Oculus Go

I confess, I've always been a big fan of VR ever since I tested a unit in the mid 90's. Those unit were big, heavy and bulky, the gfx were not that impressive and rather rudimentary 3D vectors. Still, it left my young self very impressed.

Ofcourse, back then, nobody could buy a VR set, the computers needed to power the whole thing were gigantic. In recent years there has been a VR revolution, the Valve Vive series is probably the most advanced unit available, but i still find it rather expensive. Then there are those goggles you need to slide your smartphone in, those are at the bottom level of VR, they are cheap and not very good.

One company, started through crowdfunding, is Oculus (now owned by facebook :( ). The promised an affordable headset. They more or less succeeded in their mission, however with the release of the Oculus Go they had something special. An affordable stand-alone unit.

Now the have released the Oculus Quest, the next step in stand-alone VR. And a lot of people are now dumping their Go for cheap, so if you ever wanted to get your feet wet into VR, this is the time.

Queue my Go 64GB, bought second hand for €100.

All I can say is that for that price it is an unbelievable piece of kit. I can fully recommend it to anybody interested in VR. With the Go you don't get 6DOF, so you will not be able to move your body (only your head), but it is still a good experience. What amazed me the most is the controller, which has very good tracking in VR space, apparently without all the sensors you need with other headsets. You do only get one controller, but so far, for most applications on the GO, I haven't missed a second controller. The display has a great, crisp quality with vibrant colours. Sound works well without headphones, having the benefit you can still hear your surroundings (like screaming wife/kids :P ), but it is possible to connect a headphone if you truly want to immerse yourself in VR environments.

What are the bad points? The Field of View is not that great. As long as you don't move your eyes, this is not a problem, but this is easier said then done (instead of moving your eyes, just turn/move your head). Battery life appears not to be that great, so far I haven't been able to get more then two hours of use out of it. Besides that, I don't have much to complain about.

All in all, if you want to try out VR, a second hand Oculus Go might be the best option yet.

Eclipse - Import cannot be resolved

After a much needed cleanup of my java project in Eclipse, it suddenly returned a massive amount of 'Import cannot be resolved' errors for classes in the same package. If you are using Maven, you can do the following to get it resolved;

Right click the project > Maven > Update Project

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.

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;

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.

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

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).

Security on the world wide web is important, projects like Firefox certainly take this serious and i applaud what they are trying to do by making the browser as secure by default as possible. However, when using enterprise software this sometimes gives problems because they always lag behind (a lot in some cases).

Once again, after the latest update of Firefox, i suddenly could no longer connect to the ILO interface of our HP servers. This was caused by the recent addition of 'pkix' in Firefox.

Should you see the following error while connecting to an https enabled site;

An error occurred during a connection to . Issuer certificate is invalid. (Error code: sec_error_ca_cert_invalid)

Simply disable pkix verification through: about:config - security.use_mozillapkix_verification - false

Retro find: Commodore Vic20

Went to look for an Amiga 500, but it was in a bad shape and had just too many missing pieces and i found it not worth the time when there are so many more perfect A500's available. My eye caught another piece of equipment from the same owner - A Commodore VIC-20. I asked him if i could take that instead and he agreed.

The VIC-20 is famous for being the first affordable home computer and further development of the platform would later turn out to be the iconic C64. Notice that the casing is much the same, except the color is lighter.
Included are a 16kB expansion (without it, it only has 3kB of memory!) and a tape unit.

Remember: If you have retro gear and want to get rid of it, don't throw it in the trash, but donate it to a collector like me (or one of the many others).

Retro find: Amiga 2000

My latest retro find is this Amiga 2000 (rev 6). It has 2 disk drives and a CD drive installed (however the CD drive is no longer connected). Still has the original battery, which is not leaking yet! but i won't be waiting too long to replace it before it can do damage.
The A2000 case is in good condition, however a '0' dropped of, so now it says 'Amiga 200' :) and there is a sticker on the side from 'The Simpsons', which is kind of cool and i'll probably leave it on there.
Not too many scratches or yellowing. There is no keyboard anymore, but that is not a big problem.

Included is also a 'BSC Tandem IDE controller', although it isn't really any good. It's main purpose is to control CD drives. Clearly first generation because it has two connectors; one for ATAPI drives and one for Mitsumi drives (remember those?). It is also possible to attach hard drives, but it does not support autobooting, luckily i still have a spare 'Buddha flash' available (which supports autoboot and up to 8 ide devices), combined with a compact flash card this will work perfectly.

Also included is a genuine Commodore monitor, but i won't be using that.

Heb je nog een oude/retro computer (Atari, Commodore, MSX, Amstrad/Schneider, Sinclair, ... - 8 bit, 16 bit, ...) op zolder staan waar je niets meer mee doet? Of eentje die niet meer (goed) werkt? Ik zorg er wel voor dat deze een nieuw plaatsje krijgen in mijn collectie, daar kunnen ze dan nog jaren verder en worden ze in werkende staat gehouden. In die gevallen waar ze niet meer te herstellen zijn, nemen we er de nog werkende onderdelen uit om zo andere weer tot leven te wekken.
Contacteer me via Google+ of op Twitter (of laat hier een berichtje achter) mocht je er nog zo eentje staan hebben en om verder af te spreken (toch beter dan naar het container park te brengen).

Fosdem weekend is already over, and it was fabulous once again. There are just so many great sessions and talks that sometimes it's hard to choose. This year there were 6000 open source minded people present, and this is getting problematic. On Saterday i had a lot of problems getting into rooms because most of them were full. What i did notice is that a lot of guys take their girlfriends along, don't ask me why, because most of the time these girls are bored and don't really want to be there. I don't have anything against geek-girls, who are there to learn, i just think it is silly that some people are not able to attend a talk for that reason.
Never the less, great conference. What captured my attention is the strong presense of open source embedded solutions, going from arduino to satellites. Perl is still going strong with fresh and cool projects. Even though the perl crowd is older then most other projects, there is some young blood blowing fresh air. They definatly need a person like Sawyer, which is a very good and entertaining speaker. It's also interesting to see that the main talks don't draw that many listeners anymore and all the action is found in the developer rooms.

Android is probably the most popular linux distro at the moment. The amount of users buying and the companies implementing it are huge, all in a little more then 2 years. In a certain way this shows linux was ready for the masses all along, but as always it took a big company (google in case you didn't know) to get it anywhere.
The one issue that everybody keeps picking on, is the so called fragmentation, i don't think it is really an issue though. The root of this, is the hesitance of manufacturers to release updates to their devices. They might release some for a while, ironing out bugs, but hardly you get an upgrade for your device for major versions, for example going from 1.6 to 2.0. Most of the time the vendors will claim the devices are simply not able to run it, but hackers have proven them wrong each time, for example; my 2 year old Samsung galaxy runs 2.2 just fine. Ofcourse this is all sales driven, new phones need to be sold and an OS upgrade might be a good excuse.
Still fine by me, i will just keep on upgrading my phone the unofficial way until it falls apart or the battery is worn out.The issue i have with all this is in the security part of all this. Linux is a great kernel, but it does have its security issues, if you're subscribed to the weekly SANS newsletter you'll notice there is almost a different security issue each week. Agreed, not all of those are critical or are applicable to Android, but some are. Nobody provides Android security updates, perhaps if it is critical enough, there might be an update for the latest generation of devices but all older phones are left in the dark and stay vulnerable. Since these phones are basicly small computers (you get linux and a shell with more tools on then when i started with linux more then 15 years ago), we could end up with an army of unsupported insecure Android zombie machines, we've been there before, with windows and i don't want it to happen again.
I started by saying that Android is the most popular linux distro ever, and the solution to the above problem is that they should treat Android more like an actual distro, and enable some kind of repositories-like update mechanism for the core of the OS. That way all fixes will be available to everybody and you should not have to surrender you security to the wil of the hw-builders.

The most impressive thing for this year so far, 1 second linux booting. And that is not just the kernel, but the whole init sequence right into a GUI. Now, this is what i want on my linux powered phone.

This documentary has been available for a while, but i just now got around to seeing it. It is rather good and not to long, well worth its 15 minutes.

I own a Samsung Galaxy, that is an Android phone, one that has been available for more then 2 years already. By default it comes with Android 1.5, this is a rather old version, but it didn't matter much because 1.5 was the most targeted Android release. This was changing quickly during the last few months when more and more apps became available for higher versions only. This became rather frustrating as my buddies at work installed one cool app after the other and i couldn't. Ofcourse Android phone are upgradable, and the Galaxy is no different. These are not official releases, but they work just as well (or in this case, even better) then what the vendor pushes out of the door.
I can confirm the Samsung Galaxy to be an awful device in this respect, its internal workings are totally different from normal android phones and this causes a lot of tools not to work, even the official ones from the Android SDK. It boggles the mind why Samsung did this and i really hope they revised this strategy for the new Galaxy S and the soon to be released tablet (which looks pretty cool btw). Not to mention that the instructions from the Andoid dev site contain errors.

The last one will cause problems for everybody, not just Galaxy owners. The dev site refers to a very old version of (Ubuntu) linux, why they have not updated this is beyond me. the actual content of '/etc/udev/rules.d/51-android.rules' should be:

SUBSYSTEM=="usb", ATTRS{04e8}=="0bb4", MODE="0666"

Unless you implement the above, you will never be able to access your Android phone for debugging purposes.

Next, the Adroid debugger 'adb' included with the SDK does not work with the Galaxy, you need a special, unofficial version which you can download here. Just put ungzip it where your current 'adb' is and you should be set to upgrade (or debug) your phone.

I came across this graphical overview of all court cases wich are centered around (smart) mobile phones. What a freaking mess, and the picture is not even complete/correct anymore. We need to add Oracle, Google and Microsoft to this diagram.
Image the progress made when all court efforts could go directly into improving the products of these companies, and some of them really need the improvemt, bad.

Original from 'The New York Times'

A while ago a bought myself an eReader, more specific a Sony Reader Pocket. Anyway, plug it in and it was detected without problems by Gnome, but how to get books on it? Ubuntu has the excellent Calibre ebook management software in its repositories, but it didn't do all that much. Apparently it doesn't work with the Son Reader Pocket. The solution was simple, upgrading to the version available from the official project site of Calibre solved that issue. Ebook syncing heaven reached.

Calibre is very nice and multi plaform, i can recommend it to everybody. It does a lot more then just managing your books. Converting books or grabbing news from the web and creating an ebook of that are among the possibilities.

It's all over the net, Google is dumping MS Windows for desktops and dictating to use MacOSX or Linux instead, for those who still want to use MS Windows, an exception request needs to be filed. I know it is the other way around in a lot of companies.
Is Google mad or genius? Well, no doubt i think they are genius and i think it is an important message they are sending out for others. The main reason why companies are not migrating away from MS Windows is that the cost of moving to another platform is too high. First of all, this is a one time cost and you need support for MS Windows desktops just as well.
Secondly, nobody ever calculates the cost of all the extra software you need to install onto it to keep MS Windows secure, neither does anybody keep in mind the huge cost and public image loss associated with a security problem in your company. And the fact is they will happen despite all the extra security thrown on top of MS Windows.
Ofcourse Google will have it easier then certain other companies who have a lot of MicroSoft services running in their org, which most probably will not work decently on other OS/browser combinations besides MS Windows+IE (simply think Sharepoint or certain Office documents). However that is not a reason to keep paying MS-tax or leaving your company open for potential high security related costs.