"[..] but the delight and pride of Aule is in the deed of making, and in the thing made, and neither in possession nor in his own mastery; wherefore he gives and hoards not, and is free from care, passing ever on to some new work."
J.R.R.T., Ainulindale (Silmarillion)

visiting Java Specialists Symposium

I am really exited and looking forward to attending the Java Specialists Symposium (http://bit.ly/JSR2011) on Crete end of August.

Wireless cable

Have you ever considered to purchase a wireless cable?

Me twice ;)

The first time it was in the middle of 90s, when wireless technology started booming. I went to a shop and wanted to upgrade to the new technology… wanted the freedom to use my laptop in leaving room, on balcony or even in the garden - and be connected to my small network … so I needed an access point (11MBit was the fastest one) and PCMCIA wireless network card for the laptop (USB was not invented yet)

So in the shop I was very distracted to see the price for this both pieces… around 500$. so I was checking the pros and contra… and turned around and saw a 20m Cat5 Network cable.... for just about 10$. So I had the full freedom I wanted and all my friends named that cable the wireless cable ;)

The second time I purchased a wireless cable, it was just this summer on my vacations. Wifi was provided at the reception … but I figured out that just 10cm outside of the window of my room there is also a very good wifi signal and do not need to go downstairs ...

But it is not very comfortable always staying near the window and holding the laptop outside of the window ..

As I have always an USB wireless network adapter with me .. I just bought a 3m USB cable and placed the wifi adapter ouside of the window and had internet access very comfortable from the couch… this is my second wireless cable ;)

Happy New Year

Happy new Year!

It's been a long time since the last post. But I was very busy with my daily job and there was not that much worth a post.

For 2011 I already started a lot of new projects mostly related to FS20 and home automation:

• FS20 Liquid Level Sensor
• FS20 Magnet Ventil Controller
• MoodLamp
• Xbee

A lots to do. The first ordered parts for XBee and liquid level sensor will arrive in the next week. So I will start first experiments very soon. Hope I will have the required time for this projects.

Doing Java Development work…

I am at the moment developing some web service interfaces for a client. I decided to use spring and spring ws.

As the service consumer is a SAP system and they have special requirements regarding the schema and wsdl, I prefered the contract first idea.

Dealing with spring ws with annotated endpoint and jaxb marshaling was easy. I came across some issues considering timezone and daylight saving. (see Hacks around XMLGregorianCalendar).

I am going to publish some ideas / concepts around the development as the team is right now not aware of fancy enum concepts, staging configuration, etc.

Gardena FS20-Modul finalised

Finaly I managed to finalize the prototype development and firmware programming for GardenaBodenfeuchteSensorFS20Modul.

Comments welcome (maz @ amazers . net).

Hardware Projects

As there is now a bit more time for hardware experiments, I again started several microcontroller based hardware projects. I prefer the Atmel AVR microcontrollers as they are cheap, powerful and have several neaty features.

EIB / home automation

I am planing to build a new house, intended to be a "smart" energy efficient house. So I am planing to have EIB for home automation as this standard is the most promising available standard right now. There are a huge set of components already in place. But it is a bit prizy :(. I hope that the energy efficiency achieved with the bus and the convenience will justify the effort.

I build a test board for EIB-evaluation and testing. Have a look at this youtube video

Furthermore I played a bit with this device FUL and tried to establish a new firmware beeing able to send telegrams to the bus. Unfortunately my development FUL's transmitter seems to be broken and it is only able to receive the telegrams. I was also expecting to develop kind of EIB components (switch actors, sensors, etc.) But it seems that the components are not that much demanded and busware is at the moment not working on EIB-tools.

FS20 Moduls

Already in the last year I developed an automatized watering system radio based FS20 system for my garden using also rain barrels. So I can start the watering sequence on browser (fhem) by just one click.

Following two sensors are missing:

• humidity sensor to automatically decide if a watering is needed
• rain barrel empty sensor to decide if water should be taken from water tap or from the rain barrel.

Fortunately Gardena has a soil humidity sensor for their system. So I started to develop a modul to send the sensor results on FS20 radio system. Have a look on GardenaBodenfeuchteSensorFS20Modul

With a slightly changed circuit and firmware also the rain barrel empty sensor will be realised.

Fixing corrupted win2k registry with winXP

Last week end a friend called me for help. The installed Windows 2000 showed a blue screen after boot saying that system32/config/software is no more readable. After some seconds system reboots again and again ending up at the blue screen.

This file is the windows registry containing HKEY_LOCALMASHINE/Software hive. Bad news. Without this hive all software settings are lost and you have to reinstall all kind of software. lucky who has a recent backup.

the backup we had was two years old. Worthless :(

Lookin around and searching the web many useless commercial tools came up. Most of them stating beeing capable of fixing corrupting files… But requiring a running system. What a heck..

at the end I came across a blog entry having the right answers .... unfortunately I lost the track and am not able to remember the URL. i would loved it to mention this fine dude.

the point is just boot a knoppix LiveCD , mount the filesystem and copy the file via FTP or another way to a mashine running Windows XP. winXP regedit is able to attach the file as a new hive. During loading it will detect that the file is corrupt and automatically recover it. A messagebox informs the user. Just copy the file back (do not forget to detach the hive from the registry7. and everything is fine again.

Yeah and do not forget a backup at least once aa month… you never know....

Welcome back

After some hard drive crashes this site is again online. Thus this time it is maintened within a professional data center, I hope not losing again all the data.

This site is about to gather useful informations and experiences made by me or by friends of mine for future use.

Comments welcome.