after a couple of hours of frustration with my mac and the eternal question:

why wont java use more than 2GB of RAM, if the system has 8GB Ram I found the answer here:

http://developer.apple.com/java/javaleopard.html

basically you need to provide the JVM flag -d64

thanks apple for doing something simple so complicated. On every other os java automatically uses 64bit without the need to set some stupid flags...

it finally happened, my software project is now available as opensource (at least parts) and I also got accepted by atlassian, which means we get all there cool tools for free.
jira,
bamboo,
confluence,
crowed,
fisheye

binbase uses them all for code management and documentation.

You can find more out under:

http://binbase.sourceforge.net/

or at our ohloh account

http://www.ohloh.net/projects/11844?p=binbase

which is very helpfull to push our google hits higher and higher.

oracle is back to live after a long time - 36h give or take,

procedure was:

1. connect sqlplus sys/******* as sysdba
2. shutdown immediate
3. startup nomount
4. restore control file
5. shutdown abort
6. startup mount
7. exit
8. export MALLOC_CHECK_=0
9. rman catalog rman/******@BACKUP target sys/******
10. restore database
11. recover database
12. alter database open resetlogs;

a simple 9 step procedure once you got it all figured out and just because a ******** barge hat to cap the cables at the sacramento river and took me out of business.

Helpfull links: this

or like a wise man said:

boss: how long do you need to fix the problem?
wise man: 10 seconds after I found the solution

fighting with oracle since 16 hours because of a stupid bug.

Copyright (c) 1982, 2005, Oracle. All rights reserved.

connected to target database: BINBASE (DBID=3083741697, not open)
connected to recovery catalog database

RMAN> recover datafile 1;

Starting recover at 15-FEB-08
Starting implicit crosscheck backup at 15-FEB-08
allocated channel: ORA_DISK_1
channel ORA_DISK_1: sid=155 devtype=DISK
Crosschecked 103 objects
Finished implicit crosscheck backup at 15-FEB-08

Starting implicit crosscheck copy at 15-FEB-08
using channel ORA_DISK_1
Crosschecked 10 objects
Finished implicit crosscheck copy at 15-FEB-08

searching for all files in the recovery area
cataloging files...
*** glibc detected *** double free or corruption (!prev): 0x0cc2f3a8 ***







RMAN-00571: ===========================================================
RMAN-00569: =============== ERROR MESSAGE STACK FOLLOWS ===============
RMAN-00571: ===========================================================
RMAN-03002: failure of recover command at 02/15/2008 23:46:02
ORA-03113: end-of-file on communication channel
RMAN-00571: ===========================================================


basically it is some cglib mojo with the glib library from centos which kills your application if it thinks it founds a bug...

it is pretty well described here


In short:

The version of glibc provided with CentOS 4.3 performs additional internal
sanity checks to prevent and detect data corruption as early as possible. By
default, should corruption be detected, a message similar to the following will
be displayed on standard error (or logged via syslog if stderr is not open):

*** glibc detected *** double free or corruption: 0x0937d008 ***

By default, the program that generated this error will also be killed; however,
this (and whether or not an error message is generated) can be controlled via
the MALLOC_CHECK_ environment variable. The following settings are supported:

0 Do not generate an error message, and do not kill the program
1 Generate an error message, but do not kill the program
2 Do not generate an error message, but kill the program


3 Generate an error message and kill the program

After I set this variable I made some progress.

...need to take more pictures...
...need more spare time...
...need to figure out how to get a new visa...
...dentist, need togo to dentist...
...need more mojitos...

it's the 14th of febuary and at it happened we won a gift certificate at a raffle from our apartment complex. What is it about? 30$ for the resturant fuzzios, but since I really can't stand fuzzios and another person won a 30$ gift certificate for Bistro 33, which is my favorite resturant around here...


...I started talking and trading and convincing the other person and got her certificate in exchange for my certificate since she didn't like bistro...

Yay I finally can eat the 25$ coffee powdered rib eye steak this saturday \o/

i finally managed to get my continius integration system running in the way I like it. The current configuration contains:

1 x Bamboo trial license
1 x Trac for issue management
1 x maven2

and tests my code against the following services:

1 x oracle 10g - filled using DBunit snapshots
1 x postgres8 (todo)
1 x jboss 4.2.*
1 x rocks linux cluster 4.3 - simulated using vmware server (2 nodes,1 frontend)

and all this runs on my 3year old workstation and performs quite well.

The official address is currently: bender

now I just need to get a Bamboo license for our opensource projects and write a lot more testcode. I just wished I would had started such a thing 3 years ago, since it would make things a lot simpler...

drink of the week:

daiquiri de nase

1 x fresh orange
1 x fresh lime
1 shot tripple sec
2 shot mailibu coconut rum
1 TS brown sugar
1 CuP (250ml of ICE)
5 frozen strawberries

put all in a blender (lime/orange just the juice),
blend it,
trink it

tasty with a nice sour note

currently I'm wasting my time with the hopeless attempt to develop better code. For this reason I'm migrating right now to maven from ant, which is just a nightmare.

Maven itself is a pretty cool and fancy tool and my ant scripts where always written in a way that they simulate the behavior from maven. But since my projects get more and more complex, it's just no fun to keep adjusting antfile for N projects. So I switched last friday to maven...


...one week later I'm still trying to figure out why the stuff does not work as it should and why it is so complicated. I'm actually ending up with setting up a complete continius build enviroment including:

- rocks cluster based on vmware
- maven mirror for artifacs
- continium, a continius build tool
- a postgres testdatabase
- a oracle testdatabase
- an apache
- a bugzilla

Which all takes forever since the cluster installation is so buggy that it's really no fun todo it.

Which also complicates things alot is that my car, mhm basically blew up. I have no idea yet what's wrong, but I'm looking forward to look in the greedy eyes of my mechanic when he tells me how much hes going to charge me, if he is fixing it...

now the first week in berlin is over and tomorrow we will fly to to paris, france.

yay...

...and a merry christmas

So weihnachten kommt naeher und wir waren in vacaville einkaufen. Nun ja wir wollten weihnachtsgeschenke kaufen, aber wie immer kauft man natuerlich mehr als man eigentlich wollte und das was man kaufen wollte gab es nicht...

Bedeuted ich habe mir endlich das eine messer gekauft welches ich seit einem Jahr kaufen wollte und habe auch einen kleinen Dekanter gekauft.
Als Referenz das santoku ist das Messer welches ich vor 2 jahren in Berlin gekauft habe und das untere ist ein spezielles Gemuese Messer.

Desweitere habe ich mir endlich einen Messerschaerfer gekauft, da ein Messer nun doch etwas stumpf geworden ist, nach knapp 3 Jahren, und bin begeistert wie scharf sie wieder sind.

halloween is now officially over and lindsay, from now on referred as honey, babe, sweetheart, sunshine or other names decided to make cookies.

now I decided to make a cocktail and it was a little bit strong I think...

3 shots malibu rum
2 shots black rum
some mango juice
some orange juice
some ice

blend it all and give one to honey and one to me.

result, funny shaped cookies and pictures of funny shaped pictures. Btw the pictures include 0 postprocessing. Only one flash, one 10-20mm lens and a snoot + some cardboard to direct the light in direction of the smilling pumpkin.

more Halloween pictures, this time provided by Kate and Dave

Forgot to add,

pictures from the Halloween party at Dave's place last weekend.

All pictures can be found here

(taken and provided by martin and sara)

During the game I also discovered a new problem with my camera, I don't got enough storage. So i had 3 x 1GB and 1 x 256MB card and was constantly switching cards and in breaks reviewing and deleting pictures from burst sequences. So maybe I need to get a 4GB or 8GB SD card someday so that I can store a little more than only 80 pictures on one card and don't have to worry about this issue all the time.

Btw these black marks you always see in football movies, they are actually doing this. To remove reflections from the sun or som lame excuse.

Another problem I discovered, I don't know which autofocus modus I should use to get the sharpest possible pictures. If I manually select the focuspoint, it get's pretty hard to track the player in the current point.

If I choose the automated focus selection, it happen's quite often that the camera focus on some total random objects instead of the player of my choice. Time to read Tom Hogans book again.

here we got an example of the pictures I like to archive. The subject, in this case the priceless model amber, is nice and sharp and the background is nice and blurry so that we have a perfect isolation.

This can be archived over the used aperature + focal lens + distance from background.

Btw I didn't take this picture, martin played with my camera and happend to stalk this perfect stranger who happened to be his girlfriend.

Hier haben wir ein beispiel was fuer Bilder ich haben will. Das Model war in diesem Falle Amber und die Abbildung ist scharf und der Hintergrund unscharf. Um diesen Effekt zu erreichen muss man wissen das es 3 Parameter gibt. Die Blende, die Brennweite und die Distanze zum Hintergrund. Je groesser die Blende und je laenger die Brennweite umso besser ist der Fordergrund vom Hintergrund getrennt.
Das Bild wurde uebrigens von martin geschossen und das Motiv ist amber seine Freundin.

mhm after this football game I want a lens with 300mm + worse than ever.

So something like the Nikon 300mm F/4 + 1/7 tc
The sigma 100-300mm F/4 + tc

or a faster lens like the 80-200mm F/2.8 to blur out the people in the background and get shutter speeds of 1/2000s to stop the motion and get tack sharp pictures.

Would i sell my 70-300mm VR? i could and would get like 420$ for it and I paid like 470$ but I really like it because it's so small and light.

why can you spend money only once...

i need to find some nikon shooters so I can borrow stuff and don't have to buy everything. For some reason everybody and their dog uses canon...

today I spend some time with trying to establish contact's with some of the photographers I saw at the game yesterday in the hope to get, I don't know maybe some interresst in my pictures or the possibility of access to the sidelines of event's.

Den heutigen Tag verbrachte ich damit emails and diverse photographen zu schicken um kontakt herzustellen und zu sehen was fuer vorteile man mit ein paar netten worten worten haben kann. Da ich auch bekannte habe welche als security guards arbeiten sollte es moeglich sein irgendwie bilder von den seitenlinen zu schiessen. Ich brauche nur einen presse ausweis dafuer...

today I had the possibiliy to watch my first football and It was actually fun. I don't give much about the sport, but to take pictures, lots of possibilities. Specially to figure out what the right focus mode is to get nice and sharp pictures.

To the left you the see the pictures I liked most and the rest you can find online under
http://berlinguyinca.zenfolio.com/p535351542/

i will defnatly watch another game and try to improve my picture taking possibilities.

it's getting colder and asparagus is one sale, so what does this mean?

Time to cook some tasty soups. After years and years of trying to find the perfect recipe, I came up with my own....

3 lbs asparagus - green because we are lazy and cheap
1 piece of butter
a handful of flower
3 mid sized potato's
2 cups of whipping cream
1 large white onion and I mean large
1/4 gallon of chicken stock
1/4 gallon of water

- chop and dice the veggies and keep the asparagus head
- cook all the veggies for 25 minutes in the chicken stock
- blend the now soft veggies till you get a disgusting green thick soup
- create a roux from the flower and the butter
- add the disgusting green thick soup to the roux
- add the water
- blend it all again
- add the whipping cream
- add the asparagus heads, cook it another 20 minutes and enjoy
- spice it up with nutmeg, salt and pepper

Now you got a tasty soup which a light poison green color.

same picture but without noise reduction.

Accidentally applied to much to the picture before and lost lots of details.



After I read just another review I'm very certain that I will order the Tamron instead of the Nikon. it's 450$ instead of 1200$ online an supposed to be optically equal.

And last but not least, this price difference is a nice vacation.