Java Thinking

I recently installed Ubuntu 6.10 on my laptop (dual boot with Windows XP). I already had my hard disk partitioned in two, C: for Windows, and D: for data. So, I copied D: onto a USB drive and then installed Ubuntu onto what was the D: partition. Everything went well, and Ubuntu was up and running without any trouble. One most excellent resource I came across was Automatix which not only allowed me to easily install essential software, but it also introduced me to new software which I now consider essential. However: while the wireless network card worked immediately after the install, it hasn't worked since the first time I used the hibernate feature. battery life 'seems' severely reduced A month or two goes by and Ubuntu 7.04 is released, so I did and upgrade through the update manager. It only took 10mins for me to download the 1Gig of update (at over 1000kbps on my cable broadband connection), but it took about 50 minutes to install. I was hoping this would fix t...

I've recently become interested in Groovy because of its very cool language enhancements, and ease of use. One of the stated goals is to make ' writing concise meaningful maintainable code easier '. I first used it just to write some simple utility scripts, but it in the future I hope to write some full applications (swing and web based) using it to see just how productive it can be. To get started, I bought the Groovy in Action book. This is very well written and was easy to work through, and covered so much information I think I'll be going back through it many times. If you are interested in Groovy, then you should have a look at these resources: Groovy Home Groovy Blogs Groovy Quiz Grails (and Groovy) Podcast Some more specific references that you'll need once you start playing with Groovy: Getting Started Groovy API IDE Support JDK enhancements As I was working through the book, I wrote my own sample code to test out the new language features ...

I've got a couple of PATA harddrives from old computers lying around and recently I needed some extra disk space to shift some things around and for backup. So I bought a USB Hard Drive enclosure (NexStar 3). Since I have a windows laptop and a Linux desktop, I really wanted to be able to use it with both, so, what disk format to use? From what I've read, Linux access to NTFS is getting better, but still not 100%. On the other hand, with this nifty little program Ext2 IFS For Windows windows can mount EXT2 volumes. So, I've formatted it as EXT3 (backwards compatible with EXT2) and have successfully used it on both platforms. I had one little confusing incident, where windows refused to recognise the disk and wanted to format it – but reading the FAQ for Ext2 IFS the author documents how (when using a journalled filesystem such as EXT) if anything is in the journal then windows won't mount the volume since it is mounting as EXT2 (unjournalled). In any case, to get thi...

Being a Windows user and new to Linux I automatically started looking around for a Linux equivalent of WinSCP . I've just recently installed Linux on my laptop, and when I wanted to browse the file system of my desktop, it suddenly occurred to me that I might be able to just browse it through Nautilus. It turns out to be really simple in Gnome: just go to 'Places' in the menu bar and select 'Connect to server...'. From here you can pick from several different protocols (including FTP, SSH, Windows share). I just needed to specify SSH, and supply the desktops details and then I could see the server in the Nautilus tree. Fantastic! Details : Ubuntu 6.10 (Linux laptop1 2.6.17-11-generic #2 SMP Thu Feb 1 19:52:28 UTC 2007 i686 GNU/Linux)

By default, SoundJuicer doesn't give you an option to extract to MP3. You need to set up an MP3 profile to do this, as described here . Note though, when I tried it I had to restart SoundJuicer before Mp3 turned up in the Output Format list (under preferences). Details : Ubuntu 6.10 (Linux laptop1 2.6.17-11-generic #2 SMP Thu Feb 1 19:52:28 UTC 2007 i686 GNU/Linux)