ITworks

Wicket in action and confusion

For a recent project lead, we decided to create a mock-up of the application, so the prospective Customer would be able to see that we understand their needs.

As I’m not very good at interactive HTML mock-ups I decided to go with Wicket, which seemed to be useful and easy when a friend showed me. The mock-up progressed well, but upon deployment all Hell broke loose.

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Creating for a bot for MafiaWars

I started playing MafiaWars on my last job, where I had time to spare. As it has happened in the past with me playing on a mud, when the game got repetitive I start writing tools to speed things up.When I was on the mud I used macro-enabled clients, like tintin++ to perform simple tasks for me. Since MafiaWars is a Web 2.0 application, one must emulate a web client, so things are a bit trickier than what one can achieve using a simple wget or shell-script based bot.
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Starting VirtualBox on boot

After setting up VirtalBox based virtualization on our server, I needed a way to have it automatically started and stopped whenever the host is restarted.

Also it would be for the better if the system was not simply started and stopped, but rather saved and restored when possible. I love scripting, but prefer the easy way, and since it’s a problem many have probably already tackled I sniffed around for a while.

There it was, new and shiny tool to make my day!

Starting DB2 instances on boot

After migrating our hosted application to a virtual server I realized, that as usual the system is a “maintenance free” Linux, meaning we set it up as it were and left it running for ages without touching it. On the occasion of power failure the applications were started manually.

As I don’t want to restart everything by hand, whenever our system is restarted I decided to iron these glitches out. OK, the system is only restarted about twice a year, but I tend to forget to restart things manually, so that’s the real reason.

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Migrating from physical to virtual server with pain and tears

We host the server for a legacy application in our office. Since it’s more like a favor than a real assignment we don’t care much about the server. However we had a few network issues lately, so we decided to migrate it to a virtual server running on our hosted server. Also the machine produces lot’s of heat and noise, so we’d better had it switched off.

This seemed like such an easy task to do, what could be hard in creating a disk image with CloneZilla, copy it to a server, set up a virtual machine there with kvm, restore the image and redirect all traffic to this computer instead of the one in our office. We estimated it could be done in two to three hours tops, and we get home around 7PM.

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