Hello and welcome

Since everyone has a personal (vanity) site these days, why not me...

My name is Ruan (Martin) Strydom and since I could not get ru*n(@t)gma1l(d.t)c0m or any other combination of my name I had to settle for rm3dom. I am a developer (a low paying middle class position, alias 'glorified typist'), but I enjoy it and making things fulfill me.

I have made tons of things not all useful, not all current and most not even worth mentioning. The current and new projects I will post here.

mini-me

Submitted by ruans on Fri, 01/27/2012 - 20:13

At the company where I work we do allot of business in the rest of Africa (damn I hate being associated with backwards Africa). SA's internet is good though.

Anyway internet is doggy to say the least. I had to make my web sites as fast as possible.

What I did was:

  • Minify everything: images, css, js, HTML.
  • Join all css and js files which does not have to be separate, the browser will make less connections.
  • Serve static content always from the same site/URL, for different sites, so the browser uses cache.
  • Include as much as possible in the HTML header, so the browser can download them in parallel.
  • GZIP and Cache-Control, Expires headers etc. Some content I made never expire, I use the version trick.

O, I had to write a servlet filter for the Cache-Control, GZIP etc, because I could not find a way to do it with PAX and Jetty. Glassfish/jasper does not even compile the JSP pages in OSGI (because of class-loader problems).

Slow virtuals on KVM?

Submitted by ruans on Thu, 01/26/2012 - 22:09

Use raw or qcow, use qemu-img to convert it.

Use mkinitrd to create an initrd image for your virtual including the virtio kernel modules. And update your boot loader to use it.

You may have to update fstab, cause the new disks will be named vda*.

Change domain config file to use virtio, using virsh, virt-manager or vi.

Done.

KMail 4.8 rocking again, and Dolphin is insane!

Submitted by ruans on Thu, 01/26/2012 - 21:55

KMail is rocking again on KDE SC 4.8. Dolphin is extremely fast and looks out of this world. Kudos to the devs.

Every time someone (newbie) wants to try Linux, I show them Ubuntu, and openSUSE. They pick openSUSE every time because of KDE. I try to explain the differences between the two, but they understand what they see, and KDE is looking really impressive these days :)

OSGI by any other name would smell as sweet

Submitted by ruans on Wed, 11/16/2011 - 21:47

OSGI bean (been) around since +-1999, but all the cool thing like Bluebeans was only recently added to the spec.

Hibernate + Spring? Here is a note about multiple session factories. This is more or less what I was doing. Rather than thinking of a lib as a lib, think of it as a completely separate app, exposing services and resources:

http://www.theserverside.com/feature/Modularizing-the-Hibernate-SessionFactory-with-the-Spring-framework

Hardware access within browser

Submitted by ruans on Sat, 11/27/2010 - 23:11

Since I am now working for a 'banking solutions company', they provide smartcard solutions and switches, I need to access card readers etc from the browser. The thing is we provide solutions to our clients so forcing them to use inferior products such as IE and windows :) ... would just be bad IT. So I had to find a solution for all browsers and all OS's.

What I am doing is calling an applet's methods from javascript. This applet is signed and copies the necessary dynamic libraries (JNI wrappers etc) to the host OS and loads them. Using javascript I then call things like 'init card reader' and 'check card status' etc.

Sweet!

Now all of them needs java on their machines :(

Spam!!!

Submitted by ruans on Mon, 10/04/2010 - 21:42

spam: a canned meat made largely from pork

But the kind I got was not pleasant.. and not edible. Honestly who buys (accepts it to be the truth or purchase with money) the junk?

I suppose anyone who goes through the effort of making a clever spam bot deserves some marketing exposure? (And anyone that makes an open-source spam bot deserves to be castrated! You are warned!)

After I deleted all (I hope) of the spam, I added a 'captcha' (developed by alias 'soxofaan') to the registration page, lets see how long that lasts. Seems to work as expected, thanks 'soxofaan'!

I love wasting my time on pointless things... and then blog about it to waste some more ;)

The upside is at least I received some hits, google analytics says I am up 10% .. yea!?

Nokia N900

Submitted by ruans on Mon, 08/23/2010 - 22:52

I just got my mini linux box, a Nokia N900 and its awesome! Best phone ever.
I installed openssh client and server, bash, openjdk and apache tomcat (just for the fun of it). The phone is incredibly fast (for a phone), I can ssh into the phone (I am not going to play around on it using the small keypad), do X11 forwarding, etc. Fantastic! Since I am a suse fanboy I have to get used to the debian'ish toolset, but that is OK.

Now what?

Well, I already installed the Nokia SDK (scratchbox, qemu etc) and QtCreator, but I prefer KDevelop. I started making a coin/dice tossing app using SDL/OpenGL ES. When done will post under projects.

Setting up gitorious on your box

Submitted by ruans on Wed, 07/28/2010 - 20:12

What pain!; .... what euphoria!

Like gitorious? A nice walk trough: Setting up Gitorious on your own server

eBible

Submitted by ruans on Wed, 07/21/2010 - 20:13

I was looking for a social bible network based around the content of the bible where people can tag verses, passages, words etc and share them. Where you can create discussions and people can comment and reference verses, passages etc. Perhaps even get churches involved in maintaining the topics and tags.

I found this site eBible.com and it is pretty close to what I was looking for but not exactly.

A friend suggested puritanboard and it is much closer to what I was looking for.

Syndicate content