log4p

Instead of the ‘my printer won’t work on linux’ story I actually discovered something neat today when trying to print on the HP Color Laserjet 4600. By running nmap to view to open ports on the network printer I noticed port 21 (ftp) to be open.

I ftp’ed into the printer, and was able to see the print queue by listing the directory. Uploading a postscript document directly into the queue directory made the printer print it.

No installation needed, at al….

I googled arround a bit to discover the supported formats, couldn’t find them… but I found a page on printer hacking:

http://www.irongeek.com/i.php?page=security/networkprinterhacking

They actually make a sport out of everything these days

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Today we visited the museum of Hilversum to see the exhibition about architects of the first half of the 20th century. Really interesting to see the influences of Frank Lloyd Wright on Dutch architects like J. Wils, J.J.P. Oud, H.Th. Wijdeveld and W. M. Dudok demonstrated by analyzing buildings I pass every day.

The exhibition featured some really nice maquettes. The maquette of Wright’s Falling Waters
was particularly nice… In the book I’m reading at the moment (‘Endymion‘ from the Hyperion series) the main characters actually stay at falling waters for a while; nice to see what it really looks like.

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At the moment I’m building a couple of prototypes meant to be used as proof-of-concepts for the current project.

Part of the concept I’m trying to proof is the fact that it is possible to build framework independent applications on top of MMBase .

The prototypes use Spring to wire stuff together, the integration with MMBase was done by writing a superclass called MMBaseDAOSupport which is quite similar to springs’ Hibernate DAO support. The similarity is so close that the prototype allows swapping MMBase and Spring on configuration level; ideal for comparing solutions!

Part of the concept is the exposure of objects in the mmbase cloud to javascript by using DWR (direct web remoting); using DWRs’ Spring bindings made doing this really easy.
If I’m finished benchmarking and analyzing the prototypes I’ll probable write an in-depth post explaining what I had to do to get it to work!

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Stumbled upon a nice little game called Roman Rumble:

I only managed to reach level 3 and get 370 points yet… but hey, the music is cool

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The last couple of days I started working at the ‘Mediapark’ in Hilversum, which is about 10 minutes from my house by bicycle. I’ll be upgrading the 3voor12 site (mmbase) with all sorts of nice features.  The people at 3voor12 are really nice, and actually most development workstations run (k)ubuntu or OSX, superb!

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A new crustacean (= schaaldier) that resembles a lobster has been discovered:

source: cnn / bbc
The decapod crustacean has very long fur along its pincers and is white in colour. It has been placed in a new family called the Kiwaidae, and it is currently the only known representative.

I think it looks really nice, something you would expect in a SCIFI movie! What I actually don’t understand is how the discovery of a single example is enough to call it a new species…. makes me wonder about stuff like mutation.
A hairy detail in the cnn article:

The animal is white and 15 centimeters (5.9 inches) long — about the size of a salad plate.

Wrong equation in the wrong place IMHO.

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My weblog seems to attract people from the other side of the globe:

http://d.hatena.ne.jp/sakamoto_yuki

Can’t really read what is written, maybe not to positive at all… but hey, I’m being noticed

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The book on agile development which I bought a couple of months ago has a chapter on Model Driven Architecture (MDA). The examples featured AndroMDA.

Since the moment I first read about it I knew I had to try it, but till now I didn’t really have time to investigate it. But now, at the start of my new project I decided to give it a go; since the model of the project will probably have to evolve in a couple of iterations. Apart from the dynamic nature of the model I will probably have to create a couple of different prototypes, with different persistence frameworks.

…

It took me over an hour to discover that the XMI version of my UML editors (Poseidon / MagicDraw) was incompatible (UML2) with AndroMDA (UML1.4). So, I got stuck… for now… until the download of a previous version of MagicDraw is complete. I’ll let you know!

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Today I installed Ubuntu Dapper Drake, basically to see compiz / xgl working on my own laptop. Xgl is an X server architecture layered on top of OpenGL via glitz. Compiz combines together a window manager and a composite manager using OpenGL for rendering. There are a couple of realy nice display effects in compiz like rotating your desktop in 3d, wobbly windows which auto-snap to other windows and stuff like expose on OSX (zooming out + tiling of all active windows).

The following video shows a nice demonstration of all features:

And yes, after about one hour I got it to work… sort of. All features worked exactly as demonstrated in the video… but the system got really unstable. I had a couple of freezes which I could only get out of by forcing hardware shutdown.
I can’t wait to have this functionality in a stable environment!!

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A colleague of mine (disclaimer: he is a Ruby fanatic) mailed me a link to the following video:

(click the image or this link for the video) Although the movie is a bit too java-negative for my taste I found the movie usefull to extend my knowledge on existing frameworks (never heard of turbogears and django before).The speaker actually mentioned the need for using ‘legacy’ databases and tools, but only blamed Rails for not supporting this… I’d really like to see him using Plone on top of a legacy oracle database with complex contraints etc…

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