Project Lombok's @Builder annotation

We’ve been using Project Lombok for a long time to reduce boilerplate code in our Java projects – it provides you with a number of annotations (@NoArgsConstructor, @AllArgsConstructor, @Getter, etc.) that will be used to generate code for you. If you don’t know it yet, I recommend you take a look and adopt its usage. …

Setting up samba shares in Ubuntu

One step of moving over from Mac OS X to Ubuntu was setting up my file shares that I’m using for serving media content to Openelec. For OS X I’ve used SMBUp to configure the folder sharing. Ubuntu supposedly makes it easy to share a folder, you just right click the candidate and choose “Share …

Installing OpenJDK 8 on Ubuntu

As part of setting up my new Ubuntu notebook I wanted to have Java 8 as the default JDK. Unfortunatly there’s only OpenJDK 7 available as a pre-built package and help.ubuntu.com suggests building it from scratch. It references a blog post that explains the required steps and it’s actually quite easy. Here’s how: Installing required …

The long goodbye: Leaving Mac OS X for Linux

I’ve been a Mac user for almost twenty years. While I’m still not quite ready to move away from it completely, I’ve taken the first steps lately: I’ve bought a new Thinkpad E540 and got started setting up GNU/Linux. My first tries with Debian Wheezy were painful and after a few installations I decided to …

Fixing SMB shares after OSX update

I’m running OpenELEC on a Raspberry Pi and my Macbook Air serves a number of SMB shares for it using SMBUp. Having installed a security update for OSX this evening I noticed that my shares had become unavailable. I tried to start SMBUp in order to get the shares back online only to be presented …

Welcome to donneo.bit

Ever since I’ve read Michael Nielsen’s introduction to Bitcoin a few months back I have been interested in blockchain based technologies. Specifically Namecoin strikes me as a very interesting topic: It’s a decentralized and secure name registration service with its own cryptocurrency (NMC). Namecoin records are stored in a blockchain and neither governments nor corporations …

My summary for Microxchg.io

If you’re interested in software architecture and distributed systems at all you will have noticed the rise of the term Microservices during the last two years of so. It’s an architectural style that suggests building complex systems out of small independent services rather than taking a monolithic approach. Having looked forward to it for quite …