New Software Project

3 years silence and now two posts within an hours, well thats an improvement...
Last night I opened a new sourceforge project (Simulation Interconnect Bus) in order to have a repository for my code as it seems, what I've started a couple of days ago might take a bit more time and I can code while travelling as well. But what is what I've started? Lets go back a bit in time.

A long time ago I bought the Enemey Engaged: Apache vs Havoc and the Enemey Engaged: Comanche vs Hokum (EECH) helicopter simulators and spent quite some time with it. Over the years, although being a bit outdated from a technical perspective, a fine community extended the simulator with various options including exporting the MFDs to a second monitor and telemtry data over the DeviceLink protocol of IL-2 Stormovik.

Jumping to year 2013, where I was about to trashed my 8 years old notebook when I had the idea to take it apart and see what components I could use from it. I extracted the panel, bough a controler board on ebay to make a standalone monitor out of it.

Over some evenings in the basement, I build my first and simple homemade cockpit from the panel and the Thrustmaster Cougar MFD frames. With that panel I was able to use the old laptop panel as a second monitor to display the EECH MFDs.

A couple of weeks later I bought the Digital Combat Simulator series (DCS) and while learning how to fly I also tested varios community-build extensions. On of this extension was Helios, a tool to build your own virtual cockpits with gauges, panel lights and buttons that is able to connect to the DCS so that you have all you telemetry on a second or third screen. Of course my simple home-made cockpit was the major target for the exported gauges.

A couple of days ago I tested the Helios in combination with EECH. Although not natively supported, I was able to "label" the programmed MFD buttons as overlays on the screen (making it easier to remember what the buttons actually do) and mapped some actions of the programmable joystick to info-panel light of helios. The result was a much more comprehensive overview of the current flight situation and improved controls.

But I also wanted to have the telemetry data on the second screen. So I investigated a bit more and came across some supported interface in Helios called "EOS Bus". The EOS Bus and its protocol was intended to connect external electronic boards like Arduino via Serial Bus to Helios in order to map external switches, controls and indicator leds to event in Helios respectively the Simulation. So the idea came up to build a bridge between the UDP based DeviceLink protocol used by EECH (EECH CommServer) and the Serial Bus based communication of the EOS and Helios and this was the hour of birth of this project.

Long time no write

It's been a while since I posted something into this blog. A lot of things happened since back then. To make it short, I quit my job at IBM due to total absence of projects, got married, became father, started working at a swiss bank, became father again, left the bank and now I am working for a small company doing consulting in the Enterprise Content Management area. So if any of my readers (if there are any?) will expect some more postings regarding Lotus Connections or any other Lotus software (well, hope dies last)... I recommend to look somewhere else.

I intend to revive this blog and write more about what I do in private life and less what I do at work, but nevertheless I hope it might still be interessting to someone although the target group might change a bit. My recent activities regarding hobbies have been around flight simulation and home-cockpit building, although I focus less on the physical cockpit part and more on the virtual parts running on the pc.

The Gathering in Pratteln, 02/10/10

Last week I was in Pratteln (CH) watching The Gathering touring with their latest album The West Pole. I've been following this band since I was 16. Back then they made sort of Gothic Metal (starting with Death Metal on their earlier releases) and in the following years they developed their style to something they call "Trip Rock", a mix of Trip Hop and Rock, quite melancholic and gloomy, but still rock. After their last album their former singer Anneke van Giersbergen left the band in 2007 starting a solo career with Agua de Annique, leaving the band without a charismatic singer. And I must admit, they found a real good successor for Anneke in Silje Wergeland from Norway. I was positively surprised, she did a pretty good performance even on the old songs. All in all I think she fits perfectly into this likable, natural, down-to-earth group of great musicians. And of course I got another band item for my garderobe - a new hoodie - and a signed poster for home office :)



See this video from the show, playing the very first song from my first The Gathing album "Nighttime Birds"

Installing Lotus Quickr on Ubuntu Linux Server 9.10

The installation of Lotus Quickr Services for WebSphere Portal includes an installation of DB2. Installing Quickr on an out-of-the-box installation of Ubuntu will fail due to a missing C++ library. The DB2 service requires a standard C++ library in version 5. Ubuntu Linux 9.10 includes version 6 of that library. In order to install Quickr 8.1.1 on a Ubuntu 9.10 system, you have to manually install the required library from an older release. You can find the package in the Debian package repository

. Download the .deb file from the repository and install it by issuing the following command as superuser

dpkg -i libstdc++5_3.3.6-18_i386.deb

The next issue I stumbled upon was during the creation of the was profile. The default shell of Ubuntu Linux is /bin/sh which does not support arrays and therefore a call to wsadmin.sh during the profile creation fails. I found this blog entry that describes how to solve this. You have to unlink /bin/sh, link it to bash and do a reconfigure. Enter the following commands as superuser:

unlink /bin/sh
ln -s /bin/bash /bin/sh

or

dpkg-reconfigure dash

Finally, after the installation is complete, you have to change the default shell for the created DB2 instance user for Quickr (i.e. quickradm), which is set to /bin/sh. Using this shell won't properly initialize the db2 environment when running the db2profile script. You should change the shell to bash, otherwise commands like db2stop and db2start won't be accessible. To change the default shell, edit as superuser the file /etc/passwd, look for the quickr users (usually in the end), and change the /bin/sh to /bin/bash.

"Plane attack prevented by disarming Swiss Cheese Bomber"

It's a ridiculous story that happend to me yesterday. I intended to visit my mother who lives near Hamburg for the 1st advent, I bought a gift for her, as I live now in Switzerland, what is more obvious than bringing some Swiss presents so I bought a complete Swiss Fondue Set, including forks, heater, a big cheese-pot and some dishes and - of course - 1.5kg of Swiss Fondue Cheese (and also some flour for making fresh bread). All our suitcases where full (mine and that of my girlfriend) so we decided to carry the present in our hand luggage. Of course we had to pass security and we where already quite late at the airport. But at the security x-ray scanner we had two findings. One was the flour in my bag pack (scary, huh?) and the other was - you might already guess - the 1.5kg Swiss fondue cheese. Ok, you might think, it was found, considered harmless and that's all about it. But no way! The security officer told me, that this chunk of cheese is considered as liquid (!) and we where not allowed to take it on board. I thought they were kidding, but they weren't, they argued, that it contains wine - which is alcohol - and inflammable. Yes, of course, how could I forget, most of all fire accidents happen due to exploding wine bottles. They said, if I would have some time I could check it in as normal luggae (how normal is it to check in a separate chunk of cheese?). But anyway, we could not take it with us and had to leave it. My girlfriend wished them a nice fondue party and they told us they had to destroy it anyway. The fresh, new, sealed and unused chunk of cheese.
I mean, how stupid is this liquid policy? What's more obvious than carry some cheese when carrying a complete fondue set? Everyone saw it - even the security officers saw it, they looked pretty helpless explaining to us, why a chunk of cheese is a threat. Around 8mio swiss people knew that such a chunk of cheese causes if ever then most likely a bilious attack - but not a plane attack. This has nothing to do with common sense. This has even nothing to do with security or terror prevention. How could liquids in general and a chunk of cheese in special help hijacking a plane? I mean, if it's really a bomb, then the plane just explodes and that's it, you could not fly an exploding plane into a skyscraper, and it's way more easier to get a bomb into a train and blow an entire main station out of this world then getting a chunk of cheese on board of a plane. This is pure stupid, made by people that are not affected. This reminds me of former times, when the soviet central government dictated, what famers had to plant - regardless if farmers complained that the plants are not growing in that region (as I've read in the Occupation museum in Riga).
Stop stupidity and start thinking again!

Well, in the end, we arrived safe and sound in Hamburg thanks to the security authorities who disarmed the dangerous swiss-cheese bomber (me). Happy X-mas!

(and the weird end of the story is the fact, that I could easily take 80g of burning paste which was included in the heater-set onboard without noticing and which is much more inflammable than a chunk of cheese...)

Where is the cloud on a sunny day? or Who controls the weathermaker?

Google announced they Releasing the Chromium OS open source project. They focussed on speed, security and easy handling. The entire concept is, that application do not run on the local machine at all but on the cloud, all the data are on the cloud. So much for the theory. Actually I like the idea of access to all my data everywhere and independent from the device with which I access them, but when it comes to the reality I think we are yet pretty far away from "Everything-in-the-cloud". In my oppinion there are two major obstacles to overcome:

1. Seamless and Pervasive access to the Internet. Considering the technical and financial side, this is not yet reality for most of the people. The prices are yet still to high for mobile services - especially when it comes to travelling abroad - unlike the US, Europe consists of lots of more or less small countries where you pay roaming fees - which are quite high when it comes to 24h-web-access. As example (from ordinary mobile telephony): I paid 8€ for a-15mins phone call abroad, and I was called! Looking at the technical side, UMTS has become widely available, though there are situation where you simply have no signal - in mountain regions or in the deep cellars of a customer's computing center. There you still rely on plain old network cables. When it comes to seamless, it's still a pain to switch different network providers or media. Switching from UMTS to WLAN to Cable is still a pain, having to reconnect to different services because of a new IP, lost sessions (MS RDP is my favorite...). And how do you access your data or applications when there are blue skies? When you rely on the accessibility of the Internet you could end up lost in the wilderness - and this is not an artifical problem, when I was in the Sequoia National Park this summer, we had no phone or internet access there but had to find a gas station. We were lucky in the end but consider you navigation system runs on Google! But I think, the technology will evolve and this obstacle evaporate over time. But the other obstacle require more than this.
   
2. Privacy data protection and data security. When I would put all my data and applications that have been running on my local machine into the cloud I would expand my trust domain from my client device to the cloud (or the internet or provider). And this requires a lot of trust! I have control over my local machine, I can pull the plug and preventing access to it. Of course it is in my responsibility to protect and secure my system, but thats ok. But when it comes to the cloud, I have to trust the cloud provider. And when I look at the recent sensitive data infringements that happen in Spain where probably over 100k credit card data sets have been lost I don't want to think about what would happen if the rest of my data would be stolen from the cloud provider! At the moment we trust on the pure goodwill of a company like Google. Sure, their services are yet for free but what's the worth of my private data I put into their hands? I don't even have a formal contract between them! And even if there would be contract and I would pay for using the cloud - how could I be sure to trust the provider? Providers fail, like power, water or internet providers may fail from time to time, those things happen - but it's not just the lost of internet access, light or fresh water for a moment - it may be the loss of your privacy for a longer period than just a moment! A solution for this would be kind of a certification the cloud providers could get from a governmental agency like those for data privacy protection, something similar to those of a Certification Authority. There have to be regulations for systems that deal with private data such as for banks. Before there isn't such thing I can rely on I won't put my private stuff into the cloud (although I have to admit, that I already use gmail - but to be honest that's already more than I feel comfortable with).

Lotus Connections Communities: Enable "Suscribe to ..." as default and hide it

The customer I work for, wants that for all Forum entries a notification is sent as default and the user should not have the possibility to disable this. Though I don't think, this is a good idea but anyway, here is the description how to do this.

The following changes have then been applied to tick the notifications checkboxed by default and hide them in the Web UI:

1. Edit

   Communities.ear/comm.web.war/WEB-INF/forum/views/topicThread.jsp



2. Locate:

   <div id="contentArea" class="lotusLimit">
    <c:if test="${not topic.deleted}">
     <div id="forum" class="lotusForum">
      <div class="lotusMessage lotusHidden"></div>
       <c:if test='${canSubscribe}'>
   



3. set the body content of the innermost tag (c:if) to

   <div class="lotusRight" style="display:none;"> 
   <input id="${subscribeCheckId}" type="checkbox" checked="checked"/> 
   <label for="${subscribeCheckId}"><fmt:message key="label.forum.notify" /></label>
   </div>



4. Edit

   Communities.ear/comm.web.war/javascript/build/dojo/communities.js



5. Locate

   <td><input name=\"subscribe\" dojoAttachPoint=\"subscribeNode\" type=\"checkbox\" id=\"${id}_subscribe\" value=\"true\" ${checkedAttr} />



6. Change to

   <td style="display:none"><input name=\"subscribe\" dojoAttachPoint=\"subscribeNode\" type=\"checkbox\" id=\"${id}_subscribe\" value=\"true\" checked=\"checked\" />

Important: the changes applied to both files are not recommended as they are no official and supported customization option for Lotus Connections!

At first the customer did this by themselves, but they did not hide (display:none) the elements, but removed the first one (in jsp) entirely from the file, without documenting which files have been changed and what was changed. DONT TRY THIS AT HOME!

Always:

1. Create a backup of the files you change


2. Document which file you change


3. Document what you change


4. Avoid modifying the HTML structure by REMOVING elements. Try to hide them instead, either by CSS-Stylesheet (best), style-element (ok) or javascript (last option)