From time to time I like to take a look at new things, like e.g. Gnome3 and its gnome-shell.

My setup uses proprietary nvidia drivers and two seperate X screens, one for the LCD, one for the Samsung TV over HDMI (XBMC that is). This works just fine in KDE4, Gnome2 and anything else I've tried. But Gnome3 just blatantly fails to start with this setup. Last time I tried, it was Gnome 3.0.0 or something, but meanwhile there is Gnome 3.2.2 and still they did manage or refused to fix this issue.

Well, I'm not alone:

Konverting from VirtualBox to KVM is actually quite easy.

If you use snapshots in VirtualBox, then you will first have to clone the current running state into a new VM (Right clickt -> Clone -> blah -> select only current state)

Then, if you use dynamic growing disks, convert them to raw format

VBoxManage clonehd --format RAW Win7.vdi Win7.raw

Now convert it to qcow2

Our Homepge is written in Java using JSP/JSF and for compatibility reasons we do URL-encode a jsessionid even the client accepts cookies, and also we create a session for every visitor. This causes every link on our pages to include an ugly ;jsessionid=<very long hash>, which search engines tend to dislike.

Heck, some interesting and nice comments have been posted, and landed up in the approval queue. I never got a mail, and currently cannot yet figure out where to configure this in Drupal. Anyways comment approval is disabled now and I published all comments posted so far. Sorry for the confusion.

Currently I have to configure a Sun Enterprise T5220 as our new "developemnt environment", replacing our V440 (Oracle) and the T1000 (Weblogic). We chose a Sun CMT machine as we wanted to stay close to production in regards of architecture (processor type/OS etc).

The machine will have to run an Oracle instance, and some containers for the Weblogic environments (we have an integration env, daily build env + some development environments for projects). The new T5220 ist packed with a 1.4GHz T2 Niagara, 64GB of memory, 2x146GB for the OSes, and 6x300GB for the database and NFS.

If you want to create a youtube video from an audio file, here is how to do this.
All you need is the audio file, a single picture, and ffmpeg.

First find out the lenght of the audio file in seconds, you'll need it. Here is an example with a 420 seconds file:

ffmpeg -loop_input -i picture.jpg -vcodec mpeg4 -r 25.00 -qscale 2 -s 480x360 \
-i audiofile.mp3 -acodec libmp3lame -ab 128k -t 420 video.avi

This will create a Hi-Res MPEG-4 video with 128k audio. The trick here is to use that one picture and loop it for -t seconds.

Took me a while to figure out this one. All I wanted to do is to print the text between two tags/characters/strings.

The IMHO nicer Awk way:

$ echo "bla(foo)"|awk -F'[(|)]' '{print $2}'
foo

$ echo "bla=@@foo@@"|awk -F'[@@|@@]' '{print $3}'
foo

 and with sed:

$ echo "blah(foo)"|sed -n 's/.*(\([^ ]*\))/\1/p'
foo

echo "aaafoobbb"|sed -n 's/.*aaa\([^ ]*\)bbb/\1/p'
foo

Figured.

I just had to restart a webapp in Tomcat without stopping a second app running in the same tomcat instance.

Usually this can be done easily via the Tomcat Manager, but in this case I was not able to access the Manager due to firewall rules. Though I was able to access the server using ssh, but there was no curl installed.

Luckily wget did the trick too!