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Quicky: If Japan is one thing, then it’s the country of little noises and jingles. Everything needs to “pling”. This of course includes the audio indicators at pedestrian crossings, which signal that pedestrians can cross the road. Of course they need to “pling”. But while they’re at it, they do have to sound like the chirping of birds. Of course they do.

Ohayō gozaimasu!

Sunday 26th October

After getting a good night’s sleep, I feel much refreshed. Momentarily I’m taking it easy and simply enjoying my stay. That is, I’m sitting on the balcony of my host’s apartment, enjoying the view, the scenery and everything that’s going on down below.

Yes, I’m staying on the 46th floor of the tallest building in Kōbe, which goes all the way up to the 60h floor, or so. Pictures will follow. 😉 It’s so tall that you even need to pop your ears when taking the elevator up. Nice!
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Enter Kōbe

Saturday 25th October – arrival

On the last episode we learned that our hero had made all kinds of plans for his trip through Japan. What would come of it?

On today’s episode, we continue where we left off: the flight to Hong Kong was underway and finished by the time the previous episode aired. That is, Hong Kong had been reached, hence the publication.
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On my way to Hong Kong

Friday 24th October – departure

After weeks, nay, months of preparing, today is the big day. Yours truly is on his way to Japan. Konnichiwa, birches!

As I’m typing this, I’m on board of flight 270, en route to Hong Kong, an 11h trip. There I will take my connecting flight to Ōsaka, another 4 hours. Side note: I’m glad I have my phone charger with me and that there’s a socket available to keep my phone charged. Very handy!
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Google Chrome

Google Chrome and Font Rendering Problems

Ever since version 36 of 37 or something like that, Google Chrome started rendering texts incorrectly. That is, texts would become a bit blocky and just unpleasant to read.

Being the good little technology enthusiast that I am, I usually read all the ‘whatsnew’-documentation that comes with new versions of programs, like with Chrome. And at one point I remembered reading something. Google implemented a new feature called DirectWrite which does who knows what, but should cause your texts to appear even better than they did before.

Well, as it turns out, this little feature caused the problems I was experiencing. So what does one do? Open this URL in Google Chrome:

chrome://flags

And just toggle ‘Disable DirectWrite’ so that the text reads ‘disable’ (you have just enabled the feature to disable that feature). Hurray for overly complicated texts.

Note: I use Google Chrome on a Windows 2008 R2 terminal server. On my laptop with Windows 8 everything is just fine…

Translating Feedback Types in APEX feedback forms

Oracle APEX (I’m talking about the current version, 4.2.5) has a nifty feature with which you can very easily add a simple feadback form to your application. Just add a new page and select the appropriate type and you’re kind of done.

However, if you are translating your application, you probably noticed that the form will be generated in English. (I’ll assume you develop your application in a language, not supported by APEX by default, such as Dutch.)

You can easily change the labels of the form items and be done with them. However, there’s a drop down list with types of feedback that aren’t translated yet.

To also translate those items, simply add new ‘Text Messages’ with these names: ‘BUG’, ‘GENERAL_COMMENT’ and ‘ENHANCEMENT_REQUEST’. When you have provided translations for these items, these labels will automatically be shown in the drop down list in the feedback form.

Crash in Wermgr.exe

Although I’m overall still very happy with my laptop (MSI GT 70), there are in fact minor annoyances that keep popping up. One of them is the fact that the Windows Error Reporting application itself (Wermgr.exe) keeps crashing. Most notably after extended idling, during which the screensaver (blank screen) is active. Upon resuming there will be dozens of dialogs reporting something along these lines:

The instruction at 0xf3f3be3e referenced memory at 0xa2dac660. The memory could not be read

Error Dialog for Wermgr.exe

So what to do? Simply disable the Error Reporting Service:

Press the Windows key + R to open a Run box.

Type services.msc

Press Enter.

Scroll down to the Windows Error Reporting service. Double-click it, Stop it and Disable it.

That should help, although you won’t be able to submit error reports abouts crashed applications anymore. Well, that wasn’t working to begin with. As for the origins of this failure? I haven’t got a clue…

Via Wermgr.exe Application Error?

The Java Coffee Cup Logo

Remote Debugging of Java Applications

At work I tried to debug the Java application that we provide to our customers. A nasty performance problem had developed in the course of time. To analyze this, I can recommend using VisualVM. It’s part of Oracle’s JDK (version 6 and up) but is also available as a stand alone download.

VisualVM also allows for remote debugging an application. To this end you can use the “jstatd” application, also part of Oracle’s JDK. When I used this app for some testing, I encountered the following exception at start up:

Could not create remote object
access denied (java.util.PropertyPermission java.rmi.server.ignoreSubClasses write)
java.security.AccessControlException: access denied (java.util.PropertyPermission java.rmi.server.ignoreSubClasses write)
at java.security.AccessControlContext.checkPermission(AccessControlContext.java:264)
at java.security.AccessController.checkPermission(AccessController.java:427)
at java.lang.SecurityManager.checkPermission(SecurityManager.java:536)
at java.lang.System.setProperty(System.java:699)
at sun.tools.jstatd.Jstatd.main(Jstatd.java:122)

Vinay Singla has the answer on his blog. He explains that to run the application requires some permissions before it can run:

Cause :- The “access denied” error is expected, because “jstatd” requires a security policy file specified with the “java.security.policy” system property, if there is no security manager running on the machine.

His solution (as ‘translated to a Windows environment’, by me):

  1. Inside a DOS-box/Console, change to the bin directory, inside the JDK directory. (e.g. c:\program files\java\jdk7\bin)
  2. Check if a file exists with the name “jstatd.all.policy”. If not, create it with Notepad. If so, edit it with Notepad.
  3. Add this information to the file:
    grant codebase “file:${java.home}/../lib/tools.jar” {
    permission java.security.AllPermission;
    };
  4. Run this command: jstatd -J-Djava.security.policy=jstatd.all.policy
  5. Now you can connect to this machine via VisualVM.

Via http://dbafusion.blogspot.nl/2010/05/jstad-error-could-not-create-remote.html

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