2021
Jekyll Reloaded
It’s now two years since Jekyll 4.0 has been released. The release fosters several build performance improvements, but sadly GitHub Pages remains at Jekyll 3.9 and there is no willingness to update. In addition, compiling this site locally became an increasing problem after my Arch Linux workstation was upgraded to the Ruby 3.0 release. This post explains how to ditch GitHub Pages automatic Jekyll compilation and use GitHub Actions instead.
Enabling S3 Sleep on Dell XPS 13 (7390 2-in-1)
I hate when things that used to work no longer do and this especially holds for the basic stuff. When I got my new Dell XPS 13 (7390 2-in-1) is was really frustrated by the modern standby implementation it uses by default. This post explains briefly how to re-enable legacy—but reliable—standby on this and likely other laptop models to prevent overheating.
2020
Hacking a ZTE ZXDSL-931VII Router
Recently I got my hands on an old ZTE ZXDSL-931VII router that I grabbed after it had been ditched – it’s always fun to play with old hardware from time to time. In this post I’ll shortly outline some of the security issues of the device like extracting login data and obtaining a root shell.
2019
Site Relaunch
I was a bit too optimistic when I announced the “Beta Launch” of this site – almost 8 years ago! Since then I had several ideas of blog posts and content to put on the site, but simply never found the time to finish it. Until now! I decided to start all over a again and can finally announce the “first” (not final!) release of my personal place on the web.
2018
Shrinking the Size of our Teamscale Docker Image
In this post on my company’s blog I present the steps we took to cut our product Docker images in half—from over 1GB down to under 500MB. It outlines some common pitfalls when working with Docker images and shows some tricks of dealing with required third party dependencies.
Freedoms of working at CQSE
I often get asked by friends why I stick working at CQSE for almost six years now. One reason simply is that I’m quite free in arranging my workday in a way that it fits for me. Hence, I’ve recapitulated a (not so typical) workday on my company’s blog that illustrates the benefits and freedoms of working at CQSE.
2017
Our Journey to GIT—One year later
The migration of our code hosting from Subversion to Git enabled us to scale and professionalize our development process. This post on my company’s blog sheds some light on changes the migration allowed (or forced) us to perform.
2016
Our Journey to GIT
This post on my company’s blog summarizes the the hurdles I had to take when migrating our code hosting from Subversion to Git: I had to combine the history of several Subversion repositories into one large Git repository and cleaning history from unneeded and big files. Oh—I also had to find an alternate solution for these cursed svn:exterenal links.
Lessons from Code Reviews in the Wild (part 2): Get rid of unnecessary code
This is the second post of two posts concerning code reviews on my company’s blog. This time I emphasis on one of the benefits of code reviews: Getting rid of unnecessary code.
2015
Lessons from Code Reviews in the Wild (part 1): There is no exhaustive Review Checklist
This is the first post of two posts concerning code reviews on my company’s blog. I’m motivating why code reviews are an essential part of our daily work (also besides code) and then giving some insights why there is no exhaustive review checklist—a question I often got asked at customers when introducing peer reviews.
Is Your Build Ready for Continuous Deployment? A Large-Scale Benchmark of Cloning in Build Systems
My first post on my company’s blog concerns a benchmark regarding redundancy in build (continuous integration) systems. It is the result of a scientific study I performed together with Shane McIntosh. In addition, it outlines the achievements of refactoring a large-scale build infrastructure of one of our customers.
2012
Best album of 2011
2011 was a year with quite a few album releases, so I asked myself recently which one I like most. The descision is not easy since I grabbed CDs from different metal genres, but let’s see…
Santa brought… a Galaxy Nexus
Dunno whether I have been naughty or nice, but Santa decided to put a Google Galaxy Nexus under our christmas tree. Till then I have played with the phone for almost two weeks so I can give a short evaluation and comparison to my old Motorola Milestone (Droid).
2011
mpdeimos.com - Beta Launch
The time has come – mpdeimos.com finally gets a web presentation! Almost 2 years after I’ve grabbed the domain and some controversial ideas of what to do with it I have decided to start with a simple Jekyll-powered blog.
Merge GIT repositories
When it comes to version control I am more and more convinced by Git and it’s superb branching model. Lately I was confronted with the need to merge two GIT repositories. Per se this should not be difficult, but if the commit history should be preserved it might become a bit tricky! This article explains an easy way to do this without the help of any third party tools.
Switch to Ubuntu
Today marks the release of the all new Ubuntu 11.04. And it marks a new OS experience for me: I’m actually moving from Windows to the Linux—after 12 years of happy Windows computing.
2010
Xubuntu 10.4 on Eee PC 701
Last Sunday I was quite bored, so I decided to update my Eee PC 701/4G to the fresh Xubuntu 10.4 release. The reason for the update mainly was that I still got stuck with Xubuntu 8.10 (with patched Kernel files and so on…) and Canonical will drop updates for this release soon. Thus a fresh install seemed to be the best way.
Setup Bazaar Version Control via FTP with multiple users
Have you ever been in need to setup a cheap Version Control System? Well, there are plenty of free alternatives out in the web that offer this service for free. GitHub, GoogleCode and SourceForge being the most popular ones. But all of them have one disadvantage: They require you to publish the code to the wild and release it under an open source license. This may not be a problem if you are releasing the source of your software anyways, but sometimes you might feel “I’m not ready to publish the code” or “This project is commercial, I cannot offer the source on the web.”.
2009
Stratovarius - Polaris (2009)
For a long time the future of Stratovarius was unclear. But after ex-guitarist Timo Tolkki agreed that the remaining members can continue under the old name, the songwriting begun and Timo Tolkki was replaced by Matias Kupiainen. But with Tolkki as long term member and guitarist/songwriter a person left who gave the band a face. Will the new album be different—maybe like Kotipelto’s solo project?
Jorn Lande - Spirit Black (2009)
Just one year after his last studio album Lonely are the Brave Jorn releases another rocking studio album. So if you think this will just be a mainstream album because of the short time it took to be produced, you are wrong.