The Story of David Kaspar

Clean install of OSX Lion on your Mac but keeping documents and applications

Sat, 26 Nov 2011 12:11:43 +0000

My Macbook Pro ground to a halt after 6 months of heavy usage. It started to freeze up frequently preventing it to load anything from the hard drive. Things that already were in memory continued working but accessing anything from the hard drive or unlocking the screen saver took up to 2 minutes. Not even "ls -l" worked. A quick visit to the Genius Bar and after running many hardware...

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JSR 303: Combining custom and standard validators

Tue, 12 Jul 2011 16:27:49 +0000

We are using the JSR 303 Bean validation API (Hibernate validator as the implementation) on a project and recently faced a problem. Whenever we were using our own custom validators in combination with standard validators like NotNull and NotEmpty, the standard validators seemed to be ignored. The result was that we were getting NullPointerExceptions in our custom validators and sometimes we...

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Bali with children

Wed, 02 Feb 2011 16:04:32 +0000

We just completed what I believe to be our first adventure with our kids; a trip to Bali, Indonesia. Our children are 4 and 3 years old and we were contemplating whether they would be able to handle the 17+ hours long *day* flight and the culture shock. I'm glad to report that it all went spectacularly well and our children have memories for a life time. We started out in Ubud which is a...

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Logitech Squeezebox receiver with flashing red light

Fri, 24 Dec 2010 11:39:24 +0000

Got a Logitech squeezebox receiver the other day and after plugging it in to my switch, I assumed it would just acquire an IP (using DHCP) and just start working. After 2 hours of changing network cables, restarting various network devices and a little bit of cursing I retreated to Google for some help. Turns out that the Squeezebox receiver is not to be used on its own. It is to be used...

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Batalha Animal – Do you love animals?

Tue, 01 Jul 2008 14:37:17 +0000

Do you love animals and are you thinking about a different way to make a difference? Do you feel disgusted, angry and heartbroken to see a suffering animal? Would you rather want to make a difference and truly help out? This is a remarkable story of an ordinary working mother that all by herself changed the fate of over 150 dogs left to die. This during 16 years of love, dedication and hard...

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Who owns photos when uploaded to Facebook

Tue, 22 Apr 2008 10:13:13 +0000

There is discussion currently going on regarding who owns photos uploaded to Facebook. One would assume that the user who uploaded the photos to Facebook would retain all rights associated with the photographs but the Facebook Terms of Use suggest otherwise. A relevant quote from the Facebook Terms of Use: By posting User Content to any part of the Site, you automatically grant, and you...

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London mayoral debate on LBC

Thu, 10 Apr 2008 08:51:42 +0000

Earlier today the LBC Radio hosted a debate with the three major London mayor candidates. Labour candidate Ken Livingstone, Conservative candidate Boris Johnson and Liberal Democrat Brian Paddick joined Nick Ferrari in the studio to face questions from Nick and from the public. London crime is on top of many Londoner's lists of things that need to be taken care of by a new mayor. Ken claims...

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April Fool's Day 2008

Tue, 01 Apr 2008 09:44:49 +0000

Google launches Project Virgle together with Virgin. Project Virgle, the first permanent human colony on Mars. All featured videos on YouTubeUK and YouTube Australia lead to Rick Astley-Never Gonna Give You Up. You have been RICKROLLED! TechCrunch is acquiring the venerable teen magazine and Web site Tiger Beat, will rename it CrunchKids. Venture capitalists fight back against a website...

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Virgin Media takes fight to illegal downloaders

Mon, 31 Mar 2008 11:26:57 +0000

Virgin Media will cooperate with the British Phonographic Industry (BPI) in a pilot to track down users downloading illegally: "The BPI has teams of technicians to trace illegal music downloading to individual accounts. It will hand these account numbers over to Virgin Media, which will match them to names and addresses." You might think that there will be an exodus of users from Virgin Media...

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20 minutes or so about why Lessig is 4Barack

Tue, 05 Feb 2008 10:52:32 +0000

There is no question that there is a need for change in Washington D.C. but the need is for a fundamental change; a change at the core. "A change in the power of money or corruption in how Washington DC runs... Edwards/Obama have [clearly demonstrated] their support for this strong version of change... their target is a fundamental reform of the system." Professor Lawrence Lessig has some...

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True instant push email on your mobile phone using Gmail

Fri, 11 Jan 2008 17:39:13 +0000

Today I thought that I would check out the state of SMTP and IMAP services of my favourite email service provider Gmail. I wanted to use Gmail on my mobile phone and I was pleasantly surprised. Because Gmail supports the IMAP standard, items that are read and or deleted on the mobile phone are correctly marked as read/deleted on the Gmail account as well. This is very convenient if you are...

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KB941644 and Event ID 4226 patch

Wed, 09 Jan 2008 08:06:38 +0000

The latest critical Windows update from Microsoft (KB941644) is a fix to TCP/IP to prevent possible remote code execution. The Microsoft Security Bulletin MS08-001 explains that there are two reported vulnerabilities in TCP/IP and that an attacker could take complete control of an affected system and install programs and view data. The bad news is that the critical update will replace your...

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Canoa Quebrada, Brazil

Tue, 11 Dec 2007 11:59:17 +0000

A friend and his wife are travelling in the North East of Brazil and it was a too good of an opportunity to miss out on... especially since we barely see each other while both living in London. A rough itinerary had been decided on as meeting up in Fortaleza, taking a bus to Canoa Quebrada, stay there for a few days, continue with overnight bus to Natal and finally by local bus to Praia da...

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Double Trouble travels

Mon, 10 Dec 2007 11:15:56 +0000

We had travelled many a times with one child but this was the first time travelling with two little ones and I was a bit apprehensive. On our departure London was as rainy as ever and we were in heavy Friday evening traffic on route to the airport. Oh boy was I looking forward to the Summer in Brazil. It took all of 6 large suitcases, 4 carry-ons, one car seat and one foldable buggy to fit...

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Paypal is not a bank but has a phone number

Tue, 20 Nov 2007 08:00:44 +0000

Once you hand money over to Paypal you have very little control over it. This also applies if you let PayPal accept money on your behalf. Their terms and conditions more or less make you wave your credit card protections and consumer rights. I have made over 40 paypal transactions over the last 6 years. I have been reading various paypal horror stories but I always thought it wouldn't happen...

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