Java Thinking

I've just discovered that commons-transactions offers a transactional file service allowing atomic read and writes on a filesystem. Theres a good write up here about the evolution of Wordpress . I love stories like this, because it reinforces the fact that software doesn't have to be perfect when it is released. Releasing early and often can work, and when you do it this way, you can end up with a better product - one that is shaped by the community that uses it. Wow, notice the file size difference based on type here : 22MB mp3 format file 7MB ogg format file I wonder if they sound the same? If I get time I'll download and compare, but in the mean time I'll just hope that OGG gets more support over time. A new garbage collecto r is making its way into java 7. An interesting discussion about the direction of java . Should we ditch backwards compatibility? Releases: Grails 1.1 Beta 2 Oracle SQL Developer 1.5.3

I wanted to convert some CDs to MP3 - normally I'd use OGG, but you can't always rely on devices being able to play that format (i.e. DVD players). I was relieved to see it is easy in Ubuntu 8.10: enable multiverse and universe repos sudo apt-get install gstreamer0.10-plugins-ugly-multiverse  sound-juicer start sound-juicer and go to Edit/Preferences and switch the format to MP3 It was that easy. I seem to remember having to do a lot more with previous versions of Ubuntu.

I've been wondering for a while why people spam blogs with comments like: Your site is so cool, thanks it really helped me! Or any of the many variations. Its usually obvious for several reasons (spelling and just completely out of context) that this is spam. But why bother? It turns out that some blogging software is set up so that if a user has commented, and the administrator has approved that comment, then subsequent comments from that user will be published automatically (without requiring admin approval). That means, once approved, that user is trusted and can comment freely. So, if you accidentally approve this spam bait (innocently believing it to be a genuine complement) expect much more less innocent comments to appear. In Wordpress, this setting can be found in 'Discussion settings' under 'Comment author must have a previously approved comment'.

I've just been reminded how painful it can be splitting a string based on a token with StringTokenizer . The problem is that it gets messy when you have two tokens consecutively. Luckily commons-lang comes to the rescue with StrTokenizer - where empty tokens may be removed or returned as null.

I've had to disable MemoKeys because it interferes with Intellij. I often use ALT-F1 to locate a file in the project tree, but this doesn't work because MemoKeys is intercepting the F1. There is some awesome goodness coming in Grails 1.1 - check out the release notes for the Beta . I just had a requirement to open an EPS file, but I found that GIMP (on Windows) doesn't natively support EPS. As documented , you need to install GhostScript and set an environment variable (i.e. GS_PROG=C:\Program Files\gs\gs8.63\bin\gswin32.exe). Restart GIMP and you should be right. Running a VPS costs money, so reducing the amount of ram required helps. Java applications have the disadvantage of using resources even when they are not being used, so I am interested to read about this strategy which may reduce not only the upload size but the memory footprint. I don't know if anyone has measured the effect on memory - I hope it helps.

I've installed MythTV frontend on my laptop so now I can view TV and recordings, and play music across the network. I had to change the backend setup to serve from the ip address instead of 'localhost', and I also changed bind-address in /etc/mysql/my.conf to use the ip address. I'm not sure if I had to change mysql, but I assume so. I've also edited fstab to mount my media over the network so that the path on the frontend machine is exactly the same as on the backend (this was recommended in the post I found about setting the remote frontend up): //mythtv/media /home/paul/media/ cifs credentials=/etc/samba/user,noexec 0 0 My /etc/samba/smb.conf has a corresponding entry to share the directory: [media] path = /home/paul/media available = yes browsable = yes public = yes writable = no

A friend finally launched his company mobiusly.com - I expect great things to follow, so keep an eye on this space. I expect 2009 will be a good year for mobiusly. Keep up to date with mobiusly: Blog Feed Twitter

I didn't notice until now, but nuvexport has stopped working since my upgrade to 8.10. I found the solution here, but I needed to add the Intrepid Medibuntu repository first. The full solution: sudo wget http://www.medibuntu.org/sources.list.d/intrepid.list --output-document=/etc/apt/sources.list.d/medibuntu.list sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install medibuntu-keyring && sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get purge ffmpeg sudo apt-get install libavcodec-unstripped-51 libavdevice-unstripped-52 libavformat-unstripped-52 libavutil-unstripped-49 libpostproc-unstripped-51 libswscale-unstripped-0 ffmpeg sudo apt-get install mytharchive nuvexport

A friend must have seen my comment about JDiskReport, and mentioned WinDirStat to me. I'd never seen it before. It's a similar product to JDiskReport but for windows only. I recently tried installing 64 bit ubuntu on a spare partition on my laptop - it already had Vista and 32 bit Ubuntu dual booted with Grub. For some reason the install wouldn't complete and left grub broken so I couldn't boot into any OS. Easy solution - I used the 32 bit Ubuntu alternative disk which has a re-install grub option. This worked a treat. It correctly restored my boot options and the laptop was back in action. I'm not sure why the 64 bit Ubuntu doesn't work on the laptop (Dell1525 Intel Core2 Duo Processor T5550). Looking at the comparison chart , I see that "All Intel® Core™2 Duo mobile processors feature: ... Intel® 64 architecture ... ". What gives? (The installer just fails part of the way through - no error, just freezes).

I've been looking for a convenient way to re-use some old harddisks for backup purposes. I think this cable is just what I'm looking for. It appears to support both IDE drives as well as SATA so it means I can get some extra life out of the old disks while still using it for new disks. I'm really only going to be using it for backups so it should be just the thing. I've just upgraded my MythTV media center from MythBuntu 8.04 to 8.10. I downloaded the alternate CD rather than doing a network upgrade. The main reason for upgrading was to support my new Pinnacle Nano DVB tuner - support is built in to Ubuntu 8.10. Previously it required the drivers to be installed manually. I mounted the ISO file and ran: sudo /media/cdrom0/cdromupgrade Eventually it failed due to problems with flashplugin-nonfree and ia32-libs. I removed these packages and re-ran the upgrade and all was okay. After rebooting, the TV-out no longer worked - the NVIDIA drivers were not installed. I h