Java Thinking

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.

I've had a couple of wordpress blog somehow get corrupted by evil persons who somehow got to upload content into them. These were 3.1 installs, but I've now removed the content and upgraded to the latest wordpress version. I've found the easiest way is to: download the latest version with wget http://wordpress.org/latest.zip unzip the archive which will extract a directory 'wordpress' eg unzip wordpress-3.4.zip now copy the contents of the wordpress directory over the existing installation with cp -a .../wordpress/* .../mywpinstall Now hit the admin console and you may get a prompt to upgrade the database. If you want a really mad upgrade script, check out the Rimu Hosting script at http://blog.rimuhosting.com/2012/06/14/wordpress-mass-update-script-3-4/

A friend contacted me for advice. He was having trouble writing a test for some code. I asked him to send me the code and the test so I could see what was going on. I encounter this problem quite frequently, so I thought I'd post one of my responses... Okay, here is where I think you are going wrong, and when writing tests becomes hard, it’s usually because of this. It’s important to layer your applications. Web/Services/DB – at least conceptually. What you have is a class that does everything. Web and Service. No-one can reuse your file processing logic without using the web, not even tests! A nice way to code would be to: Write a UNIT test that attempts to process a file. It passes in a file X and asserts that the result is Y. It won’t compile because you haven’t written the file processing code yet! Now you write the service which processes the file The test will compile and run now, but probably fail because you forgot something. Now you can fix your service And ...

My wife has had a Samsung Galaxy S1 Android phone for over a year now and its been great. Recently though, she'd been having terrible battery performance and had noticed that after charging the phone overnight, it was only at 50% in the morning. My first thought was to buy a new battery, but then I figured I'd try updating the firmware first. Thats when I discovered that windows couldn't recognise the device!! This was a big issue - how could I get all of her photos off the phone? Solutions: Quite by accident, she plugged her phone into an iCoustic USB charger that we got with an iPod accessory pack - this fully charged the battery and now there are no battery issues. She'd been using my iPad USB charger previously and for some reason, this makes a difference. I realized that when syncing the phone with Kies I wasn't using the original USB cable that came with the phone. We'd been using a third party cable we'd bought after losing the original one. Sinc...

I've just started using Grooveshark.com for listening to music. Running in the browser, its a great cross platform solution - no installs necessary. I'm just running the browser on my MythTV media center, with the sound via the TV. The quality seems great, even though I've got it on the lower quality, and I'm hoping its just what I need to find some new and interesting music.

I've finally fixed sound via the browser on my Ubuntu 11.04 MythTV media center. MythTV was working fine, but the browsers never even tried to play sound (the sound settings would show NO applications using sound, when Chrome or Firefox should have been). The information I needed was here and I had no /etc/asound.conf so I had to put the following in ~/.asoundrc - pcm.pulse { type pulse } ctl.pulse { type pulse } pcm.!default { type pulse } ctl.!default { type pulse }

I recently mapped a JPA entity to a view, and encountered this error while using hibernate to update the database schema: ORA-01702: a view is not appropriate here [SchemaUpdate.execute] could not complete schema update I was using the Oracle JDBC drivers 10.1.3.3 - luckily, the solution was to upgrade the drivers - when using 11.2.0.2.0 it works fine. Download ojdbc6.jar from here: http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/database/enterprise-edition/jdbc-112010-090769.html ojdbc6.jar (2,152,051 bytes) - Classes for use with JDK 1.6. It contains the JDBC driver classes except classes for NLS support in Oracle Object and Collection types.