Recently I have started working on a large scale legacy project and I’ve had some time to understand how things work there. It is a fairly old JEE5-based tech setup and there are plenty of areas that can cause headaches. But a particular pain point is the way testing is handled. Yes, there are tests. …
Today I noticed that the performance of my blog was very bad, it took ages to load a page. Looking at the process list on my server I saw that the apache2 process ran with 99% cpu usage. With more requests coming in, multiple processes would exhaust the servers CPU resources. Restarting the webserver didn’t …
I’ve written about Project Lombok’s @Builder annotation before (see here and here). We’ve started using it in our project some time ago in favour of the code generation library PojoBuilder. One thing has bugged me though during that time: Lombok’s @Builder annotation won’t generate code for inherited fields. It turns out, there is a solution to …
Since I don’t use Bluetooth I’ve been wondering for some time how to permanently disable it in Ubuntu. There’s a menu item that allows to quickly disable it, but this setting doesn’t survive a restart. Despite some time spent searching around I have not found a reasonable solution to shut down Bluetooth. The only thing …
You don’t need to be particularly interested in technology or privacy to know that a lot of companies are following you around as you browse the web. There’s a huge market for personal information which is mostly used to serve targeted ads. Lots of information is available online that goes into great detail on how …
Some time ago I’ve written about Project Lombok’s @Builder annotation. When used, it will automatically create a builder for your Java POJOs. Lately, I’ve had some trouble using it on generic classes. Initially I thought that Lombok might need some improvements in this area, but it turned out that I was just using it wrong. …
A few weeks back I wrote about my endeavour to reinstall a private server that I own using the configuration management tool Chef. One of the things that I wanted to revisit was the way I managed a test environment. I had basically manually set up a virtual machine and that I could use as …
One thing that has annoyed me since I switched to Ubuntu as my main operating system is the little red TrackPoint of my Thinkpad, situated in the middle of the keyboard. Often, when I’m typing something, I will hit it and the focus suddenly is on a different UI element. Today I finally found how …
After reinstalling Owncloud using Chef (see this post) I had to spend some time figuring out how to import existing calendar data into an Owncloud calendar. Initially I wanted to subscribe to a remote calendar (bank holiday data) in the Owncloud web interface, but I didn’t find a way to do this. Instead, I created …
For the last few years, all the projects I’ve been working on have made extensive use of a configuration management tool called Chef. It helps you define the configuration of the servers that you manage and enables you to rebuild a server easily. If you’re using Chef, you don’t change server configuration manually, everything gets …
