CyanogenMod 7 on Orange Boston (Z71 Variant)

Some time back, to be more precise, when my girlfriend bought herself an iPhone 4, I wanted to see whats possible with my old Android phone: an Orange Boston (Commtiva Z71 Family) and decided to run some custom ROM on there.

Getting Aware Of Password Security

A few days back when Sony's PSN got hacked, everybody should have already thought about how secure their own passwords and data are stored in the net.

Unfortunately I didn't...

Almost Catastrophy (aka. SD-Card not readable)

The last 3 weeks I spent on a very nice vacation in Thailand: It was not just lying on the beach, but also included a trip throughout the north of Thailand with all it sights, temples and other stuff worth seeing. Therefore I had of course my camera with me and made some shots.

Until one day really spoiled my mood: Suddenly the card in the camera seemed to be unreadable. The only message I got was something like: "Card in the slot not readable. Please reinsert the card or format it again".

F***.

My first HDR

Stephansdom HDR, originally uploaded by max.pfandl.

Yesterday I've tried to create my first HDR Picture and went therefore to the Stephansdom in Vienna, which I thought would give me a nice chance to do so.

I didn't do it very professional: I just adjusted the exposure bracketing to -1 and +1 and shot the series. Unfortunately a friend of mine already told me, that you're not allowed to make pictures with tripods in there, so I had to make it handheld which of course made me to use a low aperture and this made it a bit blurry in the out of focus range.

Nevertheless: its my first try and I just wanted to play around with it: the Stephansdom will still be there, when I know what I'm actually doing ;)

For creating the HDR I used Photomatix which is able to work with the Canon RAW Format. It has quite some presets to choose from (from the more "creative" edge to the realistic side) and I just picked the default one.

Unfortunately I used a Version which had some nasty bug and destroyed my EXIF-Information. This should be fixed in the newest version now.

This is the result: hope you like it, but I'm quite shure I can do better than that :)

Exception in a Static Constructor

Some days ago, a coworker of mine had a very nasty bug which no one had a immediate explanation for: The problem was that in his application, he was trying to call a service: usually this worked just fine, but when the service was shut down while he started his tool, his application stopped working even tough the service was started right afterwards again.

After some research and debugging, he found the problem and since nobody in my team actually knew that, I think it's worth a post.

Canon EOS 550D: First Impressions

Some Pics from the first day out with the Canon 550D incl. a 18-55m and a 55-250mm standard lens kit. Mainly just playing around with the manual settings and not using the RAW-Format yet.

Show a Set from Flickr on your Blogger-Blog

As my new camera is arriving soon, I need a way to post pictures without any hustle on this blog.

I have already a Flickr-Account and want to use this as the host of my pictures so I searched for a way to get the pictures from Flickr into this blog and as I didn't want to use the Flash-Gallery Flickr itself offers, my search took a little longer than expected.

Backing-Up a remote DB using Mercurial

I use a virtual server for a small web project. Basically it's just a content-site but still there is a database you have to backup somehow.

Lazy as I am, I wanted to centralize those backups and of course automate them: but using a virtual server, this is not the easiest task.

After some time, and figuring out that the MS Backup won't work for me, I had to find another solution.

Buying a DSLR

For some time now, I play with the thought to buy myself a descent DSLR. Of course there is a very wide range of products on the market and it seems to be quite impossible to decide here.

100th Blog Post

Wow: this is already my 100th Post on this Blog. Since I started it back in 2006, a long time passed by: with ups and downs on the frequency of posting. Mainly downs I have to say.

With the latest switch to Blogger I'm about to work up some stuff which I did the last month (if not even years already...) and never was motivated enough to write about it. Of course this frequency will also stall and I think it will get back to a one post per month rhythm.

Also the blog took a turn into the more technical part of my life: other medias are better used to cover the personal part I think. There still will be also private things covered here, but only occasionally.

Switching the posting-language to english is worth mentioning too: although my mother tongue is german (better said austrian ;) ) it's just easier to write about technical stuff in english: it's not perfect, but I think it should not be a problem to understand it.

If you have any comments about this blog or the direction where it went, feel free to leave it below :)

Web Designers vs. Web Developers

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Hosting Mercurial on a Synology NAS

Some time ago I ditched my subversion and wanted to try out a distributed sourcecontrolsystem. I had the choice between GIT and Mercurial: There is nothing to explain why I chose Mercurial, I just flipped a coin: but since then I'm quite happy with that decision.

Hosting Files for Blogger

In my latest Post, I wanted to publish some simple code-examples and of course I didn't want it to be shown just as text but with some fancy syntax highlighting and copy/paste-able (this works if you double-click on the code, than you get the plaintext-version to copy). Therefore I needed to make some CSS and JS Files available for the blog and my first thought was, just to put them on my little home-server and make them public. On second thought this was not the best idea: my server often has outages and is usually under high load, so to serve the files from there might become a problem somewhen and I tried to find another solution.

.NET WCF Service and ASP.NET Service with JSON

Some month back I wanted to create a simple .NET webservice which was called from JQuery, more precisely via JSON.

By that time, WCF was not a new technology any more: It was already well established and of course my thought was, I will use this technology for creating the service.

Synology NAS: Update DSM 3.0

Since about 2 years I have a Synology NAS (108j) at home and I'm really happy with it. Its a great way of saving my data and also for the main reason I bought it, as a Media-Server, it works perfectly!

A few weeks back, there was a new version of the firmware and after some time, I finally decided to update it. It took me some time to reconfigure my custom stuff (like web server, svn, mercurial, etc) but it was definitely worth it!

There is also one new feature I have to point out in the new version: its the blocking feature for unsuccessful attempts to log on to the NAS.

I activated it just for fun because I actually never thought, there were so many people (or bots) trying to access my NAS: but I was wrong!

Only after a few weeks leaving this feature do its work, I got already 45 IP-Addresses on the Blacklist. After a whois-research I found out, that those addresses are from around the world: so its not a special country you have to take care about: there (wannabe)hackers everywhere!

So if you also have a Synology NAS, I really recommend you to enable this feature: maybe you're not such a "target" as I am, but it's wise to do so anyways.

Switched from Wordpress to Blogger...

After quite some time on a selfhosted Wordpress, I was finally tired of maintaining this stuff and switched to blogger.

Esp. after I found out, that this step was VERY easy! Its not a problem to have your custom Domain for the Blogger Account and importing the Blog from Wordpress also was a nobrainer.

The only Thing you actually need to use to do that is a Blog-Transformertool which can be found here.

What you do is basically export your Wordpress-Blog as XML, Convert the File via the tool mentioned before, change the Links to Resources like Pictures to a new destination and then import it to Blogger again :)

After the Switch I also hope to become more active again with blogging about Software-Development and other stuff.

Spring in Vienna :)

Main Reason for this Post: Microsoft ICE and Microsoft Photosynth: really nicely working together for making such things. Enjoy.

How to make yourself a SDHC-Cardreader

A few weeks ago i bought myself a new camera and didn't save on the available storage (16GB SDHC-Card). The problem was just how to get the Data from the Card to the PC.

Snowboarding Trip

Finally I had time to go snowboarding: It was some time ago, since I made my last attempts to hit the slope. Actually I needed some time to find my snowboard and remove the spiderwebs from it ;).

Timetable for developing WebApps