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Monday, September 26, 2016 • debian displaylink

Getting DisplayLink to work on a fresh installed Debian testing took more time than expected. One reason for this was for sure my lack of knowledge about the output providers infrastructure in xrandr. I was coming from an Ubuntu 14.04 system, where DisplayLink was working more or less stable. After upgrade to Ubuntu 16.04 it still was working, but the internal sound card of my system wasn’t - and sometimes the soundcard of my docking station only was working after a replug. That was the situation, where I thought: A reinstall of the system would be great - and I simply choose Debian, it usually works.

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Monday, August 29, 2016 • cryptography java ssl

If you want to use public key encryption, you’ll need public and private keys in some format. OpenSSL and many other tools can generate such key pairs as well as java. However, if it comes to interoperability between these tools, you’ll need to be a bit careful. This post shows, how to generate a key pair with openssl, store it in files and load these key pairs in Java for usage.

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Tuesday, July 26, 2016 • backup script windows rsync cygwin

A backup strategy is important. It’s like an insurance - you have it but you hope, you won’t need it. A backup not only helps in case your hardware is broken, it might also help, if you’ve accidently deleted some important files. One simple step towards a backup is using a external hard drive, that you can attach to your computer and then copy the data you want to backup. However, if you don’t take care, you either have always only one version of your backup, which means you can’t restore deleted files. Or you end up in having multiple copies of the same files which occupy the available space very quick. And, of course, copying all the files always again will take lots of time.

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Sunday, June 26, 2016 • javafx random graphics

Do you know this? If you are bored you start scribbling around on a sheet of paper. Now I was wondering, how it could look like, if a computer program would do the same…

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Monday, May 30, 2016 • smtp

Every now and then, you come across developing an application, that sends email. How to simple test this application? It’s easy, if you have an own mail server. For Windows, there is the very simple smtp4dev application, that listens on localhost port 25 and displays all emails that would have been transmitted. A similar but cross-platform tool is FakeSMTP. For a server, fakemail might be worth a look at.

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