jdsn::blog

Got Engaged

jdsn — Wed, 19 Jan 2011 00:34:18 +0000

2011 is about to become an interesting year for us.

Frustration-Free Packaging #2 – Yes we can

jdsn — Thu, 16 Dec 2010 00:38:01 +0000

I gave the Amazon Frustration-Free Packaging a 2nd try when I ordered a memory card. When it arrived I thought: yes, this is frustration-free packaging – ok the ratio between packaging and article resembles the last Amazon package, but this time the latter is minimized.

This is Frustration Free Packaging

Amazon Frustration-Free-Free Packaging

jdsn — Wed, 01 Dec 2010 15:04:09 +0000

Two days ago I ordered two HDMI cables (2m) at Amazon. The explanation on frustration-free packaging sounded quite well. Today the package from Amazon arrived in my office and I wondered about what I may have done wrong as the package was so huge. The picture speaks for itself:

Amazon Frustration-Free-Free Packaging

Most of the sending is waste – ok, at least its only paper and no plastic. But the overall packaging to send these two cables is big enough to carry one big or two small notebooks.

Youtubian

jdsn — Wed, 01 Dec 2010 14:50:09 +0000

The never ending story continues …

When YouTube lately changed their api again I found out about Youtubian. Goto the website, drag’n'drop the Youtubian link to your bookmarks. Then when watching a YouTube video that you want to cache locally just click the Youtubian bookmark and enjoy the new view to YouTube. Youtubian offers a very comfortable way to download the video in various formats, sizes and levels of quality.

Lets see when we have to change again …

Random Number

jdsn — Mon, 07 Jun 2010 14:45:39 +0000

int getRandomNumber()
{
  // result of a real dice roll to
  // guarantee the quality of randomness
  return 3;
}

Test Cases Improve Software Quality

jdsn — Tue, 04 May 2010 13:10:58 +0000

int add( int a, int b )
{
  // fix for testcases (bug#123456)
  if ( a == 3  &&  b == 4 ) return 7;
  if ( a == 2  &&  b == 3 ) return 5;

  return a * b;
}

The never ending story – How to Download YouTube Videos

jdsn — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 13:04:47 +0000

YouTube again changed the way you can easily download your favourite videos to watch them offline. I already posted twice how to do it – you just need to create a Bookmark in your browser and click on it when watching the video that you want to download. Quite simple. But the target of this bookmark changed again. Here is current version:

Download YouTube Video

Just right-click on this link and select “Save as Bookmark”.

openSUSE 11.2

jdsn — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 00:00:18 +0000

openSUSE 11.2 is now available

Are you new to linux and want to learn about it or have never used it before? Then now its your turn to download openSUSE 11.2 and give it a try. Besides the installation DVD images you can also download LiveCD images to run linux on your computer without installation – the harddisk will not be touched. Find more information in the openSUSE wiki about whats new in this release.

Download YouTube Videos as MP4

jdsn — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 17:48:12 +0000

In February I wrote a post and offered a JavaScript code snippet that helps you to easily download a YouTube Video by adding this code to your bookmark list. The API of YouTube changed a few days ago, so the script no longer works.

Here is the new updated code snippet. Please update your bookmark or just right-click on the following link and choose “Bookmark this Link”:

Get YouTube Video

/dev/fd0

jdsn — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 20:28:59 +0000

I still don’t believe what I did last night :)

On Friday I’m going to upgrade a friend’s computer and install two new hard disks. In order to save some time I wanted to preinstall the operating system (the one of my companies’ cooperation partner). Up to then it was a good idea. But then I connected one new disk to my computer and booted the XP Home installation CD. No hard disks installed was the short message after the installer probed the system. I realized that this CD must be so old that it had no SATA drivers – or at least not for my mainboard.

I searched for the driver CD of my mainboard and – thinking like a developer who wants to be nice to the users – booted again, pressed F6 when prompted to include 3rd party drivers, inserted the driver CD and found that the only way to hand new drivers to an XP installation was via floppy.

But I have no floppy drive in this machine. Nor has my PC in the living room, nor has my Laptop. A month ago I cleaned up my cellar and got rid of my last PC with a floppy drive – a Pentium 133 machine that I got in 2001, when it already was used (Siemens wanted to get rid of it back then). Well … no way to solve that, it seemed. I didn’t want to give up that easy and crawled though my board with PC components and really found a lonely floppy drive. But then I recalled that I also disposed my collection of SCSI and floppy cables – nobody uses floppies any more and everything is SATA nowadays, I kept some IDE cables as my file server still has an IDE drive.

So the next objective was: get a floppy cable. When I almost gave up on this I had a look in an old ASUS mainboard box where I keep some manuals in – and amazingly there was a brand new floppy cable still in its original package. Ok, great, now I could connect the floppy drive with my mainboard … but stop, it needs a small power plug – but there was none. As my power supply has cable management there must be some power cords left in its packaging … so again, searching for a cable – but that one was easier to find.

But what is a floppy drive without a floppy. Those I disposed about 5 years ago after I created a last backup of thier content on my file server. So now it became quite hard. I even had to search in those tow boxes with unused stuff that I left untouched for three years now since I moved into my current apartment. And astonishingly there were about 10 floppies left.

Then the amazing thing happened. After over 5 years it was the first time I logged into my own workstation with a floppy drive connected. Ok, the workstations changed in the meantime from a custom built one to a MacMini and now I’ve got a custom built one again (does not look as nice as Apple products but its a lot cheaper and much more flexible).

Well, the rest of the story is short: formatting the floppy with KDE was easy, installing wine to extract the SATA drivers on the CD from the self extrating *.exe archives went smoothly as well, and so did the installation of XP in the end. It just was so curious to use a technology again after such a long time (5 years can seem long). Maybe I now start to understand what it feels like for the computer poineers to touch a Zuse or to power on a DEC PDP-7.