Root your Galaxy Nexus without unlocking bootloader

Since I bought a Samsung Galaxy Nexus a few weeks ago I was looking for the possibility to root it without unlocking the bootloader or wiping anything.
I don't want to use a custom ROM nor a custom recovery. I just want to get rid of the ads.
Finally someone has found a working solution and posted the instructions in the XDA forum.
I have tried it and now my Nexus is rooted :-)

m2e and generating classes using jaxws-maven-plugin solved

Since m2e 1.0 (Maven integration for Eclipse) developers are complaining about issues with the jaxws-maven-plugin.

See here and here.

The m2e wiki offers documentation describing the issue and proposing solutions. For me, none of those suggestions worked.
The classes were not generated and I had to generate the classes using Maven from the command line and refresh the Eclipse workspace. Since upgrading m2e in my Eclipse 3.7 even that doesn't work anymore.

Googling around I found this project hosted on github solving all problems. After downloading and extracting the projects zip file to my computer I installed the connector plugin in Eclipse using the local directory on my computer as update site.
After restarting Eclipse, updating the Maven project configuration and doing a clean rebuild of the project all sources from the WSDL were generated and the project compiled without errors.

Import von Excel Trainingsaufzeichnungen nach Trainingstagebuch.org

Falls jemand gerätselt haben sollte, wie er seine in Excel (oder OpenOffice) dokumentierten Trainingseinheiten halbwegs automatisiert nach http://trainingstagebuch.org importiert bekommt, sollte sich mal diesen Eintrag in der FAQ von Trainingstagebuch.org durchlesen und das dort hinterlegte Excel Dokument ausprobieren.

Mit OpenOffice oder LibreOffice funktionieren die Makros nicht. Ich hab es dann mit einer bei mir noch vorhandenen Office 2007 Installation geschafft meine alten Daten zu importieren.

Mit ein wenig Handarbeit waren dann in ungefähr 90 Minuten über 400 Einheiten importiert.

Und ich wollte mir schon ein eigenes Import Tool schreiben ...

Copy your Firefox passwords to another Firefox on a different machine

Just in case you are in process of setting up a new machine and installing Firefox you might want to save a little bit of time.
There is a stackoverflow question concerning where Firefox saves its passwords. This information becomes very valuable in case you don't want to enter (and maybe can't remember) each and every password of websites which require authentification.
In my case it works copying the files:

• key3.db
• signons.sqlite

from a Firefox 13 installation under Windows XP to a new Firefox 14 installation under Windows 7 (64 Bit).
I don't say it will work always but this situation is working well.
The above mentioned files are located in your Firefox profile folder.

Go and check out the Eclipse Memory Analyzer in case of OutOfMemory exceptions

I have to mention this great tool once again: The Eclipse Memory Analyzer is an awesome tool to analyze heap dumps and to find problems very fast. Especially the "Leak Suspects" feature is very useful for determining memory leaks in your application.

Confluence Wiki PDF Export and generating a title page

Sometimes you have the requirement to export docs written in Confluence as PDF so customers who don't get access to your wiki can read it.
Often your company has guidelines for publishing documents to the outside (or for customers).
Confluence doesn't generate a title page as default when you do a single page export or a space export as PDF.
This article (sorry, only in german) describes how to achieve this in a few steps.
It only works using the space export to PDF not the single page export.
The author has forgotten to include the CSS styles for the title page so I will publish mine as a starting point.

 .KonzeptTitel {   
 font-size: 36px !important;  
 text-align: center;  
 padding-top: 150px !important;  
 }  
 .KonzeptThema {   
 font-size: 24px !important;  
 text-align: center;  
 padding-top: 100px !important;  
 padding-bottom: 200px !important;  
 }  
 .KonzeptAutor {   
 font-size: 16px !important;  
 text-align: left;  
 }  
 .KonzeptDatum {   
 font-size: 16px !important;  
 text-align: left;  
 }  
 .KonzeptVersion {   
 font-size: 16px !important;  
 text-align: left;  
 }  
 .pdfTitelblattText {   
 font-size: 16px !important;  
 text-align: left;  
 }  

Hope this helps somebody.

SMTP Appender with logback and reducing log messages in email

Logback has some pretty cool features which makes developer life so much easier. Among them is configuring the buffer size of the log messages. Especially in conjunction with error messages delivered by the email appender adjusting the buffer size is very useful.
This blog entry shows you how to configure email alerts with logback and how to reduce the quantity of log messages in the error mail.
The default buffer size for log messages is set to 256 which might scatter your email with too much infos. The example given in the blog reduces the lines to 5 so you will receive only the latest 4 log messages (if logged) previously issued by your application including the error log message.

Using Preferences in Android

I am currently working on an Android app which can be configured by the user through preferences. Everybody who is somehow familiar with configuration dialogs in desktop applications or mobile phone apps knows that those configuration dialogs uses UI controls like checkboxes, radio buttons, list views, etc ...
On my trail through the official Android tutorial I didn't find any docs saying there is an Android preferences API which frees the developer from writing much code to display, read and store those preferences. Maybe I am to blind to find those docs ...
However, I found a few online tutorials which helped me a lot:

• Android Preferences Tutorial
• Android Preferences
• Example of using CheckbBoxPreference
• Android Quick Preferences Tutorial
• Creating a Preference Activity in Android

And of course the Android Preference API is always a good friend :-)

Stevie Ray Vaughan in action with number one

I just love this guy ... unfortunately I never saw him live on stage.

How to flush DNS cache

Sometimes it's good to know how to flush the DNS cache on your Linux or Windows box. Here is how to do it:

Linux

Restart the nscd daemon. In case it is not installed install it first

 apt-get install nscd  

then type the command

 sudo /etc/init.d/nscd restart  

or

 sudo service nscd restart  

There are a few alternatives to flush the DNS cache under Linux. See this blog posting to get a more complete overview.

Windows

Open a command shell and type

 ipconfig /flushdns