Java Thinking

I decided to do a clean install of Ubuntu 7.04 on my old desktop. I'd downloaded the ISO image some time ago, but it was on my laptop so I used the laptop to burn the image to a CD. The burning went fine and the CD looked good, but the desktop would not boot from it. The desktop has a LITEON DVD burner and a LITEON CD burner, but the CD burner is not powered up. It turns out the CD would not boot from the DVD drive, but if I put it in the CD drive, it would. I'm not sure why it would matter, since the DVD drive could read the disk, just not boot it. Unfortunately, after getting the machine to boot and installing Ubuntu to disk, I end up with the same problem described here (an /sbin/modprobe abnormal exit resulting in the boot process hanging). I've got an old (2001?) Gigabyte GA-8SR533 F7d motherboard, and kernel 2.6.20-15 doesn't seem to like it.

I've just been lead astray by a little problem with my Eclipse setup, while working on a Grails project. It's documented that when working on a Grails project and using the Groovy Eclipse plugin , you must turn off 'Enable Groovy Compiler Generating Classes' otherwise it will interfere with your Grails project. While working on a Groovy project I had re-enabled this, and after switching back to my Grails project, I would get this exception when running grails run-app : Server failed to start: org.mortbay.util.MultiException [org.codehaus.groovy.runtime.InvokerInvocationException: groovy.lang.MissingMethodException: No signature of method: Note.save() is applicable for argument types: () values: {}] (Note.groovy is my domain class) When I noticed a bunch of Eclipse generated content in the root of my project I quickly remembered this issue. Since the setting in question is a workspace setting, I think the best solution for me would be to have separate workspaces fo...

As part of my adventures with Grails, I thought I'd try the ACEGI plugin which is described here . If you try the download links though, you'll be a bit disappointed. They just seem to show a Yahoo advert which is in Japanese?? Instead of clicking on the download links, go here http://sky.geocities.jp/acegiongrails/ first and you'll get to a page where you can download them. There doesn't seem to be anything wrong with the URLs - they are the same as the ones on the page that works, but somehow they behave differently.

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)