Wednesday, October 21, 2015

This arrived last friday, it's great. The steam controller is amazing, but you wil have to put a lot of time into it. It is not a pick up an play kind of thing at the moment. Might improve over time as developers are adapting the controller. One of the best uses is in 'Portal 2', or so they say (haven't tried it yet), since it is the first and only game to native support the controller. The steam link is an interesting little device, it is in fact nothing more then a chromecast with more options to connect HID devices. It mirrors the screen of your steam machine (or a pc running steam) and nothing else. Your steam machine is not free for use by others when you play on it with through the steam link, something to keep in mind. Also it doesn't work well if both your steam machine and steam link are on wifi. After putting an ethernet in the steam link the streaming was much better. There are still some sound hickups sometimes and some games simply refuse to work (Broderlands 2).







In the meantime, steam link already is being hacked on and you can enable ssh access.

Friday, October 02, 2015

Apache Camel is a great project i've been using for creating real great integrations with. The online documentation is fairly good, but as with many projects it's missing some updates. I hit a problem with using Camel and CDI. I couldn't get any of the examples for the ProducerTemplate to work, that's because the documentation uses Spring DI instead of the Java EE CDI implementation. I couldn't find anything on the Camel site that explains how to do it with CDI, so if you're having the same problems (NPE will be thrown each time your producer is used), the following works:

    @Inject
    @Uri("mock:ToAnEndPoint")
    ProducerTemplate producer;



Tuesday, April 21, 2015

Retro find: NES (EU+US)

Doing my sunday morning market shopping at my local town, i stumbled upon this really mint looking NES packaging including two extra games (Ikari Warriors & Bionic Commando). I wasn't expecting much on a reasonable price since the whole kit was in such a great condition, but out of curiosity i asked anyway.
The seller asked 5 euro, couldn't find the money fast enough! This Nintendo Entertainment System is originally a EU-PAL system, but it has a switch fitted to also accept and play US-NTSC cartridges. It's the 'Action Set' which includes the light gun and probably the most known double game cartridge on the system with the original 'Super Mario Bros' and 'Duck Hunt' on them.
What i also love about it, is that the original price tag is still attached, back then ofcourse in old 5.995 BEF, which is about 150 euro in todays money.


Thursday, April 02, 2015

Using an old instance of JBoss (version 7) i found it littered the log files with cookie informational entries, like the following:

2015-04-02 11:46:18,714 INFO  [org.apache.tomcat.util.http.Cookies] (http--0.0.0.0-8080-15) Cookies: Invalid cookie. Value not a token or quoted value

To avoid this add the following option when starting:

-Dorg.apache.tomcat.util.http.ServerCookie.ALLOW_HTTP_SEPARATORS_IN_V0=true

Friday, March 06, 2015

When programming in Java and using Apache Maven, you might get the following warning, which does no harm but clutters up the output;

[WARNING] Using platform encoding (UTF-8 actually) to copy filtered resources, i.e. build is platform dependent!

The solution is to add the desired platform encoding in your pom.xml file by adding it to 'project.build.sourceEncoding' section of the properties (if you don't have properties, you will need to add them first).