information not related to OS X GUI programming will probably be pretty redundant to you, but you might still use the podcast to get started with Apple's Interface Builder. Xcode von NULL auf Hundert; podcast Development, OS X 2009-09-17T16:24:41+00:00 http://www.neverpanic.de/blog/single/geshify-has-moved/ http://www.neverpanic.de/blog/single/geshify-has-moved/#When:16:52:55Z My syntax highlighting extension for ExpressionEngine has moved to a new home: http://geshify.com/ Web Development, PHP 2009-04-02T16:52:55+00:00 http://www.neverpanic.de/blog/single/subversion-property-copy/ http://www.neverpanic.de/blog/single/subversion-property-copy/#When:22:03:04Z Although there is a couple of Subversion GUIs for Macs, I usually use the CLI. I manage all source code I write during my studies using Subversion and usually add revision number and date of last checkin to the file using the svn:keywords-Property. However, I always forget the set of keywords I usually add: Author Date Id Revision URL. Unfortunately, there is no way to copy a property from one file to another in the standard subversion binary. There is, however, a little shortcut: svn propset $propertyName "`svn propget $propertyName $fromFileName`" $toFileName Typing this monster isn’t any userfriendly at all, though – a little .bashrc magic does the trick: # add svn propcopyfunction svn() { case "$1" in pc|propcopy) propName=$2 fromFile=$3 shift 3 `which svn` propset $propName "``which svn` propget $propName $fromFile`" $@ ;; *) `which svn` $@ ;; esac} Update: Thanks to Raim for the wildcard support. Using subversion auto-props is an option for files, but unfortunately, auto-props don’t work on directories yet. Linux 2009-02-15T22:03:04+00:00 http://www.neverpanic.de/blog/single/a-friday-13th-story/ http://www.neverpanic.de/blog/single/a-friday-13th-story/#When:14:32:36Z Are you superstitious? Do you believe in Murphy’s law? I usually don’t believe in such things, but sometimes you start to have doubts… This site is served by my own virtual server hosted by Carrot Servers in Austria. The hardware nodes running their servers are housed in one of Germany’s largest hosting company’s datacenters. However, three of their datacenters recently suffered from a power loss because of a defunct uninterruptible power source and a series of other unfortunate problems – a little over 12,000 servers were without power for a few hours. However, it seems my vServer’s hardware node was damaged by the power loss; one of the hard disk drives in the RAID array was replaced after the outage. Yesterday, the worst-case scenario came true: besides the hard disks, apparently the motherboard was also damaged causing the RAID controller to slowly corrupt the data on the drives. On Friday, 13th, my provider informed me data had been lost and the server will be swapped with a new machine. Luckily, I did remember creating backup – and it happened to be a recent one (namely from Thursday, 12th). But as Murphy’s law states, things never work the way you expect them to work. In this case that meant that permissions were incorrect on the backup although I used rsync with the appropriate preserve-permissions option. I’ve thus been busy reinstalling the software, uploading the files and databases and fixing their permission. As of now, all data has been successfully restored (blessing in disguise) and I’m supervising the server’s functions. Internal, Linux 2009-02-14T14:32:36+00:00 http://www.neverpanic.de/blog/single/software-on-a-stick/ http://www.neverpanic.de/blog/single/software-on-a-stick/#When:11:39:54Z When you buy software in stores you usually get a box with a CD, DVD or even a couple of DVDs. But isn’t that kind of – old-fashioned? Why is the software industry still using optical media to distribute software? Besides the few companies that offer software downloads everybody else ships CDs or DVDs. I occasionally wonder why they don't use USB flash drives? Flash drives are small (from a hardware point of view) USB drives are much smaller and thus much more portable than optical media large (in terms of storage capacity) flash memory can easily store the amount of data a DVD can and the amount will certainly grow in the future robust try to break apart a CD, and then do the same with a flash drive cheap I don't know the exact price per Gigabyte of a CD or DVD, but USB drives are quite cheap as well. I'm not a business analyst, but imho thumb drives are a serious alternative to optical media especially since there will be more PCs or laptops without any optical drive (such as the MacBook Air) in the future. 2008-12-04T11:39:54+00:00