Today I had to use an Ative Record implementation for C#: Castle Active Record. It worked verfy fine until i needed to save a one to many relationship. Then the underlying NHibernate yielded the following Exception:
StaleStateException: unexpected row count -1 expected 1 .

Googling for that Exception gave me two options: At first, turning the sql servers NOCOUNT property OFF by either sending “SET NOCOUNT OFF” or setting the appropriate property of the SQL-Server in the config dialog. Both did not work for me, as i am neither the Admin of the server nor i can send the command by hand through the many layers introduced by ActiveRecord/NHibernate.

Another possible solution was overriding the connection driver to let i send the query everytime the connection gets requested. This was proposed by the blog author of: http://www.socialanimal.com/archives/2008/03/07/nhibernate-and-nocount/. This either didn’t work for me.

But taking a look in the database suprised me! My Data was actually written! So a simply try {} catch(…) { //ignore } did the job!

SHAME ON ME FOR THAT

My todays post covers my efforts to synchronize my samsung star mobile phone on ubuntu.

First of all I tried BitPim, an open source tool to sync mobile phones. Unfortunatelly, with the current version of bitpim, it didn’t work.

So I installed a VirtualBox using Windows Vista. Samsungs PC Studio seems not to work on a virtual installation of Vista? At least when I tried to install it it crashed my whole installation ;-(

So far, it does not work for me (ok, dualbooting to windows DOES work)

Edit 1 [01/12/10]: What works is sending files via Bluetooth. The mobile recognizes the files based on their ending. So you can send your contact data using *.vcf files. Each contact in one file is in my part of view just boring

Part 1 of the development series:

First of all, we need to setup the development environment. This is provided by Samsung as Eclipse-Plugin.
Therefor we need to download eclipse (The Java EE Edition!) (http://www.eclipse.org/downloads)

After downloading and setting up eclipse, install the Samsung Widget Developer SDK:

Within Eclipse, click on Help, then Install new Software.

Add the following URL: http://widget.samsungmobile.com/sdk/ and install the plugin!

That’s it, you can now start to develop Samsung TouchWiz Widgets!

Part 2 will cover a short sample project!

On Monday I willl receive my brand new Samsung Star mobile phone. This day will be the start of a new series of this blog about Samsung Widget Development! Stay tuned!

First information sources for this:

• http://www.bada.com
• http://innovator.samsungmobile.com

Using Cobertura 1.9.2 with JDK 1.6.0_14 raised the following exceptions:


Exception in thread "Thread-0" java.lang.ExceptionInInitializerError
at java.io.File.deleteOnExit(File.java:939)
at net.sourceforge.cobertura.util.FileLocker.(FileLocker.java:80)
at net.sourceforge.cobertura.coveragedata.ProjectData.saveGlobalProjectData(ProjectData.java:230)
at net.sourceforge.cobertura.coveragedata.SaveTimer.run(SaveTimer.java:31)
at java.lang.Thread.run(Thread.java:619)
Caused by: java.lang.IllegalStateException: Shutdown in progress
at java.lang.Shutdown.add(Shutdown.java:62)
at java.lang.System$2.registerShutdownHook(System.java:1146)
at java.io.DeleteOnExitHook.(DeleteOnExitHook.java:20)

The newer versions of Cobertura fixed this issue!

Today I came across a very funny new web application.

www.world-of-plush.com

On this site, you can register your favorite item you want to send on a world trip. Then you print out the tag, attach it to your item, and give it to someone who is going on a journey. Then he/she takes pictures, and writes geo-tagged blog entries, which are displayed on the world map.

If you give it to some one stranger, and he writers a blog entry, you’ll become friend!

A new, and very funny social net. Im curious where my Plush will be in about one year

You should really have a look at it!

Have you ever wondered, what is happening when your media keys keep flashing?

This means your kernel has some sort of panic

This happend to me with some sort of strange combination of wlan-access-point and ubuntu-kernel. Whenever i got a new dhcp-lease from this one access-point, my kernel paniced and the last log message was that i got a new IP.

See google for more information on kernel panic reasons!

Recently i had to implement Base64 en & decoding using openssl’s bio library, which by the way is just great, but a little “under-documented!”

If you ever wondered, why the standard example of decoding base64 data always returns 0 when using it with your test data? Well there is some nice undocumented feature: Strings that do not end with a newline ‘\n’ are not processed! So you have two possibilities: adding a newline to the string or use the following flag:

BIO_set_flags(BIO* to your bio_f_base64, BIO_FLAGS_BASE64_NO_NL);

Edit: 21/Dec/08:

After handin of the courses homework i can now give some details about how to do it:

Using a chain of BIO filters is the most flexible way to handle proper base64 en-/decoding:


//write base64 coded data to stdout
BIO* b64 = BIO_new(BIO_f_base64());
BIO* bio_out = BIO_new_fp(stdout, BIO_NOCLOSE);
bio_out = BIO_push(b64, bio_out); //attach output bio to base64 bio
BIO_write(bio_out,"data",sizeof("data"));
BIO_flush(bio_out); //flush the buffer
BIO_free_all(bio_out); //cleanup!


For more information see the super perfect documentation: http://www.openssl.org/docs/crypto/BIO_f_base64.html

Today i had to access a matlab script from a java program. After some hours of trying to get it work by using matlabs command line i found a method to call a matlab script without using the command line. Using matlab -r “functionName” didn’t work because of some unknown charset erros i haven’t found till now. The basic idea is based on this blog-post.

Therefore, a process must be created:


String command = "matlab -nosplash -nodesktop";
Process process = Runtime.getRuntime().exec(command);


Afterwards we obtain the standard-input of the process and send a command to be interpreted by matlab:


BufferedWriter out = new BufferedWriter(new OutputStreamWriter(process.getOutputStream()));
out.write("function_to_be_executed");
out.write("\n");
out.write("exit;") // this will close matlab after the execution finished!


If you like to see what is happening, try to read from the process.getInputStream()

hope that helps some of you!

Today i got to take snapshots with the integrated camera of my Dell Vostro 1510!

After some tries using mplayer, gqcam, camstreamer and others, I thought it would never work. But some adjustment of the parameters passed to mplayer it finally worked to get out movies:

mencoder tv:// -tv driver=v4l2:device=/dev/video0 -ofps 60 -ovc lavc -lavcopts vcodec=mjpeg -o test.avi

To record single images use these commands:

mplayer -vo jpeg -fps30 tv:// -tv driver=v4l2:device=/dev/video0 -frames 1

The file 00000001.jpg now contains your screenshot!