Java Thinking

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 wanted to create an integration test for some Griffon services - where I wanted to set up some data first, then check that the service produced the appropriate results. Therefore, I wanted the database working normally, but I needed access to a configured Griffon application and the required services. My issue was how to get hold of the services? They don't automatically get injected as I first expected. But luckily, StackOverflow and Andres to the rescue:

With my latest Griffon+JavaFX application, I wasn't having any luck binding a textfield to a 'float' property in my model. So to work around it temporarily, I've added a change listener which will veto any input that isn't a number. This example is basically using a very Java centric approach: Now, we can simplify this by using the Groovy way: See Groovy way to implement interfaces to understand how this is implementing the interface. If we want to have several text fields using the same logic, we can define the closure in the Controller and reference that in many places: Still, this is not optimal since I have to use Strings instead of Floats in my model - but it does let me continue with whats important right now. Hopefully the binding bug can be fixed soon.

If you're like me, you've got several years (and gigs) of digital photos that you've been copying off your cameras, your phone, your wifes phone etc. Tonnes of photos, all unsorted, and some times copied more than once. How do you go about sorting out the good photos - the ones you want to share with your family - from the ones that just aren't worth sharing? This is why I started working on vsPhotoSorter - at the moment it is minimalistic, just enough features to provide me with value - but its working for me as I steadily sort out my collection. If you have a similar problem with your photo collection, have a look and see if it helps you too. Read more here http://www.vamonossoftware.com/2013/01/sort-out-your-digital-photo-collection.html . This software is a desktop application built using  Griffon and  Groovy on the  Java platform.