It’s 2010 and I’m still using Windows XP, and I’m actually quite happy with it.

One of the small annoyances is the ‘beep’ that sounds when you change the volume. Since it’s a quiet Saturday morning and the snow is impacting some of the plans we had I googled for a solution.

Howtogeek.com has the answer I was looking for.

Cool demonstration of the possibilities of SixthSense by Pranav Mistry, its inventor.

TED talk

(thanks Mark).

I usually run my unit tests in Eclipse on my development system, or from the command-line on the target environment in bulk.

Sometimes though it’s useful to run a single unit test from the command line. There are two equivalent ways of doing that:

rake test=test\integration\firmware_upgrade_test.rb

ruby test\integration\firmware_upgrade_test.rb

Tonight I attended a presentation on the use of Second Live and other 3D worlds in education. It wasn’t earth-shattering but it was an informative presentation. Bill Krebs, the presenter, clearly enjoys using these tools and it was fun to hear more about the community in Second Life and some of the pro’s and con’s of using such tools for business purposes.

It’s always nice to go out and meet other engineers. I spoke with someone who started a company to provide data for tools like Layar, the augmented reality browser, and other interesting folks. I won a book in a raffle, and I choose Beginning Scala by David Pollack.

The evening was organized by the Agile RTP group and hosted by Allscripts in North Raleigh.

Tonight I attended a presentation by Adam Parrish on the use of Maven in building Adobe Flex & Java projects.

Maven is routinely used to build Java-only project, but this presentation talked about using the Flex Mojos plug-ins to build projects that combine Flex front-ends with a Java back-end.

It was an interesting presentation/demo for a small but knowledgeable crowd. There was a a lot of opportunity to ask questions, and I learned more about large scale Flex projects. A well spent evening.

The evening was hosted by One Cow Standing in Durham. They have a foosbal table and a real beer tap with Yuengling in the conference room.

When we visited a museum in Washington three months ago I saw the Kindle for the first time in real life. The Kindle is a hand held device for reading books, connected to Amazon’s bookstore. I’d like to be able to read books digitally, but $399 is way too expensive and I don’t like to be “locked in” to Amazon’s bookstore.

I read newspapers on my phone every day. The screen is fairly small, but it’s certainly readable and the other day I found out how to read books on my phone as well. I’ve started reading a classic a few weeks ago, The Brothers Karamazov, and in addition to the hard copy I now have the entire book with me where ever I go.

I installed “Mobipocket” on my laptop and cell phone, and downloaded a free copy of the book from Project Gutenberg. It’s free since the copyright on the book has long expired. It works great! Obviously, reading a physical book is still a lot nicer, but if I have some time to kill and my phone with me, I can now continue reading my book.

One of our computers got a virus Thursday night. Of course we have virus scanners and malware scanners, but somehow this one slipped through the cracks. We were able to track down the source of the virus, an infected website.

Our virus scanner (AVG) did not fully protect the computer but it did find the originally infected HTML file. I used the excellent HijackThis tool to manually clean up the resident processes and start-up tasks of the virus.

The symptoms were as typical as they were annoying: errors on Windows start-up (“Services and Controller app encountered a problem and needed to close”) and an slow and unstable system. This time something else happened also: Windows would automatically shutdown after a 60 seconds count-down.

I learned this trick: to cancel a pending shutdown run the following command.

shutdown -a

Amsterdam as you’ve never seen it before: Visualizing SMS messages

(Thanks to Rolf).

This morning I’ve been upgrading the Postgres database on my Windows XP laptop to version 8.3.

During the installation it asks for the password of the service account of previous PostgreSQL version. The default value is ‘postgres’, but sure enough I forgot what password I used when I originally installed it.

I found this useful post on how to change the password for any Windows user. From the Windows command line execute the following to reset the password to ‘postgres’.

net user postgres postgres

That worked, so now I’m ready to complete the installation and be able to use the new Ruby pg gem that was recently release for Windows.

In the Wieringermeer, where my parents live, the build a new data center will start this year. It’s going to be a ‘green’ data center, which will achieve a very high energy efficiency through corporation with greenhouses in the area (a PUE of 1.3).

Read more in this article in Trouw. This new data center by Parthenon will be CO2 neutral:

- The Wieringermeer is an agricultural part of the Netherlands with a lot of greenhouses, for flowers and vegetables. These greenhouses produce a lot power; plenty to supply the 50 MW the data center will use
- The heat produced by the data center will be used to warm the greenhouses
- The CO2 produced by the greenhouse energy production will be used as fertilizer for the crops in the greenhouses

Cool stuff. Thanks Jaap for sending me the article.