Hi all,

This weblog was pretty much abandoned, due to lack of time and, even more so, omnipresence of Facebook and Twitter.

I took a bit of time and redesigned my homepage (www.sid3windr.be now redirecting to tom.laermans.net), linked a bunch of stuff from there, and started a new blog (tech.sid3windr.be) to post mostly ICT-related tech tips/solutions/howtos.

The social part of the updates will be on Facebook and Twitter, as they have been for the last 2 years anyway – you can find links to all my profiles on the new home page.

Thanks for watching, and hope to see you on the new blog as well!

I wanted to start a Java Webstart app from Firefox, but got this error. The application could not launch. Apparently IE thought it was offline (File -> Work Offline was checked), and as such Sun decided to follow suit. No real reason me thinks, but if you never use IE it’s hard to find what exactly could be the problem… (obviously tried to reboot etc).

Looks like this tool is going away, it’s not in squeeze or sid anymore, but hey, I needed a newer JDK…

make-jpkg cannot create packages for Java 6 update 10 or newer, to fix this, edit /usr/share/java-package/sun-j2sdk.sh.

Add this stanza:

       "jdk-6u"[0-9][0-9]"-linux-x64.bin") # SUPPORTED
            j2se_version=1.6.0+update${archive_name:6:2}${revision}
            j2se_expected_min_size=130
            found=true
            ;;

right after

        "jdk-6u"[0-9]"-linux-x64.bin") # SUPPORTED
            j2se_version=1.6.0+update${archive_name:6:1}${revision}
            j2se_expected_min_size=130
            found=true
            ;;

Then try again, should be golden.

I swapped my WinXP 32bit for a Win7 Ultimate 64bit last weekend… Feels weird. But at least now I can use 4GB of memory instead of 2.25GB (32bit+2 graphics cards = arghl).

I found these things useful in getting a usable system:

• Reenabling the quick launch bar
• Restoring underlined key shortcuts
• Changing back to oldskoolclassic Alt-Tab

To disable the Firefox DNS cache, go to about:config in the address bar.
– Right click to select “New” -> “Integer”, enter “network.dnsCacheExpiration” as the preference name and “0″ as the integer value.
– Create another new integer called “network.dnsCacheEntries” as preference name and again enter “0″ as integer value

There is no facility to clear it, but possibly doing the above, then removing it again, could clear the cache.. Didn’t try it – just disabled it. My resolvers are on the local network so they can cache it for me – this way they ‘ll actually have something to do 😉

So.. My PSU (Zalman ZM-600HP, should be good stuff) decided to die on me last wednesday, and it seems to have taken my motherboard (Asus P5Q-WS) with it to bit&byte heaven. Luckily both are still under warranty (or should be, at least) so hopefully I can get them replaced soon. Video cards, TV card, Disks and RAID controller escaped the pain, I hope I can say the same of the CPU and the RAM .. but I have no way to say right now.

However, I don’t really like the laptop for much else than sitting in front of TV chatting or surfing a bit, so for serious work I really want my desktop…

Still had an Athlon X2 board lying around, with some PCI Express slots, CPU, RAM, etc, so decided to build this in – after all, my offboard RAID controller should be OK to take along to a new system, no INACCESSIBLE_BOOT_DEVICE for me!

However… the ARC-1200 is not compatible with the A8N-SLI Premium… board simply doesn’t boot if you put it in any of the PCIe slots. So I took an 8-port PCIe Areca from the spare parts, as that could read my RAID on the disks at least; but this lead to INACCESSIBLE_BOOT_DEVICE because the PCI ID’s of the 2_port and the 8-port weren’t the same.

My wif’s PC to the rescue, put both Areca’s in, with the disks connected to the 2-port, this allowed me to install the 8-port’s drivers in Windows, then moved it all back to my own temporary PC… Yes, no stop 7B … but stop 7E?!

The machine booted in safe mode, so I was on the right track, and after some googling and fiddling, turns out you can’t down/upgrade easily from an Intel to an AMD CPU, as you will get the 7E stop.

Details are here – I didn’t get the info from this page (seeing as it talks about Virtual PC), instead clicked through on some forums, but it contains the solution none the less. Disabling the IntelPPM driver makes the crash go away (as is to be expected, this is an AMD CPU after all).

Had to reactivate Windows again but that was no biggie.. hope it will still reactivate when I have an RMA board.. 🙂

A belated new year to everyone reading this 😉

A Best Offer Online Daily site on the Internet which shall remain unnamed publishes an RSS feed, showing their offer of the day with some descriptive information. Let’s call it format X, and location A. After a month or 2, they change the format of that file to format Y, still at location A. 3 days later, format Y moves to location B. A month later they change to format Z at location B. 3 months later, format P at location B. 5 months later, format Q at location C. Funny note there, format P at location B is still there, it just shows the same old item every day and is not cleaned up.

I use this RSS feed in an application and am pretty fed up trying to keep up with their flying shit implementation of RSS. I can’t imagine everyone goes to their site every once in a while and updates their RSS reader to yet another new location. Am I missing the point of RSS? I thought it was fire and forget… Sigh.

Quite a while back, I read in one of my magazines about the Tux Droid, produced by apparently Belgian company Kysoh. Back then, it cost 79 EUR. I wanted one, but I didn’t feel 79 euro was to be spent, so I put it on my wishlist. I revisited it a few months ago, and I almost fell off my chair when I saw the current price: 149 EUR!

My wife however found a nice deal a few weeks ago: if you buy the 2 year subscription to Linux+ magazine (for 49.99 EUR) you get a Tuxdroid as a welcome gift! That’s essentially a Tuxdroid for 50 euro with free shipping and with a free 2 year magazine as well 😉 Mine’s on the way, thanks to my wife who gave it to me as a gift – already received 2 issues and they’re interesting (read a chapter about forensics cd’s today).

I just had the following error while trying to start Smokeping on one of my newly installed machines:

ERROR: fping (‘/usr/bin/fping -C 1 localhost’) could not be run: localhost address not found

After digging around somewhat (this worked fine when run on the commandline) turns out my /etc/hosts was chmodded 700 instead of 744. Weird, but this meant only root could resolve it. What I don’t understand is why this did not work – my resolvers also return 127.0.0.1 for the “localhost” query.

Anyway, if you get this error, check if the smokeping user can resolve localhost too 😉

As Kris would say, it was some sort of DNS problem… 😉