Niklas Saers
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Spec-Driven AI Development

You write a prompt, hit enter, and watch the console light up green. Code pours out. It feels like magic. Then you try to maintain the thing a week later, and you realize your shiny new AI agent just built a leaking bucket.

Recent Writing

July 30, 2011 • Technology

The Sims 3 in Lion

I don't play that many games, but one that I've enjoyed for a number of years has been The Sims. Now that Lion is out and we can talk about it, I found the answer about what to do when it fails with an Unknown Error: Go to ~/Library/Preferences and delete the com.transgaming.* files and the "The Sims 3 Preferences" directory. This will make the game run again.

June 27, 2011 • Technology

Minus points for the 2011 iMac

Some of you might have thought that I'm perhaps a bit too happy about the iMac, and of course too cheap to get a Mac Pro. (Yes, I'm just as excited as anyone to see what the new Pro will be like now that Thunderbolt is a great bus-alternative, but that's for another topic) Let me dedicate this post to the minus points for the iMac.

June 26, 2011 • Technology

Replacing iMac 2011 memory

Back when the new iMacs were released in may 2011 I ordered one with 4GB RAM, expecting to replace them with 32GB. However, getting four 8GB blocks turned out to be incredibly hard, and very expensive, so I settled for 4x4GB blocks for a total of 16GB RAM 1333Mhz SO-DIMM RAM. Two sets of 2x4GB from Crucial was very inexpensive (about 800 DKK plus tax), and they arrived a couple of days before the iMac.

May 7, 2011 • Technology

Relocating your svn repository in-flight

Once upon a time I used a beanstalk repository in http mode. By that I mean I had it checked out from a http:// address, rather than the usual svn+ssh:// because Beanstalk didn't support svn+ssh:// . Since then, no-one had touched the project, but today I wanted to do some changes. I went ahead to make them, and before committing I did a "svn up" just in case. It told me:

May 3, 2011 • Technology

32GB RAM for new Mid-2011 iMacs

So today they released the new iMac. Still no reviews so I have no clue whether I was right or wrong about the chipset. So I've started looking into another pet topic of mine: RAM. I really would like these machines to take a bucket-load of RAM, but Apple still limits themselves to 16GB.

May 2, 2011 • Technology

vmc push\'ing Java/Maven/Spring projects

I'm just getting started with Cloud Foundry. So I grabbed Springs samples and compiled hello-spring-mongodb doing "mvn package" and then "vmc push -no-start". That got me:

May 1, 2011 • Photography

Digital film

Wow, I remember back in 1998, me and another photo enthusiast were discussing DSLRs vs digital film. I was holding out on DSLRs until there was a camera that could fit my lenses and was as good as the Canon 500N I had at the time. Turned out I'd be waiting a while, the first one I got (matched the requirements!) was the Canon 20D. Anyway, my friend showed a links on Slashdot and a few papers on "Digital Film", and I had to agree: that was probably a much better fit for the time.

April 30, 2011 • Technology

Intel Z68 chipset for the iMac that\'ll be released tuesday May 3rd?

Fair warning: This is speculation on my part

April 20, 2011 • Technology

The setup of a Spring project

One thing that I seem to forget from project to project (after all, you only need to take care of this once pr project) is that a deployed Spring project is two parts: model, business and controllers is one part, views are another.

April 17, 2011 • Technology

NoQL space

These days I'm heavily looking into the NoSQL space, and I've currently limited my learning to the document space of CouchDB, MongoDB, key/value space of AWS SimpleDB and Cassandra, and the Neo4J graph space. For the projects I'm involved in I'm most excited about Couch & Mongo, even though I'd love to host it in the AWS space and therefore should be looking at SimpleDB.