XP -> XP+Vista+Ubuntu -> XP

Posted on February 20th, 2008 by arnljot.
Categories: other.

When I first bought my Thinkpad it came installed with XP. I soon got Vista for a small fee from Lenovo, and Installed Ubuntu and Vista along with my existing XP partition.

Since I ended up using XP the most, no fault of either Ubuntu or Vista, I just felt most at home with XP since it was what I had used the most. I uninstalled both Ubuntu and Vista today.

Both operations were really easy.

1) Uninstall Ubuntu: Vista Boot CD: Bootrec /fixboot /fixmbr. This removes GRUB so that you can delete that partition…

2) Uninstall Vista: Vista Boot CD: (Boot XP) - “e:\boot\bootsect.exe /nt52 ALL /force”. This will install a normal XP MBR.

So now I delete the Vista and Ubuntu partitions, and expand the XP partition again..

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Sun Access Manager, det virker!! :)

Posted on September 2nd, 2007 by arnljot.
Categories: java, other.

Vel, etter mye om og men…

NÃ¥ virker filteret, og AM’ene snakker riktig sammen! Phew!!

Vel, jeg får ikke demonstrasjonen til Sun til å virke, men programmet MITT virker! :)

Det hele kokte ned til at det ikke stemmer i dokumentasjonen at det skal hete AMClient.properties, men AMConfig.properties, ogsÃ¥ for amclientsdk… Den dokumentasjonen gir jeg ikke mye for…

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Sun AccessManager 7.1

Posted on August 31st, 2007 by arnljot.
Categories: java.

Never write a blog post when you’re angry.

Never write a blog post when you’re angry…

Well, anyway - scr*w that. Here it goes:

Sun Access Manager is poorly documented. Really really horrably documented.

Try this: Install the SAML2 plugin for FM on windows or set up the client SDK…

It’s simply not possible. All documentation is out of date.

It’s not much better with the opensso FAM project either. It just points you to the sun documentation…

Well, Sun have excellent people and they’ve helped me A LOT (THANKS! You know who you are! :))

But I’d just format the docs.sun.com server and start all over again…

0 comments.

Tapestry adoptation

Posted on June 12th, 2007 by arnljot.
Categories: other.

An intresting blog post on why the good Tapestry framework doesn’t have a greater following:

Tapestry 101 Blog

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First scammed by Jessica, then by PayPal!

Posted on June 5th, 2007 by arnljot.
Categories: other.

This is a post I made at PayPalSucks.com

Fist, let me say that the amount PayPal scammed me. $2.63 or NOK 63.74 is really small amounts for me (about the price of a beer). But it’s when you start thinking scale that these amounts, and the number of transactions PayPal have, that it starts to scare me and make me judge them as a company with immoral business practices.

For thouse out there familiar with dollar-2-kroner convertion rates, you’ll know that $2.63 isn’t NOK 63.74, is’t more like NOK 15 But that’s what’s so brilliant about the “PayPal way”. 

This small post I’ve copy-pasted in here retells my story, and illustrates how their “apparantly” random practice is really fixed/skewed so that “the house always win”.

Short story:
March 22nd: Bought two DVDs from KIASMOMMY21 at eBay, amount charged: $146.12
April 17th: No delivery, contacted seller through eBay.
April 18th: Vague response from seller, replied. No response
April 20th: Contacted seller through ebay again, no reponse
April 27th: Opened dispute with PayPal
May 3rd: Escalated to claim the
May 25th: Dispute closed in my favour by PayPal 25th of May, received e-mail stating “You’ll be receiving a partial refund”
May 27th: Contacted PayPal via help form online. No response, not even automated. My account online says “refunding” as status
May 31st: Called PayPal, they assured me I’d receive a full refund to my card
June 1st: My balance was 0, they refunded me $146.12 and my account total shows $143.49
June 5th: The refund is completed. They refunded my PayPal account, not my card.

So, I called them today June 5th. Seems that after much back and forward. They are still working on the refund and will transfer it back to my card.

I tried to have her explain how adding $146.12 to my $0 balance added up to $143.49 but all she could say was “currency convertion rates fluxates”.

This is the currency conversion history of my case, remember. Both my account and my card are in NOK (Norwegian Kroner).

March 22nd: Purchase of $146.12. PayPal debits NOK 923.09. This is a rate of $1 = NOK 6.3173. The official rate that day was 6.1126
June 1st: PayPal refunds $146.12. PayPal credits NOK 859.35. This is a rate of $1 = NOK 5.88118. The official rate that day was 6.0352

See how clever you can be? You can even make money when refunding users! Using the iternational magic 8 ball exchange rate agency they are guaranteed to make money no matter what they do…

I seriously considering closing my account when this is all over, and rather by stocks in PayPal.

Update/Edit: By the way. An important point I missed out on initially is, what if this had been a bigger purchase? Say $2000 of computer eq or something? $1500 on that collectable Jabba The Hut peabag chair?

I got away lucky. But I’m sure these conversion stories have worse side effects, just imagine how it can be for defrauded merchants who use PayPal…

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Jobber ledige hos Avenir

Posted on May 24th, 2007 by arnljot.
Categories: other.

Se her

Jeg trives god i Avenir, har mange spennende oppgaver og flotte arbeidskollegaer. Ta en titt da vel! Og kontakt meg hvis du er interessert.

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The movies…

Posted on January 15th, 2007 by arnljot.
Categories: other.

I’ve seen quite a lot of films lately. And the wierd thing it seems is that most of them are excellent. Just look for yourself here.

I need to watch some mediocre films soon. Seems like I either like things, or dislike them… No in between.

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Bark and CubicTest

Posted on January 10th, 2007 by arnljot.
Categories: java.

Bjarte Østervold from Norskregnesentral and Christian Schwarz from BEKK was external speakers on last nights “Fagkveld” seminar at Avenir.

They spoke of Bark and CubicTest respectively, and both presentations was really interesting. Although I must admit that CubicTest with it’s graphical editor for web GUI testing really tickles my fancy.

CubicTest is an EclipseIDE plug-in that lets a user create and edit tests graphically, and then run them using Watir. A new exporter feature is now written into CubicTest so even though Watir seems the preferred way to run tests, a Selenium exporter may also be written.

Christian and I spoke of a few things, mostly how it would be interesting to run the Watir ruby scripts in JRuby inside CubicTest to get a tighter integration allowing the ruby scripts to directly report results to CubicTest. And we also discussed how exporters are made since I might be interested in writing a JWebUnit exporter considering this article about integration of Jetty and JWebUnit.

1 comment.

This is why I rarely believe in tests - more F-Secure

Posted on January 6th, 2007 by arnljot.
Categories: other.

Shocking.

This is their test of F-Secure where they proclaim it “Best in test”.

Here are their test procedures.

My first objection is that they haven’t tested installing software to the system after the security package is installed. Under some circumstances under F-Secure (and surely others too) that’s next to impossible.

Also they haven’t tested the software with different types of software. For instance will http protection in F-Secure disable many mainstream IE plugins (google toolbare for one).

Further more their “this is what you must have” list is meaningless as testing criteria for software. Like mentioning a UPS. In my opinion they should first have listed features that each software suite should have (one being a control panel to see real-time what goes on…), secondly they should make certain their testing procedures mimics real life usage of the suite (like adding and removing software, and would it kill them to run PC Mark also to see application performance under the suites?).

These guys are professionals, surely they have participated in real life software tests or system selections. They know how to make proper tests, this work was just sloppy.

PS: The linked sites are in Norwegian

1 comment.

My New toy - IBM Lenovo Z61m

Posted on January 5th, 2007 by arnljot.
Categories: other.

My new toy is a IBM Lenovo Z61m, and I’m really falling in love with it. The best thing with it is one piece of nice software that is pre-installed on it: The Think Vantage Help/Message Centre. It’s neat how it gives hints on how to get more out of the laptop. But the icon could be much improved. It’s currently a ugly little blue envelope. Juck!

Which is a typical problem with the IBM Lenovo gadgets and software. The icons and hardware design (look) is depressing. Most of the time it seems like something that’s been made because they had to (icons), while the rest of the time it seems to have been designed for business executives of the 1980s (the laptop, 19″ monitor and mouse and keyboard).

I must admit I envy my peers with their posh Ferraris and Apple notebooks. Also I wish that IBM had a Core 2 Duo option, but alas no…

Also my laptop deal requires me to use F-Secure Internet Security 2007 OEM. Which sucks. I usually go for Norton Internet Security, or Norton Anti virus with various firewall options (Tiny or Zone Alert). But this time I had to go for F-Secure.

Why does it suck? First of, the GUI. It’s a complete mess, and is slow and unresponsive. Also it lacks one feature I consider basic: An easy way to access real-time status and a real-time updated log. Deep inside its GUI it has a link to a file which will be opened in Notepad…. Jeez Louise!

Second grudge I have against F-Secure is how poorly it fits in with the rest of the security features of Windows. Norton disables Windows features it knows it’s incompatible with. F-Secure competes… This means that my new copy of “Settlers II - 10 years anniversary edition” brought my laptop to a grinding halt first time I inserted it :( Rubbish!

Worse still is that F-Secure brings OpenOffice to a grinding halt every time you try to open a file. It will load, but not after the CPU has peaked at 100% for quite some time. The worst example is to try and use the Help feature (F1) of OpenOffice while running F-Secure in the background. Every time you try to click on a help subject, the help application will freeze up (process not responding) while F-Secure (fssm32.exe) is gobbling up all CPU resources in the background…

One last example of the unintuitive GUI of F-Secure. When I suspected F-Secure of being the culprit who wouldn’t let me play my new copy of Settlers II, I decided to disable real-time virus checking. Finding the off switch proved next to impossible. There were no simple place where I could just turn of that feature, so I had to dig deep inside F-Secures innards, and disable many features. Voila, it was done. And Settlers II worked.

But surely, I cannot run without virus protection for long. So I went inside the GUI again to enable it. Before I started the protection mode I had was “standard” or something like that. But after I retraced my steps, and enabled everything again it was “custom”. Okay… So how can I set it to a predefined level or mode? There is no way to do that! Rubbish…

F-Secure has a really good name in the industry, and I’m really disappointed with this products user friendliness and GUI. On the positive side of the product, it seems like it’s really good at tracking what’s going on with my laptop. And I also like the feature of security messages from F-Secure. I would however like to se that the tool integrated better with windows and didn’t take up as much CPU, also I’d like to see a much better GUI. I would almost consider the GUI of F-Secure a security hazard in it self.

So have I told F-Secure or my vendor of my grudges? In short - no. The vendor is Telehuset.no and their support partner is InfoCare.no. I received this laptop eary December 2006, and I contacted them early November 2006 in regards to some questions I had. After asking for updates mid December, and still no answer from them: I’ve lost all confidence in them. And I just pray that nothing happens to this kit. If I’m going to be in need of support on this machine I hope that it’ll be something that doesn’t require me to need help from telehuset.no or infocare.no, in other words something I can contact Lenovo directly on.

All in all my impressions are good. But like you can gather, I’m not impressed with the vendor and support partner, or the F-Secure GUI and CPU performance.

1 comment.

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