I am currently helping out a Lawyer Friend of mine setup his small office with a LinkStation NAS drive. The NAS drive that he purchased was on that can do RAID 1 hard disk mirroring so that all of his documents would be mirrored across two drives. This works great, but does not give him a backup off of the NAS device in the event that there is a extreme failure.

Luckily the LinkStation drives have the ability to backup information to a external USB drive that is connected to the back of the device. This is great, but the information on how to configure it is almost nonexistent and there is really no good description of what the different options are. I did find the following information associated with the different Backup Options for the drive online which really seemed to help me out.

Overwrite Backup (Complete/Differential):
Saves as “_backups\sourcename\data”. Does a complete backup every time, if a file is on the destination that is not on the source, it will be deleted.

Overwrite Backup (Append):
Saves as “_backups\sourcename\data”. Does a complete backup the first time, subsequent backups only send the changes. If a file is on the destination that is not on the source, it will not be deleted.

Overwrite Backup (Differential):
Saves as “_backups\sourcename\data”. Does a complete backup the first time, subsequent backups only send the changes. If a file is on the destination that is not on the source, it will be deleted.

Well today I went to Best Buy to go and get me a keyboard to hook up to my Windows 7 laptop. When going to Best Buy I went over to the keyboard section and started testing them all out. I found plenty of them that I liked, with lots of features that I would never use, but they all looked like some kind of Mac Keyboard clone to me.

After some playing around with them I grabbed one and started to walk out of the store. On the way out the Apple section caught my eye. I wandered over there to look around and saw the Apple Bluetooth Keyboard that I have at work.

I love this keyboard. The only drawback to it is that it is expensive, is a battery killer, and it is not a full size keyboard with a number pad. Then the answer to appeared to me, the Apple Keyboard with Numeric Pad.

This keyboard is not a wireless one, but that is just fine with me. I don’t need that anyway. It is a full size keyboard which is great, has the number pad, and also two USB ports on the sides. It was also only 50 bucks, which was cheaper than the one I picked up.

When I got home I plugged it into my Windows 7 laptop, the keyboard was found, and all of the necessary drivers were installed without any issues. Windows 7 actually recognizes the keyboard as a Apple Keyboard and works great. Now I have the keyboard that I have always wanted without having to go out and spend the cash on a Mac.

I have been having a heck of a time with using anything on my Mac OSX that uses the WSS4J Web Services Security file. I have been trying to use the WSS4J that is used in SoapUI and Apache CXF. I had all of these projects setup and working without fail, then all of a sudden everything just stopped working.

After doing some research I found that Apple decided to change the Java cacerts keystore default password from “changeit” to “changeme”. Since WSS4J tries to connect to the cacerts keystore first with the default password of “changeit” the applications throw a exception and never try to load my local keystores.

To fix this issue, I went to /Library/Java/Home/lib/security/ and ran the following command to change the keystore password back to “changeit” which fixed all of my issues.

sudo keytool -storepasswd -new changeit -keystore /Library/Java/Home/lib/security/cacerts -storepass changeme

I really don’t know why Apple decided to change the default password of the cacerts keystore from what ever other version on the planet is, but I sure hope that they change it back.

I have been struggling with cygwin on my Windows 7 64bit computer for a while. My first fix was to use the new 1.7.x version in which they claimed to have support for my os. Initially 1.7 seemed only to really support the 32bit version of Windows 7, but everyone seemed to have issues with incorporating it into the 64bit version.

Today I was doing a little research and someone suggested a user use mintty as a unix and Windows 7 solution. Since mintty was already installed on my computer with the cygwin setup.exe program, I figured I would give it a shot. I mean what could it hurt, and I have been really frustrated with the default Cygwin.bat shortcut on my desktop. To me it was too much like the dos prompt.

My first impression of using mintty was that the font looked a little different, but other than that, it was a huge improvement. Some of the advantages to mintty were:

• Mouse Wheel works with scroll bar
• Ability to Cut and Paste with mouse
• Windows Transparency
• Very extensive Mouse Support
• Native Windows Interface
• Based on the Putty codebase
• Options can be set for your terminal in a graphical interface

I really liked what I was seeing here so far. It is a much better interface than what I had been using in the past by a long shot. I love the way you can click on the screen and make it go fullscreen. You can even click on the screen, select options, and customize various options of your terminal.

My biggest frustration with cygwin on my computer currently has been when I tried to run fvwm. I have found that it would not run consistently when I initiated it from the cygwin.bat command prompt. I decided that I would go ahead and give this a shot inside of mintty, but figured I would just get the same old results. To my surprise, minitty executed fvwm a lot more consistently than before. There are still issues with it.

I am now done with the old way, and not looking back. Mintty is loads better than any shell interface I have used so far, and my cygwin environment is back and running again like the old days. I don’t even need to use fvwm now. The only reason that I was using fvwm was to support the mrxvt terminal, but mintty works 100% better on my machine so why even bother.

I have a project that I am converting over to maven. Everything was going great until I decided to add log4j into the mix. When I added log4j version 1.2.15 as a dependency and tried to compile my project, I got the following error.

[INFO] ------------------------------------
[ERROR] BUILD FAILURE
[INFO] ------------------------------------
[INFO] Compilation failure
error: error reading /Users/gjenning/.m2/repository/javax/jms/jms/1.1/jms-1.1.jar; cannot read zip file

I don’t know why log4j caused a issue with the jms-1.1.jar file and throws a fatal error, but it does. To fix this issue, all I had to do was change the log4j dependency version from 1.2.15 to 1.2.14 and all now works great.