Volkerding praises KDE4 again

Recently on Slackware ChangeLog, Volkerding wrote:

Tue Jan 27 14:33:35 CST 2009
KDE 4.2.0 is released -- congratulations to the KDE development team for such
an amazing job on this beautiful and highly user-friendly desktop environment!
Thanks also to Eric Hameleers, who did a ton of work getting KDE 4.2.0 ready
for Slackware. Once again (for now), these packages are compatible with
Slackware 12.2. Enjoy! :-)

Hopefully Slackware 13 will integrate KDE4 and I will be able to enjoy the new features and eye candy.

Alan Kay on modern programming languages

Most software today is very much like an Egyptian pyramid with millions of bricks piled on top of each other, with no structural integrity, but just done by brute force and thousands of slaves.

Read the rest in A Conversation with Alan Kay

Tuckey Rewrite

Note to self, Tomcat mailing list recommends a Url rewrite filter for a servlet container called Tuckey UrlRewrite. It functions similarly to the popular apache mod_rewrite. I speculate it may be helpful in a RESTful application to map requests to JSPs.

$5 multifactor authentication for OpenID

Paypal provides a $5 unique password security key which works with Verisign OpenID provider, according to blog "i like ellipses". Get it while the introduction price makes it a better deal than the $30 Verisign's own security key.

Availability of this key is a great news because using a unique password key makes your OpenID identity much more trustworthy.

Changing fan on Thinkpad T41

After four years in service, the fan of my Thinkpad T41 started to fail. The computer either wouldn't boot with "fan error" message at boot time if the fan doesn't start or the fan would whine causing video card to overheat, freezing X11. Time to change the fan.

I found the fan part number at IBM's website, it was "CPU Fan Long", FRU 13N5341. I searched online shops for the part, finding several listing the fan from anywhere from $30 to $80. At three different cheapest stores, I tried to order the fan and failed, each time the store canceling my order because the fan was out of stock. Then, I found the IBM parts store, 1-800-388-7080. At the IBM store, the fan was $58 and 1-2 day shipping via DHL was $15, an amazing deal. They just changed the part number to 91P9252. I ordered the fan on Friday. On Monday I received a new looking fan, nicely packaged, with thermal gel intact (covered with a removable film) and thermal grease pre-applied in the right place (gel above the video card heat sink and the grease above the CPU).

The hardest part was removing the old fan. I had to find just the right screwdriver (Philips #1 from my toolkit having Ph 0..3) and applying drops of WD-40 to the fan screws. Once the fan was out, putting new fan and closing the laptop was a piece of cake. The laptop booted just fine and noise disappeared. Let's hope the thermal gel and grease adhere correctly, but it looks like IBM still got the chops. Let's hope new Chinese owners (Lenovo) won't screw it up.

NoClassDefFoundError: oracle/gss/util/NLSLocale

When I upgraded my Oracle JDBC driver to 10.2.0.4, Oracle XSQL Utility started giving me the following exception when using "-encoding UTF-8"

Exception in thread "main" java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError: oracle/gss/util/NLSLocale
at oracle.xml.sql.XSULocale.getJavaCharset(XSULocale.java:122)
at OracleXML.To_XML(OracleXML.java:1092)
at OracleXML.ExecuteGetXML(OracleXML.java:917)
at OracleXML.main(OracleXML.java:185)

Ok, it turns out that in Oracle 10.2.0.4, some classes that used to be in
orai18n.jar got separated into their own jars, which are shipped with Oracle
XDK, not with Oracle JDBC drivers. For example, oracle.gss.util.NLSLocale is now in $XDKHOME/jlib/orai18n-mapping.jar.

LCD text in NetBeans

Finally figured out how to enable sub-pixel rendering (also known as LCD text) in NetBeans. Just add -J-Dawt.useSystemAAFontSettings=lcd to netbeans_default_options variable in your ~/.netbeans/6.1/etc/netbeans.conf