Mac OS X: Icons of Apps Disappeared from Launchpad

A Solution for OS X Yosemite and OS X El Capitan as well as older releases like OS X Mavericks

Sometimes it is strange. Suddenly icons of apps are disappearing from the Launchpad. If you open the applications folder in Finder you will see that the apps are still there. What’s going on here?

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Posted in Mac, OS X | Tagged , , , | 3 Comments

Android Studio: What to Exclude While Importing a Project into Subversion?

If you put an Android Studio project under version control with Subversion, you will have to exclude some files from version control. Otherwise you will have local settings in your repository which will not work on other workstations. See what you have to add to Subversion’s ignore list.

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Posted in Android, Android Studio, Subversion, Version control | Tagged , | 2 Comments

OS X: Some Icons Suddenly Disappeared in Finder

Suddenly some icons, not all, disappeared in my Finder on my MacBook.  A restart and clearing the caches could not solve this problem. Fortunately a reinstallation of OS X was not necessary because the solution was so simple… Continue reading

Posted in Mac, Operating systems, OS X | Tagged , , | 1 Comment

OS X: Aquamacs and GNU Emacs — Keyboard Problems on the Mac

If you are — like I — one of those strange people who are not using a keyboard with US layout on a Mac, you might encounter a real problem while using the apps Aquamacs and GNU Emacs on OS X. Depending on your keyboard layout, you might not be able to enter special characters like  [, ], |, {, }, and @. The reason is that Apple’s alt/option key is used as meta key in Aquamacs and GNU Emacs. Here are two solutions which will solve this problem.
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Posted in Emacs, Mac, OS X | Tagged , , , , , | 4 Comments

WebSphere Application Server: Jython Throws an IOException While Accessing Environment Variables

If you try to access an environment variable via Jython’s os.environ in wsadmin of WebSphere AS and you are on the “wrong” Windows release you will get an IOException telling you “Cannot run program “sh”: CreateProcess error=2, The system cannot find the file specified.”. On a Unix or Linux system running the same script in wsadmin you won’t have any problems. A strange situation caused by Jython, not by WebSphere itself. — Here you will see why and you will find a solution.

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Posted in Java, Java EE, Jython, Programming, Python, WebSphere AS, Windows | Tagged , , | 5 Comments

ownCloud and Baikal: Problems Loading ICS Files into Calendar

When I tried to load an exported ICS file into Baikal’s calendar I encountered fatal problems. Most of the appointments could not be loaded. A similar problem occurred in conjunction with ownCloud’s calendar. The uploaded ICS file did not follow the icalendar/vcard format, ownCloud reported in its log. I found out that the problematic events in the ICS file were containing properties brought in by invitations generated by Lotus Notes. The reason why Baikal and ownClound could not deal with them was finally found easily. Both products, ownCloud and Baikal, are using SabreDAV for implementing their CalDAV functionality. SabreDAV applies strictly the iCalendar specification (RFC 2445) while parsing ICS files. Unfortunately extensions by Notes or Outlook might be problematic. This default behavior of “strict applying of the specification” can be changed. A simple change of a default parameter setting worked fine for me in Baikal as well as in ownCloud. Continue reading

Posted in Cloud, PHP | Tagged , , , , , , , , | 4 Comments

Renaming a Linux Volume Group Containing the Root File System

Not often, but sometimes you find yourself in situations where you have to rename a volume group on Linux. You have a base image in a virtualization platform, for example. You clone it and you realize that your preferred Linux distribution used the hostname of the original image for a volume group’s name. Your perfectionism and your sense of order don’t allow it that your new machine’s volume group is based on another machine’s hostname. Time to rename! — But there is the root file system on it. How to do it? Continue reading

Posted in Linux, Operating systems, Virtualization | Tagged , , , , | 3 Comments

NetBeans 7.4 and Subversion CLI – a Problematic Couple with Self-signed Certificates

On my Windows PC my primary tool for accessing subversion repositories is TortoiseSVN. A while ago I updated to TortoiseSVN 1.8.4. This version of TortoiseSVN is based upon Subversion 1.8. So I migrated all my working copies from SVN 1.7 to 1.8. So far, so good.

Unfortunately later I realized that SvnKit in NetBeans 7.4 is still based on Subversion 1.7 and no update to 1.8 is available by now. So SvnKit started telling me “sorry, SvnKit is too old to work together with your SVN working copy”. No problem, I thought. I switched to command line tools (CLI) as mentioned by SvnKit. All went good, except for repositories via HTTPS using SSL/TLS certificates signed by an internal root-CA and self-signed certificates respectively. Continue reading

Posted in IDE, NetBeans, Subversion, Version control | Tagged , , , | 4 Comments

Object-oriented implementation of RSA in PHP

With this blog post I release an object-oriented PHP implementation of the RSA public key algorithm. The implementation is based on Edsko de Vries’ non-object-oriented implementation. Additionally to the object-orientation I reimplemented the signature methods which are now based on encrypted hashes instead of encrypting the whole message. This post shows you how to use this cryptographic PHP module, called rsa4php, and where to download it. Feel free to use it in your own programs under the terms of the GNU General Public Licence (GPL). Continue reading

Posted in Cryptographic algorithm, Cryptography, PHP, Programming, RSA | Tagged , , , | 6 Comments

Display UIC on OpenVMS as easy as id on Unix and Linux

On Unix it is easy to get your numeric UID and the GIDs of your primary group and secondary groups. You call the program id simply. On OpenVMS it is not such easy to retrieve your numeric UIC which is OpenVMS’s equivalent to Unix’ UID and GID. With a bit DCL magic you can write a command procedure which tells you the UIC as easy as id tells you your UID and GID on Unix. By programming this little command procedure you will also get introduced to lexical functions in DCL. Continue reading

Posted in DCL, OpenVMS | Tagged , | 2 Comments