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)

It helps to be able to remote control another computer - for example if you need to install or fix something on your parents/family/friends computer and you cannot travel to their location. One-Click VNC makes it easy. Essentially, the person that is doing the controlling: If you are using a router with your internet connection you need to set up port forwarding for port 5500 to your computer. Run 'vncviewer.exe -listen' on your computer. Send your routers external ip address to the person to be controlled. Now, at the other end, for the person who will be controlled: Update settings.ini with the controllers external ip address Run OneClickVNC.exe. Now the client talks to the controllers routers external address which forwards to your internal ip address and you are done.See One-Click VNC for the full story... Note, Windows Live Messenger allows remote controlling of computers you are chatting with (the user can select Actions/Request remote assistance and then pick ...

Where has the disk space gone To find out which tables are the biggest you can run this query: SELECT owner, segment_name, segment_type, tablespace_name, SUM (BYTES / 1024 / 1024) sizemb FROM dba_segments GROUP BY owner, segment_name, segment_type, tablespace_name ORDER BY sizemb DESC Recovering disk space Most of the following was learned from this forum post . As tables grow, it can be necessary to compact them to free up disk space. Deleting unnecessary rows won't necessarily free disk space. The space occupied by those rows just becomes available for new rows to consume. To free up space, you need to truncate (or drop and re-create) the table. If there are constraints referencing some of the rows in the table you want to shrink then you'll have to disable those first. So, assuming: you want shrink table FOO you've deleted the rows you don't need from FOO table BAR has constraints referencing FOO -- copy those rows you want to keep into a new table CREATE TABL...