i’m updating and upgrading my wordpress installations per cronjob with the cool wptool from Christiane Ruetten, published in German “c’t magazin fuer computertechnik”.

This little script uses the http://svn.automattic.com/wordpress/ as subversion base.
Today this location is not available and the update terminates with the following failure:

svn: PROPFIND request failed on '/wordpress/tags/2.8'
svn: PROPFIND of '/wordpress/tags/2.8': could not connect to server (http://svn.automattic.com)

Don’t know, if this is forever or a temporary failure.
If wordpress.org moved their svn repository to core.svn.wordpress.org completely, the wordpress wiki must be updated!

To update wordpress installations from the “new” core.svn.wordpress.org repository with wptool, some slight modifications are necessary:

1. go to wordpress installation directory and relocate the svn repository

cd /usr/local/your_wordpress_dir
svn switch --relocate http://svn.automattic.com/wordpress/tags/2.8 http://core.svn.wordpress.org/tags/2.8

2. update the wptool script

#svn_base='http://svn.automattic.com/wordpress/'
#lang_base='http://svn.automattic.com/wordpress-i18n/'
svn_base='http://core.svn.wordpress.org/'
lang_base='http://core.svn.wordpress.org/'

3. run the upgrade again

./wptool upgrade /usr/local/your_wordpress_dir
...
Updated to revision 11719.

Success!

Today some mails did not reached my inbox and were blocked through my postfix spam filter rabl.nuclearelephant.com.
It seems that this rbl is not available since today.

See this info on sourceforge forum page.

Any legacy services that might have been hosted on nuclearelephant.com have been discontinued, in particular rabl.nuclearelephant.com

Solution:

simply remove from your postfix main.cf:
reject_rbl_client rabl.nuclearelephant.com

Scrum is used worldwide. You make software projects in US, Europa, Asia, South-America ?
Forget the old-fashioned Word, Excel and MS Project driven software projects with lost deadlines and regular missing transparency.

Let’s join the agile methodologies!!!

Nice presentation from Brazil:

Update: Found the way to embed slideshare doc, click on wordpress button below the presentation on slideshare and copy the [...] “link”.

After upgrade from Ubuntu hardy to intrepid last year, i had nearly every day problems playing embedded flash on websites.
I hate it, but it was not my first priority to solve and a Firefox restart solved it every time.

Suddenly i found this simple solution: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=967049

apt-get remove flashplugin-nonfree
apt-get install ubuntu-restricted-extras


Works fine now. I can see all content from slideshare and youtube.

Today I came across a very good post by Helen Keegan on “There is no future on mobile”

We forget that the mobile phone is a communication device

It was designed for us to talk to each other. It was designed for us to be able to communicate with our friends, family, colleagues and lovers by voice, text, instant message, email, facebook, twitter, whatever. But it’s about communication. In every region of the world, mobile data traffic is largely driven by social networking – whether that’s Peperonity, Cyworld, Facebook, MySpace, Twitter – it doesn’t really matter. It does mean that it’s the human communication that’s important to us and drives the desire to explore mobile devices further in order to find other ways to communicate with loved ones.

The mobile phone is personal, it’s precious, it’s an object of desire and it’s our access to the outside world. It’s also a necessity and a basic tool to participate in UK society (according to the latest Joseph Rowntree report).

Just installed the new version 8.0 of Intellij Idea.

With default memory settings i got permanent OutOfMemory with nothing else as created a default webapp with one jsp (using Sun JDK 1.6.0_10).

Exception occurred during event dispatching:
java.lang.OutOfMemoryError: PermGen space

So, i modified the memory settings a little bit more aggressive than recommended on IntelliJ Blog:

edit idea-9013/bin/idea.vmoptions (no -server, no -Xms to let the VM decide min settings)
-Xmx512m
-XX:MaxPermSize=140m
-ea


It runs now quite well.

It is a little bit tricky to get a USB headset working with Ubuntu and Amorak.

(i never use KDE, but this tool is my current favorite music player under Ubuntu. Things changes, may be there
is a another favorite player anytime. For now, Amarok 1.4.10 rocks! I donated a small amount of money for the guys of Amarok -> good job !!!).

My current Amarok version from Ubuntu Hardy or Intrepid distributions (XFCE desktop) identifies on-board soundcard only.

But i want to listen to music from my USB headset!.
So a small little manual configuration, let Amorak play music out of my USB headset:
First you need to identify the sound card identifier, i took alsactl, but other ways are possible of course:
sudo alsactl names

This creates /etc/asound.names and there you can find your assigned device, for example:
alsactl24 {
name 'plughw:1,0'
comment 'Physical Device With Conversions - USB Audio (Duplex)'
}


Now open Amarok and configure
Settings / Amarok / Engine
– Sound System: xine Engine
– Output plugin: alsa
– Mono and Stereo: plughw:1,0
– 4 Channels and 6 Channels: leave empty (i left it untouched).

or look on this screenshot:

OK

Now you can here sound from your USB headsets!

If you use XFCE and have not System/Preferences, but want to disable system beep completely:
echo "blacklist pcspkr" | sudo tee -a /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist

With next reboot cannot here the annoying system-beep or if you don’t want reboot, run:
sudo modprobe -r pcspkr.

This week the Netbeans team published the RC2 of Netbeans 6.5.

It is a quite stable release and much better than the first beta version.
I’ve been using it with minor reservations for some days.

It is helpful for Java and Maven, PHP and Firefox extension development with the Foxbeans plugin.
They solved the subversion User Interface much better than Eclipse.

Good work!

The time is now!

Yesterday was a great day.
I’ve got my new mainboard Gigabyte GA-EP45-DS4 and tried to install Ubuntu/Hardy.
Unfortunately, the boot CD hang with during startup (at the USB check time) and the only thing i got, was the busybox.
After updating the BIOS to the latest F9 version, it was time to look at the new Ubuntu Release.

Success! They released yesterday the latest Ubuntu Release 8.10 (Intrepid).

Installation on the ICH10 chipset board EP45-DS45 works like a charm without any issue !!!

Good work Ubuntu Team!

As ever, i use the Xubuntu AMD64 Alternate Image, because XFCE works much faster, than Gnome or KDE.
As every download from all mirrors were slow, i used the torrent download to get maximum download speed!