Mad Andy's Bad Thoughts

This morning my MacBook Pro just remained dark when I switch it on. Nothing, nada, nichts was showing up - neither on the internal screen nor on the external Cinema display. When I called up Apple Care they told me that I have to send it in for a repair and that it will take 2 weeks.

I was floored by that. That laptop is my primary working tool and I cannot afford to have it gone for 2 weeks. Well, tomorrow I will try to an Apple store and see if this process can be sped up. Just going through the Apple Discussion on this issues was breath taking. They had to split that thread up into two pieces because some browsers could not handle it.

Cheers - Andy

After having my family sick for 5 days I eventually found some time to play a few hours and went back to Halo 3. Coming back after quite some time I started to try out some new moves and strategies. Then I came up with the idea to try to finish a mission without dying along the way. That said I wanted to start with a really hard mission and that was Crow's Nest. The problem with that mission is that it contains a least two battles that are really difficult. The first is initial battle in the hangar which has several waves of enemies and the ammunition is limited. The second is in the Motor pool where the is a horde of brutes including a brute chieftain with a deadly gravity hammer.

The battle in the Hangar is difficult because there are many hallways, corners and levels so that it is easy to get caught off guard or pined in a corner dying pretty fast. Trying to survive I figured out a nifty strategy that makes is nearly fool proof. First I enter the hanger through the right door, kill the grunts and make my way up to the upper level and move to the left immediately. From there I decimate the enemies using the battle riffle or the carbine. I focus on the brutes first and some of the close grunts. The rest is taken care of by the other marines. There it is also easy to evade the shots by the enemies and the Covenants phantoms. The only enemy that come up to this level is a grunt that comes from the right side. From time to time you might want to roam around to find find more ammunition like a needler or others. The last wave of brutes / grunts will stay on the floor of the hangar and so you can run around to find ammunition to take them out. When done go down to the hanger's floor and pick up a needler and fill it up. Then see if there is a turret around and if pick it up for later fights.

The next fight is in a cave right before the ops-center where a bunch of flying drones fight you. In the little room at the end of the hallway where you enter the cave there is a rack with battle rifles where you can get one and reload it. Because that crate fell over I could not hide behind and so I went back into the hallway taking the drones out. It turned out that the drones are not shooting at me if I am back in the hallway. There I could take out most of the drones without getting shot at. Then I picked up the turret again and made my way to the ops-center and to the hallway that leads to the motor pool. In this hallway I drop the turret, go back to the cave and pick up the turret on the right hand side and bring it back to the hallway.

Finally the battle in the motor pool is still difficult but I figured out some tricks to increase the chances to survive. First I open the door, drop the turret behind the shield and move forward to the ramp while switching to the needler. Either I throw a grenade or use the needler right away to take out one or two brutes. While being close I use the needler to take out the brutes. If I am in troubles I run back on jump through the hole in the orange metal wall and got behind the shield. Then I use the battle rifle to take out the brutes. First I focus on the golden brute with the brute shoot. Then I go to the left of the shield and take aim on the golden containers at the other end of the motor pool which will explode when shot at. This takes out some the right shield exposing the chieftain better. For some time there are no new brutes coming carrying carbines and I try to take out the chieftain with the battle rifle. Sometimes that works fine. If the brutes with the carbines appear or I run out of ammunition on my battle rifle I got right through the hole in the wall to the crate and fill up. As soon as the brutes with the carbine appear I retreat into the hallway to avoid their fire (high enough or into the left or right corner). From there I use the battle rifle to take them out one by one retreating back as soon as I am shot at but keep an eye on the chieftain or other brutes that may enter the hallway. If the chieftain comes to the hallway use grenades and battle rifle fire to keep him out and kill him there. If he enters run towards him and melee him several times until he is dead. It seems that he cannot swing the hammer while punched. When he is gone and everything seems quiet take a gravity lift (in front of the shield) and go up to the upper walkways. Be careful because a brute or two could still hide out. When all brutes are gone, reload the battle rifle, take the gravity hammer and the turret with the most ammunition. The turret helps greatly against the flying drone on the way to the barracks and to kill the brutes afterwards.

Have fun - Andy

This week I was confronted with a challenge to figure out when Hibernate does update a record and when not. The problem was that we had to know when Hibernate does update a record because of a version flag we are going to use for optimistic locking. The import thing was that a master record is not updated when a child record is updated and that a record is not updated when its content was just reset.

Most of the results where quite good and helped us a lot to keep changes at bay. Hibernate does not update a record even when its content is reset even when a string value is set of a field that has a different address as long as the content is equal. Also when a child is updated and its saved through its master record only the changed children records are updated. This enables two users to change different child records and safe them without any exceptions. Because we are using a Hibernate Interceptor to set an updated date field the field is not set and therefore the record isn't updated when the content has not changed. Using the Hibernate Interceptor really makes life really easy here.

Eventually I found scenario where it did not work out as expected. In as One-to-Many (and I also think in a Many-to-Many) relationship adding or removing a child makes Hibernate updating the master record even though on the DB nothing has changed for the Master. Removing the child directly from the DB and then re-fetching the master record does yield the same result but without the update of the master record. I don't know why the master record is updated and I think Hibernate should be able to detect this and don't do an update. It could be that there is a way to prevent that but for now I don't know how.

Cheers - Andy

Tonight I will give a presentation about Liferay on the Pasadena JUG. It will tackle how to setup a website using Liferay 5.1.2 including creating your own plugins using the Plugins SDK.

When I started using a Mac with OS X I had a lot of problems with the Finder. Changing to the Mac was mostly easy and provided a lot of useful tricks to speed up tasks on a Mac. That said this did not apply to the Finder and even today I end up with gazillions of Finder Windows when I finally shut down the Laptop. Briefly I had a look at Path Finder 4 but this version had not enough added value for its prize tag. A few days ago I saw that Cococatech released version 5 of Path Finder. This time it seems way much better than the earlier version and includes a lot of useful features. This includes:

• Drop Stack to park items temporarily
• Dual Pane (hello from the old Norton Commander)
• Customizable Favorites Bar
• Path Bar enabling to move back the tree with a single click
• Info / Preview Pane available
• Integrated decompression tools (Stuff, Zip, BZip, GZip, etc)
• Go to folder dialog to move around like on the command line
• Integrated Terminal
• Creation of a File from within (and special support for Text / HTML files)
• Path Finder Desktop to replace Finder with Path Finder (but 5.0 version seems to be buggy and 5.0.1 I did not test yet)

I just started to use it and so far it seems to be a little bit overwhelming. Still I like it a lot and I am looking forward to buy it if it fits into my daily business and I think I know that when the 30 days trial is over.

So Good-bye Finder and Hello Path Finder - Andy

Well, this week I tried to make a bread in a form, let it rise there and then put the loaf inside the form into the cold oven and then start to heat up. This lead to a bread with much more air in it but it had the toast like feeling with sides and the bottom being more or less white.

I am thinking using another form to put the bread into. This is called rehrucken and is a half-round, lengthy form with large ripples. Putting a parchment paper into the form the bread will not go into the ripples but the ripples will allow the hot air from the oven to circulate under the bread making sure that the bread is backed at the bottom as well.

Slowly but surely I feel like Dr. Frankenstein working in my lab to worm the secret out from mother Nature on how to back Swiss style bread (or at least what I am used from my childhood).

Cheers - Andy

The first project I used Spring Security (formerly known as ACEGI) the setup was so complicated that we used the Spring Bean format from the beginning. In the new project I am working on the Spring Security was setup with the XML Namespace configuration which looks like this:

<security:http auto-config="true"

<security:intercept-url pattern="/images/**/*" filters="none"/>

<security:intercept-url pattern="/secure/**" access="ROLE_AUTHENTICATED"/>
<security:intercept-url pattern="/help/**" access="ROLE_AUTHENTICATED"/>

<security:form-login login-page='/login/loginRequired.action' authentication-failure-url='/login/loginFailure.action' default-target-url="/login/login.action" always-use-default-target="true"/>
<security:logout invalidate-session="true" logout-success-url="/login/logout.action"/>
<security:concurrent-session-control max-sessions="1"/>

</security:http>

But that leaves me with little room for customization. Well, a few hours digging around in Spring Security and I finally found several ways to customize the configuration setup.

1. Custom Authentication Provider

One of the most important part of the Spring Security setup is the Authentication Provider and not everyone is happy with the default. In order to have my own Authentication Provider used I only need tag the Authentication Provider bean as such with the custom-authentication-provider element. This looks like this:

<bean id="daoAuthenticationProvider" class="com.wb.ads.pp.util.WBAuthenticationProvider">
<security:custom-authentication-provider/>
<property name="userDetailsService" ref="userService"/>
</bean>

2. Custom Access Decision Maker

This is for whatever reason an attribute on the HTTP element and takes a reference to your implementation:

<security:http auto-config="true" access-decision-manager-ref="accessDecisionManager">

3. Custom Filter

You only need to tag your filter with custom-filter element and add an attribute before or after with the predefined filter name that goes after or before your custom filter:

<bean id="wbppDebugFilter" class="com.wb.ads.pp.util.DebugSecurityFilter">
<security:custom-filter before="CHANNEL_FILTER"/>
</bean>

Have fun - Andy

In a piece of Wired.com the self-proclaimed 'hater of all free' Author Andrew Keen says that the economic downturn will pop open-source. It seems that Andrew has quite a short memory and even if the problem with the economy seems to be much worse that when the Internet bubble burst we had such a crisis back in 2001 to 2003. Even though I lost my job in the fall of 2002 I started to work for an open-source project called: JBoss. Today I still profit from the work and money I put into this endeavor.

Of course the economic downturn with have some implication onto the open-source but maybe not in such simple turn as Andrew thinks. But even if developers of open-source projects are laid of their chances to get another job is much better than for the people that just had a nice-to-five job. That in turn means that open-source will not falter because of a max exodus of their developers. On the other hand companies need to save even more meaning that they are considering open-source more and more making the open-source business model even more successful.

I would predict that the open-source movement will become stronger despite or maybe even because of the economic crises.

Have fun - Andy

Yesterday I tried to back another piece of bread based on the same dough as on Sunday which is white flour with enough water to make a good dough, some yeast and sugar as well as some salt. This time I let the dough rise several times and even let the loaf o bread rise quite some time before putting it into the oven. Even the dough was a little bit fluffier it is still far away from what I am looking for. The next time I am going to try it by putting the loaf into a cold oven and then start to bake it. This should give the yeast more time to great bigger bubbles.

I am also thinking of putting the dough into a form and let the dough rise in a warm oven. The form should prevent the dough from flattening out and the heat to make the yeast build up enough gas to great bigger bubbles. Eventually I could turn on the oven to baking heat avoid to move the dough and losing the bubbles in the process.

Have fun - Andy

Since I am living in the US I crave a good piece of bread and every time I am in Europe I cannot get enough of it. Since a while I try to back my own bread but somehow it is not working out. Lately I would like to make some bread that is airy and has a lot of air bubbles in it. Still without any success so far. Now that my kids grow older and eat more and more I am thinking about backing bread myself because now I can bake two two-pound loafs together making the backing quit economical. The only thing I have to figure out now is how to bring the bubbles into the bread.

Last weekend I tried two variations and both this not turn out well. First I tried to heat up the over as high as possible with a pizza stone in it and then back the bread directly on the stone. Unfortunately the air circulation of the over firms up the crust to fast and so the yeast cannot rise because the hull of the bread is already firm. The other method was to back the bread in a cast iron pan keeping the air circulation out and to keep the water vapor inside to leave the dough more time to rise but to no avail.

The only other options I can think of is to either:

• let the dough rise mulitple times
• back the dough slowly by putting them in a cold over and then start to heat up

My mother told me that the 2nd option might produce a bread that is flat but it is worth a shot.

Have fun - Andy

Back when I was young there was a sarcastic saying: What is a bank robbery compared to an opening of a Bank. Even though then this was more like the lefties against the establishment this time it is more like who is going to pay the tap for the world economy misery. The English newspaper The Guardian has a piece about bankers' payout / bonuses around $70bn which is around 10% of the US bailout package. I am not quite sure what is worse that they rid us into this mess or that they now deplete the resources of a bank even though their action left to this mess and left countless investors loosing a lot of money.

Well I guess that a bank robbery is nothing compared to what the banks created plunging the entire work economy into a recession. Again it proves that you don't need to rob a bank you only need to open a bank and wait a while. Eventually you can rob a lot more money and the best part it is legal. If you are lucky then the mess is big enough that all tax payers of the world have to open their wallets to fix a problem a few rich fat cats created. Looking at the mess we are in now bankers should be treated like robbers because that is what they actually did. If any business would treat their resources like that then they would be sued. That a lot of people were in the party is dreadful but I think the bankers and many politicians created an atmosphere that let the peoples greed go wild.

And even people how were not in the party like me who bought their house wisely and did not tap into the equity of the house are now punished because I have a mortgage / property tax to pay which is much higher that the house is worth and so I am still throwing good money after bad banks.

Have fun - Andy

I am flying with that heli for a few weeks now and then I decided to buy another LIPO battery to be able to fly twice as long. Unfortunately a bad design of the heli caused the loss of one of the battery because the casing of the electric motor is spinning which I did not realize and the batter is placed right next to the motor without any restrictions. So one day I mounted the battery too close to the motor and the spinning motor cut into the battery causing parts of the battery to fail. I was told that I am lucky that the battery did not caught fire but I really thing that this is a bad design of the manufacture. Either they put into a piece that separates the motor and the batter, mount the battery somewhere else or but a warning label where the battery is mounted.

This is the cut into the battery:

This is the heli with the battery mounted:

I have another heli from a German manufacture called Robbe and they mounted the battery underneath the body and the motor is completely enclosed. But as the old saying goes you get what you paid for.

Have fun - Andy

Growing up on a farm in Europe I could enjoy the food and preparation processes from earlier days and so I tend not to use as many tools in kitchen as many Americans do. I don't know why but it seems that either Americans fear the contact with the ingredients or they don't trust their own instincts to know when something is done.

For example the Cook's Illustrated has a piece on Apple Galette which uses a shortcrust dough. To start with they use a food processor to lighten the flour and to cut the butter into smaller pieces. I am used to sift the flour to make sure it is airy but also to make sure there are no foreign objects in it. The butter is cut into small pieces and after I cooled down my hand with cold water I would squeeze the butter cubes with my fingers along with a lot of flour. The flour makes sure that the butter does not stick to my fingers. After a while the butter makes the flour crumbly. By adding cold water I can work everything to a dough that is then put into the refrigerator.

Using my fingers I have more control over the dough even though this process has to be done quickly to avoid the melting of the butter from the heat of the hands. I have a food processor but I would never take it out to make such a dough with it. The making of this dough takes me no longer than the cleaning of the food processor and to put it back into place.

Have fun - Andy

Apple announced yesterday their new line of MacBook Pro laptops and I am not going to buy one. First the ugly glossy screen which is hard to read especially with a lot of lights but then it only comes with a 15-inch screen which is completely useless for me. Even though today I can use spaces I still like to have a much code on my screen as possible and so 15-inch is too small.

But I hope that eventually Apple will get that and produce a matte version with a 17-inch (minimum) screen. In addition it turned out that the Apple is not a good gaming console and so the great NVidia chips are worthless as well.

That said I still like the new design and the glass mousepad but that is not going to cut it for me. This also applies to the new iPhone 3G which I would like to have but I don't need because the Apple's MobileMe service provides me now with the latest email. I am not surfing the web much with the iPhone and the games are mostly boring and just to bridge a dull moment I can use the free ones on my old iPhone.

Hope the Apple guys in Cupertino will eventually understand that but until then

So long Apple - Andy

Because of issues with the Layout of the Blog I moved the content of this blog entry to this Wiki page.

Have fun - Andy