Category Archives: software

StarRating GWT widget

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I recently experimented with Google Web Toolkit (GWT) and created a widget in the process. It’s a simple rating control as seen on many websites where users can submit a rating by clicking on a number of stars.
StarRating Example Application
The control currently features:

  • a custom number of stars in one row (horizontal)
  • a mouse hover effect
  • provides an RPC service interface to store and retrieve rating data
  • client side usage without a service is possible
  • ui customization via CSS is possible

Some features that are missing:

Nevertheless I believe this is pretty usable and maybe I’ll submit the widget to the GWT Widget Library Project if it is welcome. Anyway, feel free to use it but I won’t promise any further support – we’ll see. Here is the sourcecode of the StarRating widget.

Ubuntu Linux 6.06

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I had this post in the pipe since start of june when Ubunbtu Dapper 6.06 was released. It has become a very clean and user friendly linux distribution is allegedly even grandma compatible.

I installed kubuntu, the ubuntu flavor with the KDE desktop, on an old AMD K3-400 with 512MB yesterday. The main purpose of that box will be playing music files so I was glad to see amarok does perfom well enough on that old piece of hardware. All in all the installation and the desktop make a mature impression. I wish there were some applications available via “add/remove programs” to easily install. If you want to check out a more detailed review of the distro head on over to lunapark6.com

Backup.net

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I’ currently thinking about a backup strategy for my linux server. I have several subversion repositories und home directories with imap maildirs that I definately don’t want to loose in case my server disc crashes. Actually I have been very lucky so far with not backing up most of my data for years. Maybe that’s why I feel, that I have to do something in that area.

Anyway, I have about 1-2GB of data, most of which doesn’t change a lot, but it should be stored daily. I’am looking for some kind of network backup solution for storing backups on my workstation or friends’ servers on a VPN. While searching, I came across DIBS: Distributed Internet Backup System which uses a peer to peer approach to store recovery data on serveral distributed servers. From the manual it looks promising and quite mature but I’m not sure if I’ll find enough reliable servers with a decent internet connection to use it.

Bacula looks really interessting but might be overkill in my situation. I like the fact that it provides clients for different OSes so that you can use it as a single backup solution even for the windows clients in your network. It is mainly built for larger networks with distributed backup and storage servers for a large number of clients. I don’t think I’ll invest the time to set up the different server components for this one, though.

Possibly I’ll end up with a tar, scp or rsync solution that copies backups to my windows workstation or other peers in my VPN. linux-backup.net and this IBM article of automation of backups on linux give some useful example for such a do-it-yourself backup solution.

Update: I found one more popular opensource backup application which is called Amanda which provides a similar feature set like Bacula.

Daemon Tools shell integration

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If your using daemon tools regularly you need a proper shell integration. I finally realized today I have to find a new integration for the daemon tools v4 version – I’ve lived without one so far. Apparently a new version of the awxDtools was released today – my favourite integration that I used for daemon tools v3 so far. Unfortunately it only is available with an adware-installer – I didn’t bother to check it out further, let alone tried to remove this crap.

Since I’m currently only using one virtual drive I decided to stick with a very simple windows shell integration. With associating the damon tools executable with the right parameters you have a mount-on-doubleclick solution in minutes. You can set the associations in Windows Explorer under Extras > Folderoptions. The following screenshot shows the dialog – it’s a german windows version though:
Association of ISO files with deamon tools

A better solution would be using a common definition for all the image types and also provide a unmount option like this guy Archades did in his reg file. It would even be possible to add a second virtual drive as another operation in the context menu. As I see it, if you have a decent reg file that creates the associations there is barely any need for additional tools to provide a daemon tools integration.

When calling deamon tools with command line parameters you have make sure that secure mode ist turned off in the daemon tools options or you’ll get a confirmation dialog each time you try to mount an image.