Fire in the sky – or what about mobile browsing

By Henning Eiben in Software 0 Comment

Anyone who has used Internet Explorer on Windows Mobile know that this sucks – especially if you have ever played with the mobile edition of Opera know how a good browser should behave.

Well, so there is this new mobile browser coming up, called Skyfire. You can get a beta from their website at www.skyfire.com, and even though you have to provide your mobile number (assumming you’re an us resident) you can still download the software and install it.

I just did last night, but was kinda disappointed when I first tried to connect to the web using Skyfire. Even though the website appeared just as on my desktop, Skyfire seemed really slow and was not easy to work with … I will leave it on my Windows Mobile for a while and give it a second chance.

What's the time?

By Henning Eiben in General 0 Comment

just stumbled across some configuration stuff in one of my linux-servers and I thought this would be a good time to take some notes … I wanted to check that the time is correct on my linux server (running Debian), so here are some simple steps to verify that.

First off your hardware-clock should run on UTC/GMT. To verify that the clock is synced to UTC on shutdown verify /etc/default/rcS, which should have setting like UTC=yes. Then use tzconfig to manipulate the symlink at /etc/localtime to match your current timezone.

Finally you should set the clock using ntp:

ntpdate time.fu-berlin.de
hwclock --utc --adjust
hwclock --systohc

What's the diff?!

By Henning Eiben in Programming 0 Comment

Way back then I created a couple of patches to apply certain changes to some files – but now I needed to created new patches … and how did I create those patches once again? Especially how to create a patch, which can modify several files at the same time?!

OK – after some google-ing I figured it out:

diff -c2 old_file1 new_file1 > patch
diff -c2 old_file2 new_file2 >> patch

This allows me to update both files with just one patch:

patch -p0 -b < patch

Good to know!

Generating PDF with Infragistics

By Henning Eiben in .Net, Programming 0 Comment

Infragistics offers a really rich set of controls which aim to make development easier and create more powerful UIs. Unfortunately it’s not always easy to figure out how to deal with those controls/features 🙂

Recently I discovered, that Infragistics offers out-of-the-box pdf generation, so I got all excited – even more when I figured that the API also supports setting permission (e.g. for printing and saving) of pdf-files.

Unfortunately I had to realized, that the API does leverage those features, but due to governmental restrictions those features are not implemented in the current version 🙁 this really sucks big time!

Consistend HTML formatting

By Henning Eiben in .Net, Programming 0 Comment

Usually Visual Studio 2008 does the best it can, to help you to write better code – but sometimes it just failes!

For example VS puts literal strings in ", but when you’re in HTML markup attribute-values are not put in ".

But this can easily be fixed: just open up Tools\Options\Text-Editor\HTML\Formating and select the appropriate option (which is curiously the only options that isn’t already set).