Java Thinking

Print to Google Drive I just noticed 'Save to Google Drive' in my 'Print' options in Chrome! This is awesome - when you want to save something for reference, and you don't want to go through thousands of bookmarks, this is exactly what I wanted! Media Problems Here is a great blog post about trying to find a decent movie streaming service. Now I have FetchTV (this lets me buy movies to stream, much like the Google Play option) I'm considering turning my MythTV media center off, but I still need an option for playing music/displaying photos/etc. There are lots of options, from AppleTV to Western Digital et al media players. Props to Google for actually selling us here in Australia movies and music - unlike Amazon (we still can't buy movies and music from Amazon in 2013). Andrew Chen quits RSS - WTF! Andrew Chen just announced that he's quitting RSS in favour of email notifications. Look at the comments though, and there isn't a single p...

photo credit: @Doug88888 via photopin cc Installing Windows Vista For the first time since I bought it, my old Dell Inspiron 1525 has Windows Vista back on it. It's been running Ubuntu Linux since I got it, so why does it now have Windows again? My children are using computers at school now and they are using Windows - mainly Office. So rather than confuse them with different operating systems it seems more constructive to just give them some consistency and let them have their own computer set up like it is at school. I'm going to have to buy Microsoft Office for them - which after seeing how Libre Office handles clip art, I'm quite happy to do! (MS Office has a nice search and browse for clipart which the kids love and can use well. Libre Office didn't seem to have any search and you were left to click into each folder one at a time to see the clipart - not particularly useful). Downloading statements I've just noticed PayPal have an interesting fea...

Google Reader and Listen I've been using Google Listen for listening to podcasts since I got my Android phone. It worked well, I would just subscribe to podcasts via Google Reader and drop it in the 'Listen Subscriptions' folder. But now with Google announcing the end of Reader , and Listen has long been abandoned , I'm looking for a suitable alternative. I really liked how I simply had to subscribe to a feed online - if I have to subscribe to things via an app, I'm stuck if I ever want to switch apps. Maybe I'll try Pocket Casts . LinkedIn Groups I've noticed that when contributing to LinkedIn groups, its not immediately obvious to others from your profile. Recent comments might show up in your activity stream but they'll soon disappear. If you view your profile, you'll see a Groups section that shows the groups you have joined. Click on one of those and you'll be taken to the Group page and at the top there will an area where you can st...

Job interview testing While job hunting, I've come across one company that seems to have a very good filtering process. First off, you get a series of technical questions which are obviously aimed at finding out how you think or how much you know about technologies applicable to the organisation. I'm sure these questions have been custom written for their environment - which does to some extent convey some information about the potential role. If you pass that, you get an online 2 question Codility test which you have exactly an hour to complete. This is where you actually write code and can verify it compiles and produces the right answers. If you haven't seen Codility before, have a look - as a programmer you can even complete tests to get a 'certificate' you can put on your resume. Job hunting sites Some interesting sites when job hunting: http://www.glassdoor.com/ Information about company salaries http://www.snipey.com.au/ Find jobs advertised by co...

An Optus representative came knocking the other week, and explained that by having an Optus home phone, broadband and mobile phone (which I have), I'd qualify for a 25% discount and free Fetch TV . Now, this is all GOOD. I had to upgrade my mobile plan from $29 to $30 (for which they wanted a $100 plan change fee), but hopefully my next bill will be 25% smaller (down from $80ish to $60ish). And, I'm currently enjoying the Fetch TV experience. This set-top box has a 1T hard disk, and a pretty good interface for navigating the recordings and (free albeit old) IPTV movies. I'm not saying its the best, but it does have me considering turning off the MythTV media center since it takes care of recording terrestrial TV (but I would need a DNLA alternative or similar for watching audio/video/dvds - maybe a NAS? or XBMC?). See https://www.optus.com.au/shop/broadband/bundles/85 An interesting point to note, now that I have FetchTV I can rent and stream movies for approx $6.50 -...

I came across BackBox Linux - although it's not my area of expertise, I always find different distributions of Linux interesting. On the website it is described as follows:   "BackBox is a Linux distribution based on Ubuntu. It has been developed to perform penetration tests and security assessments. Designed to be fast, easy to use and provide a minimal yet complete desktop environment, thanks to its own software repositories, always being updated to the latest stable version of the most used and best known ethical hacking tools." I love listening to podcasts, and PocketCasts is an Android podcatcher that looks great! It supports variable speed playback, which if you haven't realised, you can easily play some podcasts at up to 1.5x without missing anything. Not sure if it does pitch correction to compensate, but I'll have to try it out. I have to admit to being a big Google+ fan. Whenever I scroll down my stream, I just find HEAPS of very cool interes...

I've occasionally been frustrated by the output of 'ps -ef' not showing the full command line for the processes. Well, it turns out that the solution is as simple as piping the output to a file - i.e. 'ps -ef > ps.txt' - now I can easily see the FULL command line for my java processes. I bought a new WIFI router this week. My old one was getting flaky, and for some reason I've always had trouble with some of the url shorteners such as bit.ly and t.co - they just couldn't be resolved. So I bought a basic Netgear WNR1000 which satisfied all of my criteria. One of the things I like most is that it has a switch to turn off the wireless when I don't need it. This helps with security as well as saving power. I've almost finished porting my latest application to AppEngine (Python). Lucky its a small application! I'm constantly being reminded that its useful to have skills in a lightweight technology to bootstrap and test ideas quickly. If that id...

This post is on the money. Humorous and accurate. I've seen this all before. There is a very interesting podcast on the software patent situation at NPR Planet Money. I'm in a bind! I'm ready to launch a new app (Grails based), but my VPS with 768MB memory can't handle it (its running vsconsole already, and apache, mysql etc). Unfortunately I can't add more memory until next month! They are out of stock!! I signed up for CloudFoundry.com (still in BETA), but it I haven't been able to find out how to use my own domain, or how to extract the data when/if I need to. I could easily port it to AppEngine (Python). It's a small app so it wouldn't be much effort but I'd rather spend the effort on new features!

I am currently working on a JSF2 application at work, and I mostly use Firefox during the development process because I use SeleniumIDE as a development/productivity tool to quickly log in as different users and drive the browser to a certain point. Imagine my surprise when I found out that something didn't work in IE8 . I could see IE reporting a JavaScript error, but the details were useless. Even with the developer tools in IE, I couldn't identify what or where the error was. This page didn't have any JavaScript written by me - its all the JSF generated code. All I could do is use the process of elimination and trial and error to rearrange the page and subtlety change code  until it worked. Its hard to believe that IE is still in this state, especially when faced with the competition from Chrome (built in developer tools ) and Firefox (add-on FireBug for developer tools). I'm using VMWare Fusion on my MacBook AIR to run an Ubuntu server for testing purposes. I...

A friend pointed out this article to me which says in summary: "No matter how much you try, you can’t stop people from sticking beans up their nose." Its well worth reading, especially if you continually see crazy things happening at work, and need a way to deal with it. In a similar fashion, I've also stumbled across a couple of comics which happen to describe (too accurately) most of the real world: OneFTE.com and PhD Comics . And lets not forget Dilbert . At least we can laugh about it. I've been having trouble with my MythTV install. I've installed 2 tuner cards (one is a single tuner, the other dual) and when I reboot they seem to be randomly assigned to /dev/dvb/adapterX - I finally started looking into it, and found this reference which has helped me permanently assign the first card - which should be consistent across reboots. However, I've still got to set up the second card, and test properly. An article (from 2007!) pointing out how Ron Jefferie...

Know of any companies in Sydney that engage in REAL agile projects - properly? Let me know, I'm interested! I had a javascript drop-down menu that youtube video interferred with - when the menu dropped down, the youtube object covered it! I found the answer here -  http://geekswithblogs.net/steveclements/archive/2007/03/03/107839.aspx - where the solution is simple: Add nested element to object tag: <param name="wmode" value="transparent"/> And attribute to embed tag: wmode="transparent" Spending too much time travelling to and from work makes me appreciate the idea of telecommuting. I've noticed that Canonical (Ubuntu) advertises home based jobs, but all companies I know are strongly against it - and although they don't advertise the fact , it is an unspoken policy. Right now, I probably don't have the best home for accommodating telecommunting, but I did come across the OfficePod the other day - a brilliant idea, your office ...

I've noticed a bunch of websites that just don't pay any attention to detail. Little things: banking sites that don't remember your settings (i.e. for exporting statements) and you have to set them every time you export, for every account log forms you fill it to register, and when you fail validation (like getting the CAPTCHA wrong), some parts of your form are now blank and you have to fill them in again (or you get to the bottom where they ask you to accept the terms and conditions, and when you view them it navigates away from the form you are on) paying for things online is still very difficult! It took me almost an hour to pay for an extension I bought the other day - very confusing paypal process, which I haven't fully researched to know what is going on Maybe these are symptoms of trying to do too much - and never doing anything very well? The banking site in question never seems to change, so perhaps they just aren't in a position where they can make ...

Looking for some icons? Check out the fantastic work available @ webtoolkit4.me - there are some really good icon sets. I'm always trying to find better ways of doing things and find incredible resistance to even the simplest of improvements - things that I would consider no-brainers end up subjected to business cases and long winded "evaluations of all the options". Well, the Pragmatic Programmers have released a book that might be exactly what I need: Driving Technical Change "Finding cool languages, tools, or development techniques is easy—new ones are popping up every day. Convincing co-workers to adopt them is the hard part. The problem is political, and in political fights, logic doesn’t win for logic’s sake. Hard evidence of a superior solution is not enough. But that reality can be tough for programmers to overcome." Myself and a co-worker have a keen interest in developing our agile skills, and would also like to infect the rest of the team with our en...

I've installed WorldCommunityGrid on my media center , which is on 24*7 - may as well use that spare CPU time for good! I've been watching my ranking slowly get better, starting over 300,000 and now after 21 days of run time I'm ranked (by points) in the mid 200,000s. Along comes a friend of mine and in a very short time he's already broken through under 200,000! He has a quad core CPU (mine is a dual core), and I'm assuming thats the reason. I find it strange that developer PCs never seem to get updated unless someone new joins the team - and they only get a new computer if one doesn't exist already. I've never worked anywhere where they've had a policy to update developer machines regularly. I think I'd have a policy of updating them every 12 to 18 months if it was up to me. The older machines can filter down to less power users, or perhaps the developer PCs could be rented. I would love a clean machine with a clean OS every 18 months, and I can h...

I finally got a new battery for my laptop - it only took 3 weeks rather than the estimated 6, so finally I'm back online - on the train. It's barely doing the job though, a new battery barely gets me to and from work - I obviously need to work closer to home! I'm running Ubuntu , Netbeans , Grails , and sometimes a 3G internet connection - so I guess it is working hard for what is sometimes more than a 2 hour round trip! It will be interesting to see how the new battery lasts. I'm also thinking about getting a new laptop at the end of the year - my current laptop is over 2 years old, so technology wise it's out of date. The DELL Adamo looks interesting, with a SSD disk - I'd love to see how much difference that makes, otherwise I'd probably get an Inspiron 13z - I'm mainly interested in the smaller lighter models since I'm so mobile. Its nice to see laptops coming without DVD drives now - who needs them? I found an interesting whitepaper on Agile...

I've recently made updates to my grails plugins to ensure they work on Grails 1.3. I hadn't touched them for a while, so it took a bit of effort. I haven't had the opportunity to use Grails much lately, so I had to catch up on changes. One issue I have is that its impossible to know if anyone is actually using these plugins, and therefore are they worth maintaining? I recently stumbled across AgileRecord.com - The Magazine for Agile Developers and Agile Testers. This is a downloadable PDF magazine, I think it only requires registration. Very interesting read, I recommend checking it out. Another awesome read is "Scrum and XP from the Trenches" -  http://www.infoq.com/minibooks/scrum-xp-from-the-trenches - This describes how one team implemented agile and is a fantastic source of information. I've been playing with Joomla lately, and I'm liking it so far. There is a bit of a learning curve, because it has a different paradigm than Wordpress - while Wordp...

There is some great new technology coming: Enso Zenpad 5 inches  http://enso-now.com/n/index.php Alex eReader  https://www.springdesign.com/us/index.action And the return of a classic: http://www.commodoreusa.net/index.html I'm back playing with virtual machines, trying to investigate a few products that might result in productivity gains. So, I'm using VirtualBox, and here's a couple of must knows: Bios settings for hardware virtualization  http://www.sevenforums.com/virtualization/20330-how-turn-hardware-virtualization-my-bios.html Networking - the default NAT network setting allows the guest to see the internet, but other machines can't see the guest - not too useful if your guest is a server. Here are some useful references: a)  http://www.callum-macdonald.com/2009/10/28/virtualbox-host-to-guest-networking/ b)  http://paparadit.blogspot.com/2007/08/virtualbox-windows-xp-guest-in-windows.html c)  http://mydebian.blogdns.org/?p=148 One thing I'm looking...

I've been using Remote Desktop Viewer to administer and set up my parents computer (running Ubuntu 9.10) in another country. Although functional - it's exactly what I want - I've had lots of trouble with usability, most likely attributed to the bandwidth between the 2 locations. The main issue is responsiveness – the mouse movement is terrible, almost unusable, taking ages to accurately position the mouse where you want. I couldn't find much in the way of settings to play with when using the Remote Desktop Viewer that comes installed by default with Ubuntu. But when I installed Remmina Remote Desktop Client , I noticed that there were options for Colour Depth and Quality. Changing the colours to 256 and using poorest quality, I can now control the remote desktop much better. Now it is usable and much less frustrating! I've been working with Netbeans Platform 6.8 , making a desktop GUI for an application I've been working on. I got off to a slow start, but after ...

Its been a good week. I got my Virgin Mobile Broadband Prepaid 3G modem working, and learnt a lot in the process, and actually contributed to the GNOME project: https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=607731 As part of this, I installed Pidgin so I could join the IRC channel and talk to developers, but I haven't yet figured out how to view the history for a channel - so I can see what happened while I was offline... It does surprise me though, that the database for mobile broadband providers is specific to the window manager (GNOME) instead of being a system level thing. I'm sure there are good reasons, and it probably doesn't matter, but what do the KDE (and others) users do? Define it all over again? Worse than that though is that Virgin don't seem to make the APN easily available. I found it by searching the web, and finding it in forums, but why isn't it in the FAQ on a Virgin site? I didn't anticipate how much I'd enjoy having access to the internet...

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