Daniel Schneller's Blog

15 months – And it is done

2010-03-14T23:28:00.001+01:00

Finally: Not quite 65 million years in the making (Jurassic Park, hint, hint), but it took about 15 months to get my first book to the printer. A few days ago Udo – my co-author – and I approved the final version of the MySQL Admin Cookbook for publishing. From what I see the book has not been added consistently to the online book stores around the net, but I will most certainly put links on here

OS X’s Preview fails to display PDF annotations

2010-02-04T23:38:00.001+01:00

Today I went through a set of changes the proof reader had made to the book’s preface. I could see his annotations in the document and was seriously wondering what the heck he wanted to tell me. I even went so far as to reply that I thought his changes would make matters worse. Turned out to be quite embarrassing, because apparently Mac OS X’s Preview.app does not do a very good job of displaying

Finishing touches

2010-02-02T02:20:00.001+01:00

The book is in its final stages. Right now I am putting the finishing touches to the illustrations and going through the editors’ most recent comments and suggestions. Takes a lot more time than expected, though…

HP ScanJet G2410 Mac OS X 10.6 driver (Snow Leopard) download

2010-01-15T11:35:00.000+01:00

In my previous post I promised to post follow ups regarding the missing Mac OS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard) compatible drivers for the HP ScanJet G2410. Today I got a response to my support case, including a download address which I would like to share. On the website you still cannot find the software directly. HP ScanJet G2410 Mac OS X 10.6 driver download page I have not yet tried to install it,

HP Mac Software Support - Ridiculous

2010-01-15T00:45:00.001+01:00

When a few weeks ago my Canon LIDE70 scanner died, I went and looked for a Snow Leopard compatible replacement. I found the HP ScanJet G2410 which is labeled compatible with 10.6. Little did I expect what “compatible” means in HP’s terms. So I went ahead and bought one at a local electronics store. Inside the box there was a leaflet informing me about the software on the CD only being suitable

Blog Statistics 2009

2010-01-01T19:16:00.001+01:00

Others have done it, so why shouldn’t I do it, too? Well, usually that’s not my line of thought, but when today I read David Linsin's blog post about his stats I thought I might follow along. Overall stats The overall visits to my blog – and countless others with no doubt – display the workday/weekend jagged line one would expect. The summer months seem to be a little lower on average, but that

On Font Rendering

2009-12-23T15:27:00.000+01:00

If you have ever wondered (as I have years ago) why the text rendering on Linux usually looks inferior to both Mac OS X and Windows text, no matter how much you try and tweak the settings, there is a great and very in-depth article at http://www.antigrain.com/research/font_rasterization/index.html. It is quite long, but it contains excellent background information, theoretical and practical

Star Wars Review – Hilarious

2009-12-19T18:00:00.001+01:00

I just came about this Star Wars – The Phantom Menace Review on Daring Fireball. Yes, the movie has been out for years, so why a review? Well, go see for yourself (it is 7x10 minutes long!). Be aware that if you loved it (who would?) you might be offended by the heresy against George Lucas’ creation, but I for one mostly agree with it. You might have to get used to the guy’s voice, but the

51 Weeks since my book writing adventure began

2009-12-17T00:47:00.001+01:00

In one week, on December 24th, it will be exactly one year since I was first contacted by Packt Publishing. After reading several posts from this blog they asked me if I’d be interested in writing a MySQL administration cookbook with hands-on recipes for those among us who have to make sure the MySQL servers are kept running and in good shape. Funny thing, I almost deleted their email, because

Google Navigation

2009-10-28T18:26:00.000+01:00

You just gotta love this tech world...

Fluid app for TWiT.tv

2009-10-20T01:20:00.001+02:00

For the last couple of weeks I have found myself regularly having a Safari or Firefox window open, showing the Bitgravity stream from http://live.twit.tv, Leo Laporte’s netcast site. Time and again however, I accidentally closed the video when I routinely quit the browser when I had finished using it for other web related stuff. Today I got sufficiently annoyed by myself to resolve this

Setting up iPod Touch for Google Sync

2009-10-07T20:57:00.002+02:00

Google offers an Exchange/ActiveSync based option to keep your mails, contacts and calendars lined up nicely on your iPhone and iPod Touch. I succeeded in setting this up on my iPod Touch 2G as per their instructions, but when I tried to configure which of my calendars were to be synced by going to http://m.google.com/sync with the Mobile Safari browser, it told me that “Google Sync is not

Another note on code readability

2009-10-06T23:21:00.001+02:00

Some time back I posted a piece of code I found that was trying hard to obscure its meaning (see this post from September 2008). Today I came across this: long now = CalendarUtil.theCalendarUtil().getCalendar(new Date()).getTimeInMillis(); long milis = now - creationDate; milis = (milis < 0 ? milis * (-1) : milis); return (milis > 2 * 60 * 1000); Now, do you immediately see what’s going on

John Lloyd on Invisibility

2009-10-01T22:10:00.001+02:00

The following video I came across by chance – listening to some podcast I was reminded about TED, browsed through the site and found this. I really find it a great little talk (10min), so here it is: The original can be found on the TED Site (direct link). Technorati Tags: john lloyd,ted,video,fun

iMac hangs at gray boot screen – solution

2009-09-29T01:28:00.001+02:00

Today my Intel iMac (mid-2008) suffered a heavy software crash, effectively leaving me no choice but to turn it off, as the shutdown process would hang forever. I held down the power button several seconds, until it went off. Unfortunately getting it back up was not that easy. I would hear the startup chime, but after that the screen would just hang, completely gray. I could hear the CD in the

Reducing Mac screen brightness even further

2009-08-31T23:39:00.000+02:00

While I generally love my iMac, one thing I always hated from the first day was the insufficient range within which you can regulate the screen brightness. Especially at night when the surroundings are dark, even the lowest setting is still too bright and both illuminates the whole room and also hurts the eyes after a while. Today I found a simple tool with the even simpler name Brightness

Eclipse: ClassFile cannot be cast to ICompilationUnit

2009-08-24T09:10:00.004+02:00

Today, checking out from the repository, I got this error message from Eclipse: org.eclipse.jdt.internal.core.ClassFile cannot be cast to org.eclipse.jdt.core.ICompilationUnit To save anybody getting the same message from wondering and poking around what it means, here is the simple reason. A colleague had accidentally checked in a .class file in a source folder, causing my Eclipse to try and

myTexts with Keymote – a nice combo

2009-08-17T22:35:00.001+02:00

Some time ago I wrote about Using Pages ‘09 in “WriteRoom” Mode, but since then I found myTexts from MOApp Software and bought it. I like the idea of having a document storage inside the application without having to worry about file handling – which is one of those things I do not want to think about while writing. However, the (intentionally) spartan design of pure writing applications like

Bud Spencer Gedächtnislache

2009-08-02T14:02:00.002+02:00

Just stumbled across an old Bud Spender movie snippet and got here per related links: This is the German dubbing voice of Bud Spencer (and a few others as well: John Rhys-Davies, Charles Bronson, Oliver Reed, etc.) and I just *love* the laughing right at the beginning... Just GREAT!

iPod Touch 2G requires charger adapter

2009-07-16T20:09:00.001+02:00

I know this has been blogged before, but I feel so strongly about it, I need to post my own rant as well. Apple for some obscure reason decided to change the layout of the dock connectors charging pins between the iPod Touch and its 2G successor. The same fate also hits iPhone 3G and 3GS. The older models used the FireWire portion of the dock connector to charge the devices battery. Many

Modularizing Software with Ant/Ivy and Eclipse

2009-07-09T23:46:00.001+02:00

This is one of the rare times when you get the chance to some technical cleanup and rewrite time from management, so we are trying to get some new things going that were pushed time and again in the past. In the architecture meetings we have been telling ourselves that we’d have to modularize better, so more unit tests could be written and overall quality be improved. Instead for lack of time we

Domain Hassles - Part 2

2009-07-06T09:17:00.002+02:00

I am almost done with the domain changes to this blog. It is currently reachable via www.danielschneller.com which is what you should already be seeing in the address bar right now. The danielschneller.de domain is working partially, I guess some DNS updates have not propagated to everywhere yet. It should redirect to the .com immediately, however currently it still seems to have the CNAME to

Using Pages ‘09 in “WriteRoom” Mode

2009-07-06T07:20:00.001+02:00

As I am currently in the process of writing a book, I am always on the look for a better way to write stuff down. While the publisher wants to have OpenOffice or Microsoft Word files, I am not perfectly happy with writing in either OpenOffice or NeoOffice. They both seem to bloated and full of stuff, all the time taking my attention away from just pure writing. When looking for a simple note

DomainFactory

2009-07-04T03:13:00.001+02:00

I just whipped through the ordering process for danielschneller.com with DomainFactory. From ordering to having the domain online and reachable (at least for me) it took less than 30 minutes, including automated SMS message for activation, setting up mailboxes and configuring the CNAME to point to the blog. I am impressed. Now I will try and test this a little more, before maybe migrating the

1&1 Domain Hassles

2009-07-04T00:41:00.001+02:00

Earlier this week I (again) thought about changing my Blogger settings to use my own domain - in the end what is it good for to pay every year for my custom danielschneller.de domain only to have it forwarded to the one-of-many .blogspot.com subdomains. So - having pushed this for in fact several months now - I finally went to the Dashboard and looked up the instructions on how to configure my