I recently had to poke around with the JAAS classes in the JDK and wanted to step through with a debugger. But the JDK ships with a rt.jar that’s not compiled with debugging symbols enabled. Thus, debugging into the JDK sources is not much of a success.

Some …

I recently got a new Laptop and installed it with Gentoo 64 bit. Along the process I had a hard time getting Thunderbird, the enigmail plugin and gnupg to play together nicely.

I had everything set up correctly (or so I thought) and the proper keys in place. But kept …

Working in a team of developers sometimes requires you to unify certain settings in the Eclipse workspace. We used to solve this manually by documenting the required settings on a wiki page. This woks only so good because everyone (including me) tends to forget about those settings and when crating …

While doing a big refactoring for a customer I stumbled over a missing feature in Eclipse’s refactoring dialog: you cannot double-click to expand packages in the dialog that selects the destination when moving classes.

This was a good chance to actually do some hacking in JDT. I was able …

To analyze data on a customer’s server, I often hack together small Groovy scripts. I type tiny scripts right in the editor on the remote side but sometimes it’s tedious to type over a slowish ssh connection.

sshfs seems to come in quite handy in this case. However …

My mom has a ThinkPad A31 that she uses to read eMails and surf the web. It was running the Windows XP install that the machine came with.

The end of Windows XP support appeared a few times in the daily print press here. This made my mom beware of …

I’ve been using a USB disk in an external case to make TimeMachine backups of my wife’s Macbook. This approach worked for quite some time but was quite fiddly: take the disk out of the closet, find a power plug for the external case, attach cables etc. My …

At work we develop a web based software for the automotive industry. On the server side we embed Jetty as HTTP server and Servlet engine. It’s easy to configure in code and performs very well.

Recently, we had to integrate a third party solution which comes as a virtual …

My trusty old Samsung Galaxy S running Cyanogenmod is beginning to show its age. The main shortcoming of the device is it’s RAM - 384 MB is on the low side for running a current Android version.

So I was looking for a modern device that would run Cyanogenmod. A …

At work we deploy our software on machines that are located at customers sites. To access these machines we have created a VPN infrastructure that allows us to access the machines, deploy updates etc.

I use Shrewsoft’s VPN client to connect to the VPN infrastructure. This works so well …