meineerde

30 Minute Timeout

2011-02-01T16:06:42Z

After sitting days after days behind my laptop without much change of environment at all and starting to get really tired I thought I might go out, face the cold, and grab a nose-full of fresh air, taking the camera for a walk.

Aiming for the Griebnitzsee – just around the corner – I immediately spotted a lovely pair of mandarin ducks slowly swimming along the river bank. I guess I annoyed them a bit, tying to snap a good photo, but at least they didn’t escape in a hurry.

I mean, nobody is to be expected to be in hurry during this kind of weather. Afternoon is in full swing, the sun starting to drown in its own misery. All together it creates that special melancholic mood you only get during those painfully slow winter days.

How awesome would it be just to sit down in front of a huge fireplace, wrapping oneself into a nice and cozy blanket, having a nice cup of coffee, and watching the world sleeping outside through a window? Without having to worry about anything but when nature might wake up again, starting a new year full of fun, sunshine, and happy people.

And then, all of a sudden, a huge frog appears. Not just any frog but The Giant Red Frog Of Awesomeness having its well-deserved hibernation. But be aware once he awakes. Then he’s going out to find ~~Mozilla~~ Godzilla to have a last epic fight about who’s going to conquer the world. Then, after he won, he’s going to swim to the next beach to entertain the kids. As he is truly an awesome frog.

But first we have to wait for the sun to come up again. To haunt the ice and the cold and the strange thoughts. Then I might even start to enjoy the sunsets at our local mooring again.

Tron Legacy

2010-11-10T16:28:02Z

There’s a new trailer for Tron Legacy. And it’s even more awesome than the first one. I can’t wait for it to hit the cinemas over here. Though I need to find one playing it in OV (original version in English). But I probably go crazy until January 27th nevertheless…

(Direct Tron)

The Simpsons – by Banksy

2010-10-11T17:49:50Z

(Direct Banksy, via Nerdcore)

Yes René, you are right. This intro of the recent Simpsons episode by Bansky deserves to (and is going to) be on every blog on teh internets.

FrOSCon 2010: Redmine, und dann?

2010-09-29T15:16:24Z

Am 21. August 2010 war mal wieder FriOSCon in St. Augustin (bei Bonn). Und ich war dabei, vor allem um einige Open Source Projekte näher kennen zu lernen, Leute zu treffen und vor allem, um dem Redmine-Vortrag von Felix Schäfer zu lauschen.

Aus Gründen war der Felix leider verhindert, sodass ich mich spontan bereit erklärt habe, den Vortrag zu übernehmen. Damit hatte ich meinen ersten Talk auf einer Konferenz. Und mit nur ca. 3 Stunden Vorbereitung war der dann sogar ganz okay.

Die Aufzeichnung des Vortrags ist jetzt bei CCC-TV online.

Redmine ist installiert, ein paar Projekte sind angelegt, und die Defaulteinstellungen scheinen gut zu klappen. Alles läuft gut, ein paar Kleinigkeiten scheinen allerdings noch zu fehlen, aber was? Redmine eignet sich nicht nur hervorragend zum Verwalten von “einfachen” Softwareprojekten, sondern dank der hohen Anpassbarkeit des System zu komplexeren oder gar nicht softwarebezogenen Projekten.

Aufzeichnung Froscon / cc-by-nc-sa

Stack Trace

2010-09-17T18:09:36Z

Thank you for contacting support. Your issue is very important to us. Would you be so kind and provide us with a so called stack trace so that we can help you with your issue. You normally find it in the log file.

(from the internets)

Or you know what? Just get the fuck out…

Cross-browser CSS gradient

2010-07-26T09:22:00Z

Recently, I released a new version of the Redmine Checkout plugin. This release sports a nifty protocol selector with buttons styled entirely in CSS (as good as it gets). To be able to support as many browsers as possibly while not having to fall back to pixel graphics I had to apply some tricks which I want to describe here.

The buttons take most of their appearance from a background gradient with a light color at the top and a darker color at the bottom. This gives them some kind of three-dimensional effect compared to the plain-colored background. We are going to style the unselected button on the right. The left selected button is styled equivalent with just some different colors.

An unselected standard button is styled as follows:

ul#checkout_protocols li a {
  background-color: #eee;
  background:  url(button.svg) 0 0 no-repeat; /* Opera  needs an "image" :( - using svg for this so it will scale properly without looking too ugly */
  background: -khtml-gradient(linear, left top, left bottom, from(#f8f8f8), to(#ddd)); /* Konqueror */
  background: -webkit-gradient(linear, left top, left bottom, from(#f8f8f8), to(#ddd));   /* Webkit (Chrome, Safari, ...) */
  background: -moz-linear-gradient(top,  #f8f8f8,  #ddd); /* Gecko (Firefox, ...) */
  filter:progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.gradient(startColorstr='#f8f8f8', endColorstr='#dddddd'); /* IE 5.5 - 7 */
  -ms-filter: progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.gradient(startColorstr='#f8f8f8', endColorstr='#dddddd'); /* IE 8 */
  position: relative;
}

As you can see, there are a multitude of rules which each target a specific browser. This is required as there is no standard defined on gradients yet. However every major browser supports a technique for this – just in its own syntax.

The first rule on line 2 (and also line 3 as seen later) works as a default here. It is used in browsers which do not support one of the following rules. It forces a background color which does not look too bad and at least keeps the GUI element usable. Lines 3–8 each target a specific browser family to use a gradient instead of the simple background.

KHTML (Konqueror) and Webkit (Chrome, Safari, …)

Let’s start with line 4 and 5. These rules target KHTML browsers (like Konqueror) and the similar Webkit browsers (Chrome, Safari, …) respectively. The rules are structured as follows (more information can be found in the Safari documentation)

linear — The gradient type. Can be one of linear or radial
left top — The starting point of the gradient. This is a X-Y coordinate.
left bottom — The end point of the gradient. This is a X-Y coordinate.
from(#f8f8f8) — The start color.
to(#ddd) — The end color.

Gecko (Firefox, Mozilla, …)

Line 6 targets Gecko-based browsers like Firefox, Thunderbird or Mozilla. These define the gradient type inside the actual rule name. So -moz-linear-gradient defines, well, a linear gradient while -moz-radiant-gradient defines a radiant gradient. We obviously use -moz-linear-gradient here.

top — Starting point of the gradient.
#f8f8f8 — Start color.
#ddd — End color.

Internet Explorer

Line 7–9 focus on Internet Explorer. Here we use filters which are very old IE-only features, originally invented to allow DHTML animations. They are rather slow and show strange behavior sometimes, but it the only way to get gradients to IE. On the other hand, these even work on IE 5.5. The HTML element must have layout. So we use position: relative in line 9. If you omit this, it is showing some really strange renderings. The parameters of the filters should be rather self-explaining. As the filter syntax has slightly changed from IE7 to IE8 we include both variants here. Additional documentation is available from Microsoft.

Opera

And finally there is Opera. This browser is targeted in line 3. Unfortunately Opera does not support the concept of a gradient out of the box, so we have to develop a fallback here. Fortunately though, it supports SVG out of the box which allows us to define the gradient in an XML format to still benefit from the vector definition and not having to fallback to a pixel representation. As this is a fallback, it must be defined atop of the other rules which then overwrite this rule if one them is supported. If the SVG rule was put at the bottom, it would have a higher priority and all browsers would attempt to use it.

This technique, however, allows us to even target browsers which do not match one of the explicitly supported browsers but do support SVG.

The referenced SVG is rather simple:

<?xml version="1.0" standalone="no"?>
<!DOCTYPE svg PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD SVG 1.1//EN" "http://www.w3.org/Graphics/SVG/1.1/DTD/svg11.dtd">
<svg width="100%" height="100%" version="1.1" xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg">
  <defs>
    <linearGradient id="gradient" x1="100%" y1="100%">
      <stop offset="0%" style="stop-color:#ddd; stop-opacity:1" />
      <stop offset="100%" style="stop-color:#f8f8f8; stop-opacity:1" />
    </linearGradient>
  </defs>
  <rect width="100%" height="100%" style="fill:url(#gradient)"/>
</svg>

Note that the start color is defined on offset="100%" and the end color on offset="0%".

How to compile Postfix+SASL+LDAP on Opensolaris

2010-06-14T18:44:12Z

Currently, Opensolaris does not provide a Postfix package. Although there exist packages on blastwave and on OpenCSW they are either outdated or do not play well together.

Fortunately, Ihsan Dogan did create a script to create Postfix packages from scratch as well as some precompiled packages. Unfortunately, these packages miss SASL support. So I was in need to compile these myself.

You will obviously need the Postfix sources and the package script:

wget http://de.postfix.org/ftpmirror/official/postfix-2.7.1.tar.gz
gunzip -c postfix-2.7.1.tar.gz | tar -xf -

wget http://ihsan.dogan.ch/postfix/downloads/makePostfixPkg.sh
chmod +x makePostfixPkg.sh

cd postfix-2.7.1

Since Opensolaris b130, NIS+ was removed from the system. As Postfix does not know that, it will not compile as it defines a dependency to it. However, this can be disabled by simply applying the following patch:

--- src/util/sys_defs.h	2010-06-02 01:56:57.000000000 +0200
+++ src/util/sys_defs.h	2010-06-14 22:08:35.596113543 +0200
@@ -400,7 +400,6 @@
 #define DEF_DB_TYPE	"dbm"
 #define ALIAS_DB_MAP	"dbm:/etc/mail/aliases"
 #define HAS_NIS
-#define HAS_NISPLUS
 #define USE_SYS_SOCKIO_H		/* Solaris 2.5, changed sys/ioctl.h */
 #define GETTIMEOFDAY(t)	gettimeofday(t)
 #define ROOT_PATH	"/bin:/usr/bin:/sbin:/usr/sbin:/usr/ucb"

Just put that patch into a file called nisplus.patch and patch the code:

patch -p0 < nisplus.patch

(found on estibi’s Solaris blog)

Before actually compiling Postfix, we need some packages:

# First install the sunstudio compilers and some additional
# development tools
pkg install sunstudio12u1 object-file
    
# ...and some additional libraries and tools
pkg install libsasl pcre

Now we can generate the makefile, compile and generate the SRV4 package. We will tell the compilers to include the default Cyrus SASL library for client authentication as well as the Dovecot library which I will use later to connect both servers and authenticate SMTP users.

# Clean up first and after failed attempts
make tidy

# Generate the makefile
make makefiles CCARGS='-DUSE_TLS -DHAS_LDAP \
-DUSE_SASL_AUTH -DDEF_SERVER_SASL_TYPE=\"dovecot\" \
-DUSE_CYRUS_SASL -I/usr/include/sasl'
AUXLIBS="-L/usr/lib -lsasl -lssl -lcrypto -lldap"
CC=/opt/sunstudio12.1/bin/cc

# Build
make

# Create the package if the build succeeded
../makePostfixPkg.sh

The makePostfixPkg will create a Solaris package named something like CNDpostfix-2.7.1,REV=100614-SunOS5.11-i386.pkg inside the Postfix directory. This package can then be installed like this:

# make sure you removed the default Sendmail package first if it installed
pkg uninstall sendmail

# install the package
pkgadd -d CNDpostfix-2.7.1,REV=100614-SunOS5.11-i386.pkg CNDpostfix

# Configure the package to your needs. Then enable the service
svcadm enable svc:/network/postfix:default

Sane Opensolaris Settings

2010-02-05T12:46:41Z

Opensolaris has done some huge steps towards being usable by a normal person. Sadly there are still some things lacking sane defaults which I try to provide here. I will try to update this post if I stumble over more of these hiccups.

Correct colors on exit of an ncurses program

If an ncurses program (like nano) exits, the default xterm-color does not properly restore the colors of the terminal. The background color is shown in a dark gray. For a quick relieve you can issue a short

tput rs1

As this is rather cumbersome, I think it is better to adjust out terminfo definitions.

TERM=xterm-color infocmp > /tmp/xterm-color.src
sed -i -e 's/op=\\E\[100m,/op=\\E\[m,/' /tmp/xterm-color.src
pfexec tic -v /tmp/xterm-color.src
rm /tmp/xterm-color.src

The solution is from the Opensolaris Bug, the rough steps from Peter Harvey.

Fixing some key bindings

By default some essential key bindings do not work properly. This can be fixed by just reassigning them. The following statement has to be run as root.

cat >> /etc/profile <<EOF
# home key
bind '"\e[1~":beginning-of-line'
# del key
bind '"\e[3~":delete-char'
# end key
bind '"\e[4~":end-of-line'
# pgup key
bind '"\e[5~":history-search-forward'
# pgdn key
bind '"\e[6~":history-search-backward'
EOF

You have to logout and login again for these settings to take effect. Alternatively you could just enter the individual bind statements into your current terminal.

The bindings are from Epiphanic Networks’ Wikka.

en_us.utf-8 locale on OpenSolaris

2009-10-29T22:11:44Z

This is mainly a pointer for me to remember things…

If you have an OpenSolaris 200×.xx installed as a minimal image (like that one) you will notice that there is a rather unfriendly assortment of locales installed:

locale -a
C
POSIX
iso_8859_1

What we (or at least I) want instead is the “default” locale en_us.UTF-8
Google has pointed me to the localeadm tool to solve this. However this tool seems not to be available anymore on Opensolaris. Instead, one is expected to do the following:

pkg install lang-support-english

This installs ca. 135 MB of packages. Unfortunately one of them is a complete X.org server which I specifically did not want to install in the first place as the system is intended to be a server where I deem an X server to be just unnecessary cruft. Fortunately, it is not started by default, so it seems, I have to live with that.

Another call of locale -a shows us a much friendlier view on the system:

locale -a
C
POSIX
en_AU
en_AU.ISO8859-1
en_AU.UTF-8
en_CA
en_CA.ISO8859-1
en_CA.UTF-8
en_GB
en_GB.ISO8859-1
en_GB.ISO8859-15
en_GB.ISO8859-15@euro
en_GB.UTF-8
en_IE
en_IE.ISO8859-1
en_IE.ISO8859-15
en_IE.ISO8859-15@euro
en_IE.UTF-8
en_MT.UTF-8
en_NZ
en_NZ.ISO8859-1
en_NZ.UTF-8
en_US
en_US.ISO8859-1
en_US.ISO8859-15
en_US.ISO8859-15@euro
en_US.UTF-8
iso_8859_1

To setup our newly installed locale, just put this line

LANG="en_US.UTF-8"

into the file /etc/default/init and reboot the system.

Sigh, sometimes are things so much easier on the Linux side of life.

The hint to the solution came from the OpenSolaris Forum btw.

Update 2010-02-23

You can also just install the locale files without the overhead that comes from lang-support-english. Just install on Opensolaris < Build 133

pkg install SUNWlang-enUS

or on Opensolaris >= Build 133

pkg install system/locale/en_us

Chili con Carne

2009-10-01T15:16:03Z

Schee war’s g’wesen auf’m Oktoberfest. Jetzt bin ich wieder da und muss daher auch wieder selbst für mich sorgen. Angesichts des sehr pünktlich angebrochenen Oktobers und der damit verbundenen Kälte wird es damit wieder Zeit für Wärme von innen. Und was ist dafür besser geeignet als ein ordentliches Chili?

Richtig: nix. Und genau deswegen habe ich mir grade eins gekocht. Und im Sinne von Open Sourcing soll natürlich auch das Rezept dazu den Weg in die Welt finden. Guten Hunger!

Zutaten für 2 ordentliche Portionen

500g gemischtes Hackfleisch
500ml Rinderbrühe
2 EL Tomatenmark
1-2 weiße oder rote Zwiebeln
2-3 Knoblauchzehen
1 Dose Tomaten (400g), ganz oder gehackt
1 Dose rote Kidneybohnen (420g)
2-5 Chilischoten (je nach Geschmack, aber unbedingt frisch)
etwas Chilipulver (je nach Geschmack)
etwas Paprikapulver
1/2 TL gemahlener Kreuzkümmel (oder Kumin)
1 TL gemischte Kräuter (Oregano, Thymian, Rossmarin)
2 TL Honig

Zum Anrichten

Crème fraîche oder Schmand
etwas Gartenkresse, Schnittlauch o.ä.
ein frisches Baguettebrot oder Bauernbrot

Zubereitung

Das Hackfleisch in einer Pfanne mit etwas Olivenöl (oder anderem Pflanzenöl) gut anbraten bis es anfängt krümelich zu werden. Währenddessen in einem großen Topf die Rinderbrühe erhitzen, dabei etwa 1 Esslöffel Brühe zurückbehalten. Sobald das Fleisch vollständig durch gegarrt ist und anfängt braun zu werden alles in den Topf mit der heißen Rinderbrühe geben und aufkochen.

Die Zwiebeln und den Knoblauch fein hacken. Der Knoblauch schmeckt besser und riecht nicht so stark, wenn er gehackt und nicht gepresst wird und wenn das grüne Herz entfernt wird, das riecht am meisten.

Beides in die Pfanne geben in der gerade das Fleisch war und anbraten bis es glasig wird und das Tomatenmark sowie einen Esslöfel Wasser oder Brühe dazu geben. Kurz weiterbraten und dann in den Topf mit der Fleischbrühe geben. Jetzt die Dosentomaten und die kleingehackten Chilischoten dazu geben. Wurden ganze Tometen verwendet, diese mit einem Messer etwas zerteilen.

Jetzt mit Kreuzkümmel, Chillipulver, dem Parikapulver sowie Pfeffer und Salz würzen. und jetzt das ganze mindestens 30 Minuten bei mittlerer Hitze zugedeckt köcheln lassen. Hier noch nicht zu stark würzen, da sich der Geschmack durch das Kochen noch verändert und wesentlich runder wird.

Währenddessen die Kidneybohnen abtropfen und ggf. den Saft abwaschen. Nach den 30 Minuten – also wenn sich der runde Geschmack eingestellt hat – die Bohnen dazugeben und nocheinmal ca. 10 Minuten kochen lassen. So fallen sie nicht auseinander. Die Kräuter dazugeben, das ganze mit dem Honig abrunden. Noch etwas abschmecken und nachziehen lassen, aber nicht mehr groß kochen lassen, die Bohnen werden es danken.

Zum Schluss die scharfe Angelegenheit in Schüsseln mit etwas Crème fraîche und Kresse obendrauf servieren. Dazu frisches Brot und ein kühles Bier.

Auf einen guten Hunger!