On Coding Habits and Noise in Source Code

The presentation and the provided slides from Kevlin Henney, found at http://www.infoq.com/presentations/7-ineffective-coding-habits, are a good summary on the most prominent "noise generators" and "focus detractors" in source code. I know that most stuff around source code formatting, commenting, naming conventions, etc. is very subjective, and things get quite religious discussing it. However there is basic knowledge about how humans can digest information in an optimal way, and that knowledge is hundredths of years old and should not be dismissed easily by none of us. Go through the slides and maybe one or the other of you finds those fundamentals appealing and you change your coding style for the better.

Enter a (masked) password on the DOS command line

If you ever had the task on how to retrieve a password from a user on the command line, you can find the right tool here: http://westmesatech.com/editv.html. The editv tool allows you to prompt a user for whatever input, and with the -m (masked) parameter, the entered value is masked with stars. Pretty cool! Thanks, Bill!

Howto: Remove processes in Unix by searching their names

I sometimes have the situation where I am left with some stuck processes from previous sessions. I'm sure this could be done better by the application, but it's not in this case. I therefore have the following command line (bash on Solaris) that solves my problem:

$ ps -ef | grep {myuserid} | grep {procname in ps} | awk '{ print $2 }' | xargs -l1 kill -9

Might be of use for anybody out there.

The user interface library Qt is licensed under LGPL

There's great news: Qt will be free starting in March 2009, finally. Qt is a cross platform GUI development library. It's a library for GUI development using C++ and Java (which I was not aware of until now). The Java integration is done via JNI. Check this out, there are some Webstart based demos available. I could not get it running on my Mac OS X, unfortunately. But it's tested on Windows and Linux only, anyway.

Setup Eclipse Ganymede (Eclipse 3.4) with Subversion and Maven 2 Plugins

That's what I found, collected and provided in a cookbook format:

1) Download a fresh copy of Eclipse 3.4 / Ganymede. I've used the EE release, but the others should work, too.

2) Follow this cook book for the subversion part.

3) Install the Maven 2 plugin from this site: http://m2eclipse.sonatype.org/update/

4) Test it with a subversion based project, e.g. my favourite is CAS. m2eclipse is officially supported by that project. However, you have to activate the "Include Modules" property in the project to get rid of initial errors. I've reported this on the CAS mailing list.

Java on Ubuntu Server 8.10

Here's some in-a-nutshell information on how to deal with Java on Ubuntu server 8.10:

To find out what's on an Ubuntu system for Java:

$ update-java-alternatives -l

Running

$ java -version

shows that the OpenJRE 6 is installed by default. Aha, it's a JRE. To install and probably run Glassfish, however, you need a JDK. Off we go and install it with:

$ sudo apt-get install sun-java6-jdk

(and get demo, doc, source, too, while you're at it)

Ok, but now, how to make this JDK the default Java on the machine. Some tools are available, fortunately, and without much background research, we make use of them to make the switch:

$ sudo update-java-alternatives -s java-6-sun

Now, calling

$ java -version

shows Sun's java to be active.

Now you can download Glassfish, install and configure it. That's very well documented already.

Tidy Up, please tidy up here!

I've switched from Windows to Mac OS X about 2 years ago, at least at home, where I have enough influence to change things on a small scale. I've converted my mother's computer from Windows 95 to Mac a couple of years ago. We've upgraded from our PowerBook to the latest MacBook Pro four weeks ago. We have iPods, and soon the touchable version of it. We also own a Nano. We love Apple and the software on it. With one exception: Tidy Up! It's that program that makes me crazy. It's my fourth test run to clean up my iTunes library with it. Everything on a Mac is easy. TidyUp is not. I bought the full version because I believed the reviews in the Internet. That must all be great marketing talk from Hyperbolic Software, because it just does not work for me. It's not Tidy Up, it's Tidy Down!