JohnsonSolutions

ptrace: Operation not permitted

2012-01-02T21:23:00.000-08:00

I got above error when try to use Eclipse CDT to attach an running process for debugging.

It because of the ptrace protection since Ubuntu 10.10.

Here is the link to more detail explain
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/SecurityTeam/Roadmap/KernelHardening#ptrace%20Protection

To work around:
first need to enable root account
>sudo passwd root
>su
>echo 0 > /proc/sys/kernel/yama/ptrace_scope
>exit
re-disable root account for security reason
>sudo passwd -dl root

Now, it works

To permanently allow it edit /etc/sysctl.d/10-ptrace.conf and change the line to:

kernel.yama.ptrace_scope = 0

Git ---- denied: You cannot push changes not committed by you

2011-06-20T07:33:00.000-07:00

If you get the PERMISSION DENIED error when try to push to a remote server, check the followings:

The author name and email should be the same as your git profile.

Expecially, the author name is FULL NAME of your profile on git server.

If you are using Linux, you also need to setup committer name and email to the same as git profile. otherwise, it will be youid@your_linux_host by default

To fix the permission problem:


>export GIT_COMMITTER_NAME="Your Fullname"
>export GIT_COMMITTER_EMAIL="Your Email"
>export GIT_AUTHOR_NAME="Your Fullname"
>export GIT_AUTHOR_EMAIL="Your Email"

//to back out the commit and index
>git reset HEAD^
//recommit and push again
>git commit
>git push

Tutorial: Developing Windows Phone7 games using XNA

2011-06-13T19:59:00.000-07:00

Developing games for Windows Phone7 using XNA

View more presentations from JohnsonMa.

Forecast on Windows Phone market share and revenue in 2013

2011-05-24T23:25:00.000-07:00

The global mobile phone market has changed, since the day Apple enters the market on January 9, 2007.

In Q4, 2007, Nokia has more than 50% of global market share on smart phone with SymbianOS.

By Q1 2011, Google's Android has more than 50% of global market share, and Apple's iOS has 25% share.

Furthermore, Android grows from zero to 50% market share in just two and half years. This kind of technology evolution and adoption never happened in such a short time before.

With Microsoft and Nokia works together later this year, what are market shares in 2013?

I think what happened to Symbian in the past two years, will also happen to RIM. Microsoft and Nokia will also get some market share from Android as well. Also, from operators point of view, they don't like that internet giant dominating the mobile echo system.

According to some forecast, there will be 800 million units smart phone shipped in 2013. In that case, it will be 200 million Windows Phone, plus $15 per unit, the revenue for Microsoft will be 3billon dollar.

However, in fiscal year 2010, Microsoft recorded $62.5 billion of revenue and $18.8 billion of net income. If my forecast is correct, the revenue from phone will only be less than 5% of 2010's annual revenue.

Seems Microsoft needs to do more to boost the revenue from smart-phone area. Buying smartphone segment from Nokia to create a counterpart with Apple's IPhone? It do make sense, since XBox is doing great. why not create a XPhone then?

Script to install Apache, PHP and MySql on Ubuntu

2011-05-19T21:07:00.000-07:00

Here is a shell script i wrote to download and install LAMP on Ubuntu.


#!/bin/bash

echo "current OS information:"
cat /etc/lsb-release

echo "install patches"
sudo apt-get install update

echo  "install apache2 and php5..."
sudo apt-get install apache2 php5 libapache2-mod-php5


echo "create test.php at /var/www/test.php"
echo "" | sudo tee /var/www/test.php

echo "restart apache2"
sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 restart

echo "start firefox to check the test page"
firefox "http://localhost/test.php" &

echo "install mysql"
sudo apt-get install mysql-server mysql-client php5-mysql


echo "install PhpMyAdmin"
sudo apt-get install phpmyadmin

sudo echo "Include /etc/phpmyadmin/apache.conf" >> /etc/apache2/apache2.conf
sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 restart

firefox "http://localhost/phpmyadmin" &

#need to set the default character to gb2312 to support chinese character
#mysql> set names 'gb2312'

Enjoy!

Software Testing MindMap

2008-12-14T07:09:00.000-08:00

Software Testing is not an easy topic, because of mass considerations.

So I just created a mindmap for software testing to cover most perspectives around testing.

Reasons for project failure

2008-11-07T18:50:00.000-08:00

During the past 15 years, i have worked on various projects. I must say that some projects are not as successful as expected.

Here are most common reasons for project fail:

Project Initiation & Planning Issues

Unclear or unconvincing business case

Insufficient or non-existent approval process

Poor definition of project scope and objectives

Insufficient time or money given to project

Lack of business ownership and accountability

Insufficient and/or over-optimistic planning

Poor estimating

Long or unrealistic timescales; forcing project end dates despite best estimates

Lack of thoroughness and diligence in the project startup phases

Technical & Requirements Issues

Lack of user involvement (resulting in expectation issues)

Product owner unclear or consistently not available
Scope creep; lack of adequate change control
Poor or no requirements definition; incomplete or changing requirements
Wrong or inappropriate technology choices
Unfamiliar or changing technologies; lack of required technical skills
Integration problems during implementation
Poor or insufficient testing before go-live
Lack of QA for key deliverables
Long and unpredictable bug fixing phase at end of project

Stakeholder Management & Team Issues

* Insufficient attention to stakeholders and their needs; failure to manage expectations
* Lack of senior management/executive support; project sponsors not 100% committed to the objectives; lack understanding of the project and not actively involved
* Inadequate visibility of project status
* Denial adopted in preference to hard truths
* People not dedicated to project; trying to balance too many different priorities
* Project team members lack experience and do not have the required skills
* Team lacks authority or decision making ability
* Poor collaboration, communication and teamwork

Project Management Issues

* No project management best practices
* Weak ongoing management; inadequately trained or inexperienced project managers
* Inadequate tracking and reporting; not reviewing progress regularly or diligently enough
* Ineffective time and cost management
* Lack of leadership and/or communication skills

Agile Process can cure some of the problems, but not all

big-endian UTF16 or little-endian UTF16?

2008-09-27T03:34:00.000-07:00

I was working on generating configuration file for mobile device on PC today.
From the example, I can tell that it is using two bytes Unicode.
Thus I am using 'UTF-16' encoding for InputStreamReader and OutputStreamWriter.

However, it seems that the server running on mobile device doesn't like my configuration file.
By looking into the example and generated files, I notice that it was using little-endian UTF-16.
So I changed to use the following statement to write content in little-endian UTF16 encoding.


OutputStreamWriter out = new OutputStreamWriter(
            new FileOutputStream(iniFile), "UTF-16LE");

Here are Unicode table for reference:

Encoding	File initial signature	Java encoding name
UTF 8	FF BB BF	UTF8
UTF 16 Big-Endian	FE FF	UTF16-BE
UTF 16 Little-Endian	FF FE	UTF16-LE

AntSys -- lightweight and powerful system test framwork

2008-08-26T23:00:00.000-07:00

AntSys

Why write AntSys

I was looking for a well-know and easy to use open source tool for our system testing.
My requirements are:

Test Model, provides the concept of test suite, test case and test result

Test Method: launch command line application, check the outputs. which means should be easy to
* configure parameters
* setup environment variables
* able to redirect stand input, output, and error
* get back the process exit code

Test Assertions: should built-in with the following assertions:
* check if output file is created as expect
* check the content of output file against expected file.
* check process exit code
* check the content of system.ouput.
* check the content of system.error.

Test Result:It should generate XML and HTML report

Test Language/API: the test language should provide rich API to help users write test case:
such as create/delete directory, copy files, and even xml processing.

Extensibility: the test lanauge can be extended by end users.

Although the requirements are quite generic, I can't find a well-known OSS project. Most companies are
using their own home-grow system test framework.
Let's create a OSS tool to solve this problem then!

What is AntSys

AntSys is a lightweight and powerful system test framwork built on top of Ant.
It is designed to be easy to work and user can create system/function test cases in xml file without writing single line of code.

AntSys Tasks

AntSys provides the following Ant tasks to write a system test:

tastsuite: is used to aggregate tests into groups of test cases that should be run together.

testcase: is a set of conditions under which a tester will determine if a requirement or use case upon an application is partially or fully satisfied.

assertfileexist: check if the output file is exist as expected.

assertfileequal: check the content of output file is the same as expected test result.

assertfilegrep: check the content of output file contains expected string defined in regular expression

assertpropertyequals: check the ant property against expected value. This is offened used after 'exec' task to check the process exit code.

Example test script

Here is one example of test script to test echo command.


<project name="antsys-systemtest" basedir="." default="systemtest">
  <target name="systemtest">
          <!-- this test suite is using AntSys to test echo shell commands --> 
         <testsuite name="CommandTestSuite" failonerror="false" todir="./report" htmlreport="true">
              <!-- test echo command output -->
              <testcase name="echo_test">
                  <!-- create working dir for testing -->
                  <mkdir dir="work"/>
                  <!-- use echo to create a test file -->
                  <exec vmlauncher="false" executable="echo" output="work/test.dat">
                       <arg value="testmessage"/>
                  </exec>
                  <!-- check the file exists or not -->
                  <assertfileexist file="./work/test.dat" errormsg="should generate test.dat" />
                  <assertfilegrep file="./work/test.dat" regexp="^test" errormsg="should start with test" />
                  <assertfileequal expectedfile="./work/test.dat" actualfile="./work/test.dat"/>
                  <delete dir="work"/>
              </testcase>
   </target>
</project>

Something big is right around the corner!

2008-06-29T06:33:00.000-07:00

The Symbian Foundation announcement this week will change the business strategy
for mobile space in the following years.

Android from Google is one big part of the reason for Nokia to pay 400M to buy Symbian and donate it to open source.
Thinking about the Symbian/Nokia relation, this is the milestone in the use of open source by large tech companies like Nokia,

Nine years ago, when i worked for Nokia, I found it is a company always ready to big change. I really respect to that.

However, things are not clear to some related parties yet:

Employee

In such big move to open source, Some teams in Symbian and Nokia will be cut (like what happened for UIQ).
some time will shrink to fit the community driven mobel (How those managers find there position in community
model?). As a symbianer, Do i want to wait for the special bonus?

Microsoft

M$ will be the only company, who charge $ for mobile phone vendor. Let's see what will happen for them.

Apple

Will iPhone be the most popular mobile device like iPod did for mp3? Can the company fight with foundation
supported by major vendors and operators?

Symbian Fundation

2008-06-23T23:50:00.000-07:00

Big news again today.

Nokia to acquire Symbian Limited to enable evolution of the leading open mobile platform
June 24, 2008

Visionary move embraces openness and accelerates innovation

Config Idle Timeout for openSSH Fedora

2008-02-17T19:32:00.000-08:00

With some ssh servers, you can config the time out in /etc/ssh/sshd_config like

IdleTimeOut=10m

However, the openssh shipped with Fedora doesn't support this option.
Two workarounds are:

Apply openssh watchdog patch

http://www.sc.isc.tohoku.ac.jp/~hgot/sources/openssh-watchdog.html

use TMOUT for shell

In /etc/profile
#set the idle timeout for ssh to 10minutes
TMOUT=600

readonly TMOUT

export TMOUT

Notice here, need to set the TMOUT to readonly, otherwise users can override it.

On The Road -- Google Map Mashup

2008-01-31T18:31:00.001-08:00

Just Created a google map mashup page to show those places i have visited.
The page is hosted on google http://multiroute.googlepages.com/ajaxGoogleMapsMashup.html

The draft version only show the list of places in the right side, and show marker and zoom in once you click the location.

Plan to add more stuff when have time:

polish the site

show to pictures for each trip (Already in Picasa Web Albums)

SOA Trends

2008-01-24T17:50:00.000-08:00

SOA Trend on the web

Trends compare between SOAP/REST

Looks like people are more favorite REST than SOAP now. interesting...

localization360

2008-01-08T06:46:00.000-08:00

www.localization360.com

A good portal site for localization industry. Keep me up to date with the industry news, blogs, hot topics, jobs and resources.

Open Source "Best Practices"

2007-12-20T19:26:00.000-08:00

Check out the Best Practices for Open Source project from collab.net.

Most of the "Best Practices" are also followed by in-house agile development team.
Such as:

Technical Communication

Version Control, Document Management, and Distribution

Build and Test Management

Project Management

Knowledge Management

I can't agree more that open source products have achieved a remarkable degree of quality with very low cost because of the following reason.

Developers are self-selected by their interest and knowledge of the application domain.

Requirements are tacitly understood by developers who are themselves users of the software.

Technical communications (including bug reports) are conducted in public. The public nature of open source helps developers take pride in their successes and think twice before releasing faulty code.

Installed Ubuntu 6.1 on my new flash drive today

2007-12-15T05:15:00.000-08:00

Installed Ubuntu linux on flashdrive (2G) today.
Thus I can still keep my Fedora on harddisk, and switch back later.

Even better, I can boot and run the popular Ubuntu anywhere as long as i plug-in the flash driver.

What is the difference before Operation System and application software then?

The more we use web apps, such as google doc, salesforce, the less we care about Operation System.

Here is the link to follow

Google doc has everything except macro

2007-12-10T06:47:00.000-08:00

I have created a spreadsheet for my wife's portfolio today.
The spreadsheet has three sections:
1. US Stock
It is dynamic table, since i can use googlefinance() cell function to retrieve real time quote for us stocks

2. Mainland Fund
Keep tracking the fund investment in china.
However, the googlefinance function doesn't support get stock/fund price for hongkong or china market yet.

3. Bank Investment.
Bank money market account.

I feel that google doc is really handy. It allows me to finish this complicated document for less than an hour. What is the most wanted feature for me then?
Macro! Macro! Macro!

cannot restore segment prot after reloc: Permission denied

2007-12-06T01:18:00.000-08:00

That is SELinux policy problem.

System -> Administration -> Security Level and Firewall -> SELinux Tab. Change
"Enforce" to "Permisive"

Or we can config to only allow this policy
System -> Administration -> Security Level and Firewall-> SELinux tab ->Modify SELinux Policy ->Compatibility -> Allow the use of shared libraries with Text Relocation

PHP tempalte + CSS = new website in one day

2007-12-02T17:36:00.000-08:00

Just created a new website last night. How can i do that in one day? Here is the answer:

CSS:Separate the presentation with content by using CSS stylesheet

PHP template:Define website structure using PHP template --all the headers, footer, main menu, sidebar...etc are added by php include

Contents:the contents dir will only keep clean page content without any presentation, and site structure.

javascript include workaround

2007-11-16T01:29:00.000-08:00

While i am working on a server side javascript framework, i realize that javascript doesn't support include. that means, you can't directly include another javascript.

If you are write web application, this can be done by

document.write('<script language="javascript" src="' + baseHref
+ 'variables.js"></script>');

However, i want to separate my javascripts into libraries, and called on the server side.
In the end, i write a include function as work around.

usage:


...
var includes = "";
...
 include("another.js");
 eval(includes);
 includes = "";
...

include function:


function include(filename){

      length = filename.length;

      if (filename.indexOf(".js") < 0) {
            filename = filename + ".js";
       }
      reader  = new java.io.BufferedReader(new java.io.FileReader(filename));
      while((chunkread = reader.readLine()) != null)  {
      includes = includes + chunkread + "\n";
      }
      reader.close();
}

How to solve the connection refuse error for php script on Linux

2007-10-31T06:11:00.000-07:00

I am trying to use Magpie RSS parser to parse RSS feed in my PHP scripts today. However, I always got 'unable to connect to www.google.com:80 (Permission denied)' error messages.

In php.ini, the allow_url_fopen is set to on.
Then it must has something to do with my Apache or network configurations.

After fighting for one hour, I finally found the problem that it was disabled by my network policy.
To fix this, Desktop > System > Administration > Security Level > SELinux > httpd > check the HTTPD scripts to connect to the network.

Building auto-translator based on google translate API (3)

2007-09-27T19:50:00.000-07:00

Finished the ETranslator plugin

Since machine translation is getting more mature year over year, it can be used for localization vendors to cut the translation cost.
Even more, if we can mash-up related technologies together, we can create

Interpreter Robot

Speech-to-Text, to input English
machine translation, to translate to Franch
Text-to-Speech, to speak out in Franch

How to find out which process is listening on a port

2007-08-23T00:26:00.000-07:00

for example, we want to find out which process is running on port 8005

First, use the following command to find if the port is is use or not
netstat -an |grep 8005

Then, use the following command to find which process is using the port
fuser -n tcp 8005
the return will be something like '8005/tcp: 9113'.
it shows pid.

After that, we can find the full process information.
ps -ef |grep 9113

In the end. I wrote a script to put all those steps together
ps_port.sh


#!/bin/sh
status=`netstat -an |grep $1`
if [ "$status" == "" ]; then
   echo "port $1 is free"
   exit
fi
ps -ef |grep `fuser -n tcp $1`

Setup Outlook Mobile for Gmail account

2007-08-14T23:25:00.000-07:00

Just got a smart phone with windows mobile 5 installed.
It comes with Intel 520MHz cpu and 640*480 VGA.

Here are the steps to setup Outlook Mobile for my Gmail account on windows mobile.
1. Select to create new Outlook E-mail
2. E-mail Setup (1/4)
Enter e-mail address: you@gmail.com
3. E-mail Setup (2/4)
User Infomration
Your name: Johnson
User name:you@gmail.com
password: you_gmail_password
4. E-mail Setup(3/4)
Account Type: select Pop3
5. E-mail Setup(4/4)
Server Information
Incoming mail:pop.gmail.com:995
Outgoing mail:smtp.gmail.com:465
Click 'Options' button
6. Options (1/3)
Use default
7. Options (2/3)
Check 'Require SSL connection'
Check 'Outgoing mail requires authentication' (Since gmail needs auth for sending email)
8. Options (3/3)
Use default

Until here, you are read to send and receive emails using Gmail
Actually, i did not have a lot of time to play with it yet. will post more experience about this baby later.

Building auto-translator based on google translate API (2)

2007-08-11T06:48:00.000-07:00

Got the draft version of the eclipse resource auto-translator works.
For a input resource file in English below:


action1=File
action2=Open
action3=Save
action4=Johnson

The output resource file in Simplified Chinese looks really stupid.

Need to find a way to let google translate to use IT dictionary!

[Updated 08/12]
Here are more info after digging into this problem.
From Google Translate FAQ:

"
Most state-of-the-art, commercial machine-translation systems in use today have been developed using a rules-based approach, and require a lot of work by linguists to define vocabularies and grammars.

Our system takes a different approach: we feed the computer billions of words of text, both monolingual text in the target language, and aligned text consisting of examples of human translations between the languages. We then apply statistical learning techniques to build a translation model. We've achieved very good results in research evaluations"

However, it can't be used to translate single word. since the algorithm needs context words to match for result.

In our application, for example, menu labels are single word. such as "File", "Open"...etc.
For workaround, I need to use an online dictionary for single word translation.
One good candidate is worldlingo
It is handy. allow you to select from list of dictionary, including computer/IT.

editing binary file using VI

2007-08-09T02:10:00.000-07:00

Not using VI as HEX editor for quite long time. nearly forgot how to do it.

Here are the commands:

vi ~/myBinary.so
[esc]:%!xxd
[esc]:%!xxd -r
[esc]:wq!

XML Transformer indent doesn't work with jdk5

2007-08-08T23:16:00.000-07:00

The below code works fine with jdk1.4, i can get nice formatted xml document.



 TransformerFactory transFactory = TransformerFactory.newInstance();
 Transformer transformer = transFactory.newTransformer();
 transformer.setOutputProperty(OutputKeys.INDENT, "yes");
 transformer.setOutputProperty("{http://xml.apache.org/xslt}indent-amount", "4");
 DOMSource source = new DOMSource(document);
 StreamResult stream = new StreamResult(os);
 transformer.transform(source, stream);

However, found it doesn't work on jdk5.
I need to change to the following work around code


TransformerFactory transFactory = TransformerFactory.newInstance();
transFactory.setAttribute("indent-number", 
    new Integer(2));
Transformer transformer =  transFactory.newTransformer();
transformer.setOutputProperty(OutputKeys.INDENT, "yes");
transformer.setOutputProperty("{http://xml.apache.org/xslt}indent-amount", "4");
transformer.transform(new DOMSource(document),
   new StreamResult(new OutputStreamWriter(os, "utf-8")));

Building auto-translator based on google translate API (1)

2007-08-08T20:39:00.000-07:00

I am writing an auto-translator plug-in. which will do the i18n for eclipse plugins and application automatically. After evaluate several online translating engine, i think google translate is more accurate. Although google does no provide an official API for their translate yet.

Here is the translation mode definition class. It lists all translation directions supported by google so far.


public final class TranslateMode {
        public static final TranslateMode ARABIC2ENGLISH= new TranslateMode("ar|en");
        public static final TranslateMode CHINESE2ENGLISH = new TranslateMode("zh|en");
        public static final TranslateMode CHINESECN2CHINESETW = new TranslateMode("zh-CN|zh-TW");
        public static final TranslateMode CHINESETW2CHINESECN = new TranslateMode("zh-TW|zh-CN");
        public static final TranslateMode ENGLISH2ARABIC = new TranslateMode("en|ar");
        public static final TranslateMode ENGLISH2CHINESECN = new TranslateMode("en|zh-CN");
        public static final TranslateMode ENGLISH2CHINESETW = new TranslateMode("en|zh-TW");
        public static final TranslateMode ENGLSISH2FRENCH = new TranslateMode("en|fr");
        public static final TranslateMode ENGLISH2GERMAN= new TranslateMode("en|de");
        public static final TranslateMode ENGLISH2ITALIAN= new TranslateMode("en|it");
        public static final TranslateMode ENGLISH2JAPANESE= new TranslateMode("en|ja");
        public static final TranslateMode ENGLISH2KOREAN= new TranslateMode("en|ko");
        public static final TranslateMode ENGLISH2PORTUGUESE= new TranslateMode("en|pt");
        public static final TranslateMode ENGLISH2RUSSIAN = new TranslateMode("en|ru");
        public static final TranslateMode ENGLISH2SPANISH = new TranslateMode("en|es");
        public static final TranslateMode FRANCH2ENGLISH = new TranslateMode("fr|en");
        public static final TranslateMode FRENCH2GERMAN = new TranslateMode("fr|de");
        public static final TranslateMode GERMAN2ENGLISH = new TranslateMode("de|en");
        public static final TranslateMode GERMAN2FRANCH = new TranslateMode("de|fr");
        public static final TranslateMode ITALIAN2ENGLISH = new TranslateMode("it|en");
        public static final TranslateMode JAPANESE2ENGLISH= new TranslateMode("ja|en");
        public static final TranslateMode KOREAN2ENGLISH = new TranslateMode("ko|en");
        public static final TranslateMode PORTUGUESE2ENGLISH = new TranslateMode("pt|en");
        public static final TranslateMode RUSSIAN2ENGLISH = new TranslateMode("ru|en");
        public static final TranslateMode SPANISH2ENGLISH = new TranslateMode("es|en");

        public String toString() {
            return langpair;
          }

        private final String langpair;

        private TranslateMode(String mode) {
            langpair = mode;
          }
}

unix shell is still one of my favorite

2007-07-22T16:09:00.000-07:00

unix shell is so easy and powerful, just like vi.
It is always my favorite.
the following example shows how to change variable in unix shell to lower case and remove file extension


for f in *.shp
do
#change to lower case
file_name=`echo $f | sed 'y/ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ/abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz/'`
#remove file extension to use as table name
table_name=${file_name%\.*}
echo "table name: $table_name"
done<

Production GIS map system all based on open source components

2007-07-03T18:56:00.000-07:00

During the past weeks, I was designing a GIS map system similar to Google map for a company.
On the server side, they want a spatial database, which support ESRI format Sharp files. Also needs a map server, which handle client request, query the database...etc.

On the client side, they want a standalone client instead of AJAX based web app.

I have some experience on the GIS stuff five years ago. We used a open source map server at that time, but it was quite slow.

When looking into open source area for GIS system again after five years, i found that we can build PRODUCTION GIS system by integrating all the latest and best from open source community.

Here is the solution in the end:
Server side: Postgis + GeoServer + squid cache.
No development work is needed .

Client side:

Web-based client, can be built on top of OpenLayers

standalone client, can be built by extending from udig. udig is an eclipse RCP application!

The 'E' Day

2007-06-26T19:33:00.000-07:00

Tomorrow will be the 'E' Day -- Eclipse Europa Release.

All the hard work for the past months will pay off.

4G Momory limitation for 32bit Windows?

2007-06-04T00:51:00.000-07:00

I was been asked today :"my 32bit windows box has 8G memory. As we know, the max memory for 32-bit windows is 4G. are we wasting memory then?"

Good question. But the 4G limitation is only for one process during memory addressing. The OS can manage lager memory than 4G.

Here is the table

OS	MAX MEM
Windows XP Professional	4G
Windows Server 2003	4G
Windows Server 2003 Enterprise Edition	32G
Windows Server 2003 Datacenter Edition	64G
Windows 2000 Professional	4G
Windows 2000 Advanced Serve	8G
Windows 2000 Datacenter Edition	32G

Post some eclipse interview questions

2007-05-24T03:28:00.000-07:00

Since i have worked for eclipse during the past three years. i did quite a few interviews.

Each time i need to prepare some questions in advance.
However there isn't any eclipse interview Q&A on internet so far.
So i decided to post some generic questions to share within community.

I will add more questions such as emf, pattern, views... when have time. (I am crazy busy recently for the Eclipse Europa release.)

http://www.eobjectsoft.com/product/EclipseInterviewQuestions.htm

Agile Offshore discussion on theserverside.com

2007-05-13T20:06:00.000-07:00

There is a very interested discuss going on at theserverside.com
about agile offshore.

From those post, some are not memories from the offshore dev.
My point in the thread is:
As i always said, you are agile team locally and want to go offshore.
then first step is the find an agile offshore team, then build long team releationship.
this will lead a success in long run

http://www.theserverside.com/news/thread.tss?m=c.reply&thread_id=45367#232704

The swt event logger/debugger (1)

2007-05-08T15:30:00.000-07:00

Since Eclipse GUI is also event driven, it is good to be able to monitor the SWT event at runtime. It will be even better if we can setup event logger filter by widget.

I still remember that M$ DevStudio do provide tools to inspecting windows and tracing events. That is really useful when deal with some tough problems. I am thinking about building a similar plugin for eclipse platform , which can find the widget using mouse and trace all events (or any type of events) on that widget.

Based on that plug-in, we can build event breakpoint feature for Eclipse platform. In the new Eclipse 3.3, there is a new class loading breakpoint feature, which will pause the debugging session when loading a particular class into Eclipse jvm. The event breakpoint is similar to the above. it will break when user selected event occurs on particular widget.
If you are doing a lot of bug fixing on other code not wrote by yourself, you will also want this feature really hard!

Google Gadget Eclipse plugin (3)

2007-04-25T21:58:00.000-07:00

Here are some updates about the Google Gadget Eclipse plugin.
It has been uploaded to the website for about one week. We have 200 daily download so far. I really feel that "The world is flat", since the users are coming from around the world.
I even see a user from South Africa. Amazing.

Google Gadget Eclipse plugin (2)

2007-04-18T18:38:00.000-07:00

Uploaded the Google Gadget plugin to
my Website

Also listed on the
eclipseplugincentral

There are 20+ downloads so far. More than half of those visitors are from eclipseplugincentral.

Google Gadget Eclipse plugin (1)

2007-04-08T07:58:00.000-07:00

Just wrote a plugin to integrate Google gadgets into Eclipse platform.
Reason:
I am working on eclipse for the past three years. At the same time, i am enjoy google gadgets very much.
Since both of them are based on open standard and free to use, why not combine them together.

Here it comes Google Gadgets plugin for Eclipse, which is integrated with Google Map, Google Talk, Google Calendar out of box. It can be extend to support any Google Gadgets
you want by just modify the plugin.xml file.

Here is the screenshot

I will upload the plugin and give more detail information/instruction later on.

my blog can't access again from china

2007-03-27T16:32:00.000-07:00

Since i am maintain this blog from china. looks like blogger has been blocked in china.

I know google will be blocked some time, and it will last for one or two days in the worst case.
But the blogger is down for a week.

The temp solution is:
add '72.14.219.190 johnsonsoultions.blogspot.com' to
c:\windows\system32\drivers\etc\hosts file

More detail about that:
if you do nslookup for johnsonsolutins.blogspot.com,
you will get the ipaddress from dns as
72.14.207.191

But if you tracert for that ip, you will find it has been locked at chinese operator before going to the outside world.

We can't do anything here, just wait......

How to add your website to google and other search engines

2007-03-27T16:10:00.000-07:00

After create a new website, our problem is how to list that site in google and other search engines.
There are two steps here:

Submit you url to google

http://www.google.com/addurl.html
it will take severl days, or even one month for google to record your new website. to speed up the process, you need take more action.

add extenal links to you website

For those website with high PR value, googlebot will visit it everyday.
So you can add links to you website.
The easy way to do it is put some posts in bbs, email list with link to you site. Then you new site have chance to showup in several days
Links to other search engines:
* yahoo
https://login.yahoo.com/config/login_verify2?.src=siteex&.intl=us&.done=http%3A%2F%2Fsiteexplorer.search.yahoo.com%2Fsubmit

*dmoz.org
It is Open Directory Org. provider content to most search engine
http://dmoz.org/add.html

Agile Offshore -- EObject Software

2007-03-26T10:47:00.000-07:00

I am following agile development for the past three years. Our team was setup as a small distributed team in a global development organization.

Since i am more and more involved in open source development, i really see the best fit between agile process and offshore/distributed development.

Then i ask myself: why not setup an agile offshore team to help those small/mid companies outside there. It is a flat world!

My answer is EObject Software

Find a good webhosting provider

2007-03-26T10:38:00.000-07:00

It hard to find a good web hosting provider.
some sites offer web hosting ranks you can check out. But from my experience, those ranks can only work as a reference. You need to check out the feature, price, and performance by yourself.

For my case, i just created a website, which is hosting on IX WebHosting.
I am happy with the features set and price (7.95/month) of their biz plus plan. The only problem
to me is they are really really slow when access from china.

Don't konw how to deal with that yet. Most of our customers will in US or europe anyway.

Here are some review sites
http://www.top10webhosting.com/
http://www.web-hosting-top.com/

GUI guideline

2007-03-22T02:18:00.000-07:00

I always feel need to remind myself every couple of months about those basic GUI guideline:

user in control, directness, consistency, forgiveness, feedback, aesthetics, and simplicity.

McAfee VirusScan Enterprise block irc by default

2007-03-20T20:10:00.000-07:00

Was trying to add eclipse irc today. got error when try to connect to serverr.
Finally found out that the McAfee VirusScan is blocking IRC protocol by default.

Enable it, then reconnect, everything works fine now.

What is the point to block IRC?
It is sound quite safe to me, need to check the risk later on.

Goolgle site itself is not robot friendly

2007-02-28T00:18:00.000-08:00

Just checked
google site search engine setting

It is 1st search engine in the world, but it only allow other agent to read from news.
Really Funny!!!

User-agent: *
Allow: /searchhistory/
Disallow: /news?output=xhtml&
Allow: /news?output=xhtml
Disallow: /search
Disallow: /groups
Disallow: /images
Disallow: /catalogs
Disallow: /catalogues
Disallow: /news
Disallow: /nwshp
...

Add Google Analytics to your Blogger

2007-02-27T05:37:00.000-08:00

Since the blogspot doesn't provide traffic monitor by default. need to install some counters by youself.

I found the easy way is to use Google Analytics.
But the problem is, you need to register on google analytics first,
then login to blogger to update the template manually.

Need to check if the process can be done automatically from script.
Since they share same google id anyway.
Can you modify blog template using GData API?

Need to check it out this week!

Disable Flash plugin on Firefox

2007-02-27T05:12:00.000-08:00

I don't like most flash from internet.
Since the took at least 50% CPU from my computer.
So i installed the flashblocker, that will not download
flash content by default at all. You can click the empty picture to
enable the flash when needed.

FlashBlocker

There is also a similar one called AdsBlock. one guy said it is event better than flashblocker

Bus speed of USB, 1393, IDE, SATA and FC

2007-02-07T18:08:00.000-08:00

Device	Speed
USB 1.1	12Mbps
USB2.0	480Mbps
IEEE1394a	400Mbps
IEEE1394b	800Mbps
IDE HardDisk ATA66	66MB/s
IDE HardDisk ATA100	100MB/s
SATA1 HardDisk	150MB/s
SATA2 HardDisk	300MB/s
FC (Fibre Channel)HardDisk	2Gbits/s - 4Gbits/s

msnim in HTML code

2007-02-07T02:49:00.000-08:00

Here are some new Hyperlink Command Codes for MSN IM

msnim:add - Allow your visitors to add you to their MSN contacts immediately. Example: Add me to your MSN Messenger contact list
msnim:chat - Clicking this link will open a conversation with email@address.com and allows instant chatting. Example: Click here to chat
msnim:voice - Allow your visitors to start Voice chatting with you in just one click. Example: Start a Voice chat with me
msnim:video - Launches a Video conversation straight from a web page. Example: Start a Video chat with me.

delete ^M in vi

2007-01-09T23:07:00.000-08:00

Need to delete ^M again in some schema files.
Why it always happen, why can't those softwares handle it internally.

Hope the M$ and Novel deal will help to eliminate those small and big difference between Unix and Windows world.

Anyway, here is the step to delete ^M suing VI.
%S/^V^M//g
The ^V is CONTROL-V and ^M is CONTROL-M

'ga' command in vi can show the hex value of current character.
If you move cursor to ^M, and give 'ga' command. it will show:
<^M> 13, Hex 0d, Octal 015

This is actual value of ^M we dislike

Google Desktop Hack -- add two clocks for two different timezones

2007-01-05T01:44:00.000-08:00

Just hacked the Google Desktop to start two clocks for two different time zooms.
I need this feature really hard, since some of my co-workers are located in Dublin office (8 hours from my time).
Do not need to calculate the time difference by myself anymore!

I will become an idiot one day since i am more and more depending on computers to do all stuff.
Anyway, check out my current desktop screen shot.

Enable Virtualization on dell laptop

2007-01-04T00:01:00.000-08:00

Virtualization is the next big thing in PC industry. The intel Core2 cpu already support that.

However, the virtualization is disabled at BIOS level by default on dell laptop.
For my case, sometime, i am running WinXP and Linux together , So i want the WinXP running on one CPU and Linux running on the other CPU separately.
By disable this feature, the VMPlayer can still work. But it will give you warning message during start up.

To check out if the virtualization is enabled or not.
use the following command:
'$cat /proc/cpuinfo'
Check the flags section of the output. If there is vmx flag, that means the vmx has been enabled.

To enable virtualization in BIOS for Dell 9400,
"Post behavior->Virtualization->Enable"

Enjoy!

Dell 9400, Overclock, BIOS

2007-01-03T23:52:00.000-08:00

Just got a new laptop two weeks ago.

Here are some information about it
1. hadware configuration for dell 9400
17inch LCD, Inter Core2 T7200 CPU, 2G 667 RAM, 100G HDD at 7200rpm.
ATI X1400 video card with 128M RAM.

It is really fast laptop, indeed i use it as my workstation now.
Alrough it is really heavy (4kg+), i still carry it between home and office everyday.

However, i must say that the quality for dell insprion product line is poor compare with the latitude ones. I already replaced the keyboard.

2. BIOS
I think nobody like those BIOS comes from DELL or HP. Since they locked the front side buses. That means you can't overclock the system. For my case, the T7200 should be easy to run with 2.13GHz speed without any problem.

The Bios's version is A04, i updated with latest version (A06) from dell support site

Here are some interesting configurations in the BIOS
* All FSB related information are read only
* The Multiple Core Support has enalbed by default
* HDD Actoustic Mode: it is set to bypass by default, i changed to 'Performance', which can get faster HDD but noisier. That is ok to me, I don't think laptop is noise at all since i used to work with those big HP. Solaris box before.
* Virtualization: See the next post