Author: mattanja

  • OpenWRT on TP-Link TL-WDR4900

    My wifi connections at home have been really slow using a really old AVM Fritz!Box, so I decided to upgrade to a TL-WDR4900. (The only thing still missing is 802.11 ac but the cheapest router providing that would be the Asus RT-AC66U AC1750 for twice the price of the TL-WDR4900, so that wasn’t worth it for me.)…

  • Groupware options for small companies or organizations

    (tbd – work in progress… Advice welcome…) Over the last weeks and months I’ve had multiple people asking for advice about groupware software. For me that is still kind of an open issue and I’m not sure what the best answer would be. These are the options I know and would consider using at this…

  • Install rails >=1.9.3 on Ubuntu 12.04 (for Redmine) with RVM

    Quick reference on installing specific versions of rails on an “older” version of ubuntu without the need of having all packages in the ubuntu repositories. After doing so, you can continue to install redmine as described in http://www.redmine.org/projects/redmine/wiki/RedmineInstall This will fail if the environment is not set correctly – this helped me a lot: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/12127603/usr-bin-env-ruby-noexec-wrapper-fails-with-no-file-or-directory…

  • Typesafe viewmodel for MVC frameworks

    Ever since I was working with MVC projects, looking at sample code even from Microsoft, I always wondered why everyone is using ViewBag and other “unsafe” techniques for the data to be displayed. I would have sticked to developing PHP applications if I wanted to do that. (And maybe even some PHP frameworks might do…

  • Continuous improvement

    I started writing most of this article back in January and did not have time to finish it since – because I was stuck in doing exactly the things that I wanted to avoid. Now it’s time to finish the article so I’ll be able to compare my recent experience to my oh so nobel…

  • Bézier curves

    Some time ago I did some interview question that I just wanted to share mostly because I want to keep a backup of it. The questions were the following: We start with three dots (green) on the screen. We need to connect these dots with a smooth line (blue) rather than direct lines (grey). What would…

  • play! framework and Google App Engine

    I just uploaded my first app to the Google App Engine – which is unbelievably simple with play! framework and the gae module. The application for my test is just 10 lines of code in the controller and all it does (for now) is to extract the URL of the latest Chromium Build from the…

  • Synchronize a long-running task to the UI-Thread in WPF/.NET

    This post explains how to process data from a task in WPF in a way I’d consider “best-practice”. The main code could or should be in the view-model. Code-behind (keep it short or better yet use a delegate command) And the code in the view-model: StartSearch() is a method in the view-model class and sets…

  • Kubuntu/Ubuntu 11.10 fix

    Just a quick note: After updating to Kubuntu 11.10 today, Firefox didn’t startup anymore and the console told me: mattanja@tiger:/opt$ /opt/firefox/firefox bash: /opt/firefox/firefox: No such file or directory Obviously it’s a bug: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/ia32-libs/+bug/852101?comments=all The workaround & fix is to reinstall libc6-i386: apt-get install –reinstall libc6-i386

  • Howto: Task and issues tracking with Redmine and Eclipse Mylyn

    Howto: Task and issues tracking with Redmine and Eclipse Mylyn

    While working on one of my current projects I came to realize the importance of good task management and issue tracking. Sadly the use of an expensive Team Foundation Server does not guarantee good task tracking when the tasks are only used to do the rough planning in MS Project. Much more important than the…