Sérgio Lopes Sakabatō, the reversed blog!

PHP Development with Vangrant, xDebug and NetBeans IDE Oct 20, 2016

Being a slow adopter of some things tech (still no Docker or any other container thingy), I’ve started moving my development stack to virtual machines using Vagrant. Yes, I know everyone is using it now (I’ve actually started a year and a half ago), but I’m now creating my own local machines tailored to the tools I use instead of just pooling the latest packaged distro from Atlas/HashiCorp. So, if you want to build your own development boxes here are a few rough steps.

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LaunchAnywhere/Java causing Windows Error 2 Mar 21, 2015

A short tip for anyone trying to install old Java based applications that use the LaunchAnywhere installer. At a command line, run the installer with the following parameter:

LAX_VM = <full path to Java executable, preferably javaw.exe>

At work I have to keep installing old finance related applications that are developed in Java… or that are no longer developed and maintained but even if they are key to every company operating in my country, still don’t have a replacement; yeah!, the kind of software often featured here.

This particular piece of software was released with an installer, to make things easy, but with an old version that doesn’t support the various Java upgrades making it fail, silently if you don’t run the installer using Windows command line (does anyone?).

The problem is that the installer fails to find the recent versions of Java, starting with Java 8, even if all other Java based applications work fine.

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Adding JARs to OSGi bundles, with maven Apr 30, 2014

I’ve been developing a middleware system for smart houses (or at least to enable easier sensor node communication) that I chose to make OSGi based. Now, OSGi is nice and all, (rant: I don’t really mind all the 100 pages every book on OSGi has just to market the virtues of OSGi and why it comes to save the world, but it does drive me a bit crazy that there isn’t a set of instructions for those that want to develop using OSGi, not develop an OSGi container, and only need to get the differences to the “non-OSGi way” that we’re already familiar with) but getting a JAR to be part of one of my bundles has been harder than expected.

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First attempt at creating a Yii extension: Yiibootflat Apr 19, 2014

I Recently tried to integrate the nice widgets from Bootflat (Bootstrap 3, but in flat!)  and thought I should give a try at creating my first Yii extension. After a few hours hitting the keyboard, with the usual pause to read the docs, I got most of the basic widgets available in Bootflat working.

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How does one keep the motivation? Mar 31, 2014

How can we, working as freelancers or in the traditional arrangement, keep the will to get out of bed and jump to work? Lately I’ve found myself lacking any energy to do my work and just entered a state of automation: I get up from bed, prepare my day and start working until it is time to stop.

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Back to school... Mar 31, 2014

… and its not going that bad.

Somehow, still not sure why, I decided to get back to the school. After some changes in my professional life I found myself returning to Leiria, a nice place to live but not where I would like to be at this point, and amidst all the changes I added one more when I enrolled in a Masters course at the Escola de Tecnologia e Gestão de Leiria.

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Fix Eclipse IDE & PyCharm not loading on OSX Mavericks Dec 23, 2013

After a, somewhat, uneventful move from OS X Mountain Lion to Mavericks I hit an issue with Java based applications that would either refuse to start or ask me to install Java 6. Well, I don’t want to install Java 6, I have Java 7 running perfectly, but I would like to use some of the applications that are refusing to run. Searching the web didn’t provide any useful info besides many recommendations to just install the Apple provided Java 6 version.

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Moving away from Sourceforge.net and their malware/adware/spyware offers Aug 23, 2013

I’ve been a Sourceforge.net registered user since 2007, before that Sourceforge.net was a “website” I knew I could use to find great free software. From the “website” I learned a lot about free software, I discovered great tools and I also started my journey as a free software developer, it was there that I added my first project, it was until recently the place I first looked at for any new project I would be creating. That will all end after today where I will definitely stop using their hosting service and also use less of the existing software offers.

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