When I wanted to suspend my notebook today the hibernate button was gone from the menu. Running the /etc/acpi/hibernate.sh shell script as root still worked, but there was no way to get that silly button back.

My first idea was some kind of configuration trouble, suddenly appearing …

I've been blogging for a full year now and since the calendar year is coming to an end, too, it's time for a tiny bit of reflection. One of the main premises of this blog is to keep meta blogging low, so this article is going to be a rare …

I've been a happy user of RCS for years (in fact, my software engineering course at university was held by Walter Tichy, the original author of RCS). The good old Revision Control System may be a dinosaur, but it served me well for my configuration files and scripts.

Over the …

This weekend I finally had the time to take a look at GridGain, a computational grid package written in and for Java. GridGain is a an open source product licensed under LGPL-2.1 (the same as JBoss) with minor portions under the Apache 2.0 license, so use in commercial …

Handling configuration data in Java isn't as convenient as it could be. The old and popular Properties mechanism has an awkward syntax and you have to take care of type safety yourself. The new Preferences mechanism supports XML but still isn't everything I'd like it to be.

Recently, I discovered …

My interest in Grid Computing over the last weeks begins to show. After reading the Google MapReduce paper, I tried my fingers on a client side toy problem.

For formatting purposes, I was interested in the size of the longest string in a sequence. There are lots of ways to …

Spam filters are supposed to take care of unsolicited E-Mail and they save us lots and lots of time each day. But what about all that stuff from inside your organization that is only loosely relevant to your work or not at all? Crowded inboxes use up time and energy …

Currently I've got the pleasure to do some coding in C. There's nothing wrong with that, but things can get a bit uncomfortable for those spoilt by languages like Python or Java. So it's nice to have a library of useful functions from various areas, which I accumulated over the …

Many software developers feel bad because they make little use of comments in their code. Often, using lengthy comments is considered good style. In the old days, with languages like C or assembler, things got messy pretty fast, so comments were the only way to keep track of processor registers …

In a previous article, I discussed sshfs, a user mode filesystem based on FUSE for accessing remote files. Another useful filesystem type is encfs which provides transparent encryption of directories. With encfs, files are stored encrypted in a special directory under encfs' control. The encryption algorithm and password are specified …