beyond blog

“Star Wars: The Old Republic”

Dirk Rademann — Thu, 21 Jul 2011 17:38:13 +0000

Today I got the email from Amazon that “Star Wars: The Old Republic” (SWTOR) is ready to be pre-ordered. What can I say, I ordered it.

It’s a long time since I last played a MMORPG and my plan was not to play online again. I played Ultima Online (Hail ERC on Europa!) and I had my Jedi in Star Wars Galaxies. Some day I got fed up with the way SWG changed and left for good. But now … SWTOR looks promising, and I’m a big fan of Star Wars. So, a look I shall have! :-)

see Star Wars: The Old Republic

Paintings …

Dirk Rademann — Sat, 27 Mar 2010 21:32:06 +0000

Many programs are able to turn a real photo into a painting-like picture. The results are usually more or less good. But recently I found a nice piece of software that does a little more.

Dynamic Auto-Painter created by Mediachance uses a picture, be it a photo or some graphics, as template to draw on a canvas. You can choose from many different paint styles, change a few parameters, and the rest almost happens automatically. The styles include Aquarell, Pencil and even many inspired by real painters like Monet or Klimt.

Here’s an example. First the original photo I used.

A Door, the original photo, Tuscany, Italy.

And the painting created by using the style FeltTip with more than 1.000.000 paint strokes.

A Door, Tuscany, Italy.

I love this. If you want to try by yourself there’s a trial version available. Have fun.

“Internal Error during Item Filtering”

Dirk Rademann — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 12:58:36 +0000

If you ever get the following error message while using the Eclipse IDE
An internal error occurred during: "Items filtering". Class file name must end with .class
if you ie. try to use the “Open Type…” dialog, then the following solution might help.

close the IDE
find the /.metadata/.plugins/org.eclipse.jdt.core/ folder and delete all *.index files
in the same folder, also delete the file savedIndexNames.txt
start the Eclipse

Everything should be working again. The error message was most likely caused by a corrupt index file.

Happy New Year!

Dirk Rademann — Wed, 06 Jan 2010 17:48:17 +0000

There we are, Happy New Year and welcome 2010!

We spent the days in Denmark with some friends at the North Sea. It has been some nice days even though I was a little sick. The weather was cold but many times the sun was shining so we could go for a walk.

I didn’t take many photos but I put some work into the few of them. You can find them in my little gallery.

How to change the Send-To menu in Windows 7

Dirk Rademann — Sat, 07 Nov 2009 00:37:49 +0000

It’s a bit difficult to change the Send-To in Windows 7 because the folder where the links are stored is slightly hidden. But there’s a shortcut.

Simply enter shell:sendto in the address bar (where the current path is displayed) of a Windows Explorer window or in the “Run…” dialog to jump to the folder where the links are stored. Here you can add new links as you want or delete/edit existing ones.

How to change the Windows 7 logon background

Dirk Rademann — Sat, 07 Nov 2009 00:12:07 +0000

In Windows 7 you can change the background image of the logon screen without any 3rd party programs or dirty hacks. Here’s a detailed description how to do it. Enjoy.

Open search result in a new Explorer window

Dirk Rademann — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 20:13:42 +0000

My wife was missing a functionality in Windows 7 she used in XP previously. After you executed a Windows Explorer search (top-right search box) you get the results. Now in XP you had an option in the context menu to open the parent folder of the found file. Choosing this option opened a new Explorer window showing the given folder.

Now in Windows 7 there’s a similar option, Open Path (something like this, “Dateipfad öffnen” in my german version). If you choose this option the folder will be opened as above but in the same window. Now the trick, to get the resulting folder opened in a new window, it to hold down the Shift key while clicking the context menu option. That’s it.

BurnAware Free

Dirk Rademann — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 15:06:07 +0000

I was looking for software that makes burning of CDs and DVDs a bit more comfortable. It should be easy to use and should be able to save the file compilations. Just basic requirements, and not more. Not a huge software package where I have no need for half of its features.

I tried around half a dozen programs and there was always something I disliked. Finally I came across BurnAware. It’s easy to use and does what it’s supposed to do and not more.

And it’s free!

So far I found only one thing I dislike. It seems you can’t save the file list of Audio CDs. While you can save MP3/data file lists, for Audio CDs there are simply the menu items missing …

Hibernate Logging

Dirk Rademann — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 08:56:30 +0000

I came across one thing about Hibernate and its logging of SQL statements to the console. I was working on some old code which still uses Hibernate 2.x and I was pretty annoyed that Hibernate always logs the SQL statements to System.out if you set the hibernate.show_sql property to true.

But Hibernate can do better. It also logs the SQL statements to the logging framework of your choice, you just have to enable the right logging category, ie. in log4j.properties:

log4j.logger.org.hibernate.SQL=DEBUG

or for older versions

log4j.logger.net.sf.hibernate.SQL=DEBUG

Now Hibernate will log the SQL statements to your favourite log file (or what you set up) so you can scroll unhurriedly through the millions of statements that were let loose ;-)

Welcome!

Dirk Rademann — Sun, 28 Jun 2009 20:40:20 +0000

Hello and welcome to my blog!

No, I’m not Kermit, but ain’t he great? :-)
Thanks to Jim Henson!

Anyway… I got the WordPress package uploaded and installed, even if it was a bit tricky. If you ever upload WordPress via Expression Web, you should disable the “Optimize HTML on upload” option. Otherwise you’ll get errors like “unexpected $end tag”. Now it works, most of it is configured and I hope you enjoy it and might find some valuable information here every now and then …