Personal TechBlog

If you want to use your QuoVadis SuisseID to logon to your system (or for any other authentication on your system like on "su" or "sudo") you can just configure PAM with PKCS11 support to get authenticated. No more passwords. Only your PIN for the SuisseID is neccessary.

This little guide should work on nearly any distribution... but take care: if you are not really familiar with linux, dont use this
Its not a simple "click and go", its some config files editing, RTFM, and: think first!

Smartcards – never faced with it. Now i am owner of a QuoVadis SuisseID. The big advantage in comparison to the Post SuisseID is that the QuoVadis comes with an optional eMail Certificate to encrypt emails. This is a nice feature if you transfer sensitive informations which should be secured in a special way.

The problem is that i want to use it with Linux. And Linux support is not established like the Windows support yet. So i tried to get it working. The following steps should work with nearly any Distribution.

I love alpha testing. I love to test new software and play around with it to make my own decisions what should be used - or not. Thats why i recently installed Fedora 17 alpha. Pretty nice, feels much faster (i always use the XFCE spin) than F16. And since a F16 update my wlan works out of the box. Thanks for that.

Unfortunately, its alpha, so some things wont work, eg. the new, just released, fglrx driver from AMD for my HD 5770.
As the Xorg radeon driver keeps improving, it is working really nice, but what messed me around was the noise that comes from the fan of the GPU. It was blowing much louder than my CPU fan on fullspeed.
I searched a lot and found that its possible to control the fan speed. Just modificate a few values in the labyrinths of /sys.

Long time ago...
no, its not been a long time as i am still young, but at least 6 years - i wrote a tool called slup.
I wrote it because i had a i386 as firewall which was really slow. i used slackware linux which is a damn nice linux distribution (as it comes without all that much stuff like ubuntu/fedora).
Thats the slogan of slackware linux:

Since its first beta release in April of 1993, the Slackware Linux Project has aimed at producing the most "UNIX-like" Linux distribution out there. Slackware complies with the published Linux standards, such as the Linux File System Standard. We have always considered simplicity and stability paramount, and as a result Slackware has become one of the most popular, stable, and friendly distributions available.

I cannot confirm that its easy but its stable and really "unix-like". If you compare some distro's out there you get a thousand of helper tools with qt, gtk+ and all that stuff, which requires a bunch of librarys as dependency.
slackware also has a few helper scripts (mostly written in ncurses, like the installer), but nothing else. it has a very basic package management (installpkg and such) like every *nix, so it is predesigned for firewalls, servers, ... or for systems with lesser hardware resources.

I think everyone who uses Windows and Linux in an encrypted way thinks its really a mess to restart the system to just access some files. Maybe just to read a 1kb txt file. So i googled alot and found a really nice tool, called dmsetup-tc. The problem i faced with was, it did just not work.

Hell, i'm starting to love Jenkins. It has a plugin for everything, except washing the dishes... and cleaning the flat. But thats ok.

On l33tbox there's now a sonar instance running (in an own JVM) which gets executed by Jenkins via maven3. If you want to take a look at it: http://www.l33tbox.de:9000 - or - if you are on Jenkins at http://www.l33tbox.de:8080/jenkins then just click on any project and click the sonar link.

My thesis is about automation of validation (static and dynamic tests) to make sure the code is correct and uses the defined rules (eg. checkstyle, pmd, findbugs, ...). Thats how i found out about jenkins. I heard about it some years ago but as a lone-wolf programmer - i thought - thats not necessary. I changed my mind

You can take a look at that server at http://l33tbox.de:8080/jenkins.
I will soon also implement a sonar instance for further checks.

The question: whats the "best" way to play back the most common (mp3, ogg, etc.) formats in Java?
I used mp3spi but it has some problems with newer mp3s (maybe something that has to do with vbr or so...) - and it does only support mp3 (and i dont like the autor because of his mind of gpl software).
So probably i need a media framework like gstreamer... any hints are welcome

I have no idea what changed the MANIFEST.MF in that way, but it wasn't me

I googled alot for that strange bug in my application and was really confused about that error message.

"Line too long"... which line? Any command line? I found many links to a bug with "command-line too long", but nothing for "line too long".

Then, after 2 days or so, i found a blog entry (sorry, forgot the link) which was pointing out that something changed the MANIFEST.MF

While using the osgi version of apache httpclient and httpcomponents, i was getting really weird errors (i used maven to get them with netbeans which is really nice).

One of those errors was:

WARNING: SvcRef [org.osgi.service.event.EventHandler] EventAdmin: Exception during event dispatch [org.osgi.service.event.Event [topic=org/dyndns/soundi/soundbox/gui/browser/SEARCHSONG] |
[org.osgi.service.event.EventHandler] | Bundle(org.dyndns.soundi.JamendoPlugin [11])] (java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError: org/apache/commons/logging/LogFactory)