Paul Labis: This is a personal blog where everyone can read my experiences, ideas and thoughts about programming, latest gadgets and other information technology related topics, lifestyle and many other stuff I would like to share to the public.

April Blogging Comeback

Oh yeah! Techieboy is back in sharing his experiences!

Its been a while since I created an article on my experiences with technology. It was around October last year since I stopped due to busy schedules and work. I was also sent to Chicago, Illinois to assist our company client.

It had a wonderful experience though. I was able to see and experience what politics was in software industry. I was exposed to high-end technologies such as Spring Roo and JQuery. Learn a lot on how to deal with management stuff particularly on strategies of motivating employees to make them productive. I had been quite on most of the time, but, I am very observant of thing happening around me.

Anyway, I will cut this article for now. There will be a lot of articles coming up in few days. Have fun and keep in-touch.

DDSteps Testing with Ant Tutorial

It has been almost a year that I've been using DDSteps for testing a back-end project module and I haven't been able to share or create an article about it. So to those people reading this article, I hope this helps you get started on DDSteps testing.
DDSteps is an integrated tool stack, combining the best open source testing tools for Java and adding the ability to resuse test cases and test data.


DataDriven so that when you want to test "sign up" on your site, you can test the same flow with both "George Bush" and "Владимир Путин". Just add another row to spreadsheet, that's all! - by ddsteps.org 
In this tutorial, I will discuss a little about this simple java application I made focus on testing and generating html test results using ant. We will not deal much on the theories since those kind of information are already provided on www.ddsteps.org. I usually use eclipse as my preferred IDE in developing the application. The application makes use of ant to generate the HTML JUnit reports.

Fix upside-down or inverted webcam on Ubuntu linux

I am running Lucid Lynx 64 bit OS version on my Asus i3 K52J Series laptop. Like everyone else, I like using Skype video/chat as well as Cheese camera for taking pictures and videos. Not until then when I had a problem using it.


NOTE: Not advisable to do "export LIBV4LCONTROL_FLAGS=3", LIBV4LCONTROL_FLAGS is for debugging purposes only. - by Hans De Goede(libv4l author and maintainer)

I was so disappointed that my camera display was inverted! I tried reading several blogs and posting comments on Ubuntu forum threads online for days and but none of their solutions helped solved my problem. It could have been easily solved if only there was an option to invert my camera on Video4Linux Device Preference. Sadly, there was not! So, I decided to find a way to flip the camera by looking into export options on gtk-v4l(Video4Linux). 

Fix Asus K52J Sound or Speaker Problem

I just got a new replacement company laptop for my 2 year acer dual core laptop. I now have Asus i3 K52J Series Laptop. Like everyone else using Lucid Lynx on their Asus. I had a problem with my sound and audio device and drivers.

Some of my problems were:
  • Speakers do not mute when headphones are plugged in.
  • HDMI sound out not working.
  • External microphone not working.
Thanks to this Ubuntu Forums Thread where a fix is posted though incomplete in my case. So, I decided to create one of my own and hope to help someone else looking for a solution online. The steps below are the things I did fixing this problem.

Use Arguments on Property File

The goal on this tutorial is to be able to format a value on a properties file given its parameter or arguments. It is best describe as passing value as a parameter and inserting those values on the string retrieved from the properties file.

To better understand what I'm doing, read and understand my example code below.

Property File Sample
message.welcome= Welcome {0} to {1}!
message.thank= Thank you for you visit {0}.