Five Years of Blogging

Posted on January 1, 2012 by

When I started this blog in December 2006, I didn’t think I’d keep going for five years. Now, more than a hundred articles later, there’s still no shortage of topics to write about. Five years is like eternity in my line of business, so let’s not dwell in the past. Anyway, I’m still going to have a brief look at what happened last year.

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Hudson vs. Jenkins Revisited

Posted on December 27, 2011 by

When the Hudson/Jenkins fork was announced earlier this year, the case seemed pretty clear. There were heroes from the Open Source community, among them Hudson’s original author, and there was everybody’s favorite villain, Oracle. Back in February, I would have chosen Jenkins without a second thought. Now, almost a year later, things are less clear and I’m not sure which one to pick.

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Sharing Files Revisited

Posted on November 19, 2011 by

It’s amazing how sometimes problems solve themselves. Since my last article, I got a new home router (a FRITZ!Box Fon WLAN 7320) that nicely solves the problem of accessing network devices with dynamic addresses even without Zeroconf.

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Sharing Files With Android Devices

Posted on October 9, 2011 by

Occasionally I want to transfer a file from my Linux desktop machine to one of my Android-based devices via my home network. Shouldn’t be a problem, there are lots of networking protocols for this, right? In practice, many solutions you think of aren’t convenient enough for daily use.

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“Cannot fork”

Posted on September 4, 2011 by

From time to time, the virtual server I rented acted up. When logging into the system, I would get error messages indicating the server wasn’t able to create any more processes: “cannot fork”. This was weird because ps(1) showed only 20 processes, while the hard limit of the virtual machine host was apparently set to 94.

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Writing Hamcrest Matchers

Posted on August 2, 2011 by

JUnit 4 introduced a fancy DSL based on the Hamcrest framework for expressing assertions. JUnit ships with the most important matchers and you can always add Hamcrest to your classpath if you need more. Sometimes no existing matcher fits your needs and you have to roll your own. Since it’s not entirely obvious from the documentation, I’ll show a template for creating a simple Hamcrest matcher.

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Moving to blog.mafr.de

Posted on July 23, 2011 by

This blog has been running for four and a half years now. That’s quite a while in internet time, so I’ve decided to move it to my own domain at http://blog.mafr.de/ (the old URL will be valid indefinitely, though). Since I don’t want to host a WordPress blog myself for both stability and security reasons, I bought the domain mapping upgrade wordpress.com offers.

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JBoss: Running Multiple Instances on One Host

Posted on July 10, 2011 by

Occasionally, it’s useful to run multiple JBoss instances on one machine. Like with any network server, this is difficult because only one application can bind to a port at any given time. You have to assign different sets of ports to each instance. JBoss consists of quite a few network services so it’s a lot of tedious work to reconfigure each and every port (I counted 16 different ports on JBoss 6′s default profile).

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