Upgrading from Ubuntu "Hardy Heron" to "Intrepid Ibex" wasn't the smooth ride I was used to. I'm a pretty happy Ubuntu user and my system (an old Acer Travelmate 291) has been running all Ubuntu releases since "Breezy Badger" without a single reinstall. This time, however, I experienced problems with …
read moreEfficient Development Environment Setup
Development environments and their configuration can become quite complex. It's not unusual that a complete workstation setup takes half a day or more and requires extensive help from other project members. Using virtual machines for the runtime environment can help to reduce setup and maintenance costs.
For large Java web …
read moreUnderstanding the find(1) Utility
The Unix find(1) utility is a powerful tool, yet few people really understand how it works. It may be a bit confusing at first, but a programmer who knows his boolean algebra should be able to wrap his head around the basic concepts without much trouble.
You've probably seen …
read moreProfessional Deployment and Operation of Web Applications
There are millions of web applications on the Internet that are under constant development. Paying software developers to work on bug fixes and new features is quite expensive already, but what's often neglected is the cost for deployment and operation. Well-run organizations invest in their deployment and runtime infrastructure and …
read moreRsync Snapshot Backups Revisited
A while ago, I blogged about my self-made backup solution, a simple shell script using rsync to create snapshot backups. This wasn't my first attempt at establishing backups for my private workstation but the most successful one so far. The backup takes less than 5 minutes for about 10 GB …
read moreThe State of Java Build Systems
Most people eventually get it that building release artifacts using their IDEs is not the way to nirvana. Builds have to stay stable and reproducible between IDE revisions, and being able to execute them in a command line environment or especially continuous integration servers is key to agile development.
Fortunately …
read moreWhy Do We Build Web Applications?
Creating a good user interface is no trivial task, no matter if it's running as a desktop application or inside a browser. When it comes to accessing server-side resources (a common thing in the corporate world) web applications seem to be the first choice nowadays. You have complete control over …
read moreQuick Tip #1: Implicit FIFOs in Bash
One could assume that I have run out of material and retreat to safer ground, but far from it. From now on I'll just throw in a few quick shell hacks hoping some of you don't know them yet. So, here it goes ...
Unix pipes are cool, but it's quite …
read moreRsync Backups For External Disks
Transcoding Files to Ogg Vorbis
I've got a nice MP3 player from Samsung with 2 GB of flash memory. That's very little and I can never decide which files to keep and which to delete. Fortunately, the player also supports Ogg Vorbis files that require less space for the same quality. To make the most …
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