Samsung Galaxy Nexus OTA Update from Android 4.1.1 to 4.1.2 and keeping root

A few days ago my carrier rolled out the OTA Android Update 4.1.2.
I didn't want to lose root on my Samsung Galaxy Nexus after updating from 4.1.1 to the new 4.1.2 release and I installed OTA RootKeeper from Google Play.
The important step is to install and run RootKeeper before you do the update. Instructions on how to use RootKeeper can be found here.
This should work at least for the Samsung Galaxy Nexus running Android 4.1.2 without a custom recovery image.
After updating to the new Android version and rebooting your phone you have to start RootKeeper again to reactivate root. All you have to do is to select Restore Root and your phone is rooted again.

Grub error 17 and a possible solution

Taken from this forum post.

Give this a try if you are getting grub rescue:

1. At grub>. enter these commands

   find /boot/grub/stage1
   

   This will return a location. If you have more than one, select the installation that you want to provide the grub files.
2. This is important: what was returned for the find command use it in the next line for the "?" -

   root (hd?,?)
   

   Again use the value from the find command i.e. if find returned (hd0,1) then you would enter root (hd0,1)
3. Next enter the command to install grub to the mbr

   setup (hd0)
   

4. Finally exit the grub shell

   quit
   

Now you are done. Reboot the machine.

---

Another option is to run this command:

grub-install /dev/hda

If you don't have grub rescue:

1. Try booting from a live CD
2. In case Live CD doesn't have package "grub" install it first (eg. sudo apt-get install grub)
3. Take a look at your partition table: sudo fdisk -l
   /dev/sda5            1276        1397      979902   82  Linux swap / Solaris
   /dev/sda6            1398        2550     9261441   83  Linux
4. In this case grub should be installed on /dev/sda6 (in grub this is hd0,5).
   NOTE: Every device in grub starts with "hd", even if it's a SATA device.
5. Type in the following in a shell:

 sudo grub  
 grub > root (hd0,5)  
 grub > setup (hd0)  
 grub > quit  

6. More infos can be found in this article.

In Virtualbox einen bootbaren USB Stick starten

Virtualbox unterstützt das Booten von Gastsystemen von einem USB Stick nicht out-of-the-box.
Mit dem hier beschriebenen Trick geht es aber doch.

Zusammengefasst:

Schritt 1:

In Windows die Datenträgerverwaltung starten und den USB Stick identifizieren:

Im Bild ist das Laufwerk I.

Laufwerk I hat die laufende Nummer 3 (Datenträger 3 im obigen Bild)

Schritt 2:

Jetzt in einer Kommandozeile in das Installationsverzeichnis von VirtualBox wechseln und folgenden Befehl eingeben:

 VBoxManage.exe internalcommands createrawvmdk -filename "G:\VirtualBox\usb-stick.vmdk" -rawdisk \\.\PhysicalDrive3  

Entscheidend ist hier der letzte Parameter "rawdisk". Hier wird das physikalische Laufwerk mit der Nummer angegeben, die in der Datenträgerverwaltung (siehe Schritt 1) identifiziert wurde.
In diesem Beispiel ist das die Nummer 3.
Der Parameter "filename" gibt an, wo die vmdk Datei auf dem Dateisystem abgelegt werden soll.

Schritt 3:

Jetzt kann VirtualBox als Admin gestartet werden und in der Konfiguratoin der Massenspeicher die gerade erzeugte Datei usb-stick.vmdk hinzugefügt werden.
Idealerweise als erstes Gerät damit auch direkt davon gebootet wird.

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.