Java Thinking

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 recently moved from Wordpress to Blogger. It just seemed to make sense to me, less maintenance (I was running Wordpress on a Linux VPS) and no infrastructure to worry about. It hasn't been seamless though - I used the Wordpress2Blogger script to transfer my content to Blogger but it appears there have been some issues: Firstly, managing comments is totally broken - If I try to access the comments from the management screen, all I get is: We're sorry, but we were unable to complete your request. When reporting this error to Blogger Support or on the Blogger Help Group, please: Describe what you were doing when you got this error. Provide the following error code. bX-naxxg8 This information will help us to track down your specific problem and fix it! We apologise for the inconvenience. Try googling for that error code and you get nothing. I've sent the Blogger team an email using the online help but I've heard nothing back. Secondly, some of my posts don...

I've written one Griffon application, and now I'm on to another. Its a great learning experience because I've never really worked much on desktop applications or with swing. While working on vsPhotoSorter I encountered a problem with the Installer plugin , one that was resolved in a recent update - but how do I upgrade the plugin? There are no upgrade-plugins scripts, but it is as simple as installing the plugin again, and specifying the version. You can use griffon list-plugin-updates to find out which plugins can be upgraded: Plugins with available updates are listed below: -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- <Plugin>            <Current>           <Available>         <From> datasource          0.4                 1.1.0             ...

vsConsole 2.0.6 has been released. This has a couple of bug fixes and feature enhancements added, see  http://www.vamonossoftware.com/2013/02/vsconsole-206-available.html for more information. vsConsole is a tool for developers and testers which lets you easily tail log files on remote servers, monitor the status and version of applications deployed to your environments, and stay informed with broadcast messaging.   Read more .

I'm looking for work! Last year I joined the SpringSource R&D team here in Sydney, but our project has come to an end so I'm looking for exciting opportunities - local (Sydney CBD) or telecommuting. If you need a passionate agile java developer, then please get in contact. For more information, see my profile at http://au.linkedin.com/in/paulrule/ or  http://careers.stackoverflow.com/paulrule .

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/