NetBeans 6.5 and Python

2008-11-24 12:08

NetBeans 6.5 is out! You can run it with the Nimbus look and feel too! There's also an Early Access plugin for Python. All very nice.

I recently had occasion to play with some Python at work (a small script to do some configurations, and I didn't want to do them in bash), so I took the time to get all of this set up. It's all so very easy and not worth writing about. However I thought that the interactive debugger (which is awesome, btw) has a small issue that needs resolving. Mean-time, here's a work-around.

Switching to Java JDK 6u10

Michael Lockhart

2008-10-30 09:52

I've been using 6u10 beta for a while and keeping 6u3 as my main JDK. It's also the default JDK for NetBeans but now that update 10 of Mustang is out of beta, it's time for me to ditch 6u3 and swtich to 6u10 final.

NetBeans turns 10

Michael Lockhart

2008-10-21 13:25

It's NetBeans' 10th birthday and to celebrate I thought I'd write a quick blog post about how I use the NetBeans IDE to develop Dvorcode.

"generic" types: what's in a name?

Michael Lockhart

2008-09-10 14:00

I've been stumbling over Java's generic types for a while now... I think I finally understand what my problem is:

They should be called specific types, or parametrised-collections!

Stripping tags from ogg Vorbis files

Michael Lockhart

2008-08-26 16:05

I have a bunch of free Ogg Vorbis audio files that I've downloaded from Kahvi.org. They're great! But recently they've been including cover art within the files, which breaks Windows Media Player (it can't handle the very long tags of binhex-coded JPGs).

Since I rather like WMP's integration in windows (keyboard shortcuts), and Amarok isn't quite ready for win32, I thought I'd find a way to strip the troublesome tags from the data files rather than change to another player.

Here's a quick-and-dirty shell hack to remove the tags from the files and get them playable by daft players such as Windows Media Player

Cascaded revision control strategy

Michael Lockhart

2008-08-21 10:45

Okay, this isn't rocket-science, and in fact it's not even my idea (heard it on the FLOSS POD about Git). A problem with centralised repository systems such as Subversion (which is used on SourceForge) is that you need network access to do many things, and also to just save your work. You can't do commits to the repo' while on the train, for instance (which is where I do most of my hacking).

One option is to switch to a distributed revision system, such as Git or Mercurial. I may do that some day, but right now is not a good time for me to be learning a new revision system. Plus to have SourceForge host my project in Hg (for instance) means installing it myself and blah-blah-blah. Then there's IDE integration to consider...

I want to have my cake and eat it too.

Project: Dvorcode

Michael Lockhart

2008-08-15 09:50

I've just finished hacking together a simple little program to transcode my "dvorcodes" for when entering on a QWERTY keyboard. I've created a new project on SourceForge and I've uploaded the code and a pair of pre-compiled executable JARs (one for Java 5 and also a re-worked version that's been tested on Java 1.4.2).

Unicode chars between Emacs/X11 cygwin and Win32

Michael Lockhart

2008-06-27 12:19

I'm using Emacs/X11 on cygwin as my main editor (when stuck on work's machine) and Emacs 22's Unicode support really rocks. However, getting it to pass unicode between the kill ring and Windows /X11 clipboard doesn't work out-of-the-box (mainly because Emacs thinks it's on a Unix host). The fix is easy though:

Pretty-printing XML with Emacs' NXML-mode

Michael Lockhart

2008-06-26 12:46

Did you ever get a stream of XML out of a log file, or in a data stream, and it's all mashed together without line-breaks so that it just appears as gobble-de-gook? If there's a data error (not an XML parsing error) then you have to read it so that you can find where the error is, but you don't have XML-spy and NetBeans is overkill or takes forever to fire up...

Emacs to the rescue! Benjamin Ferrari wrote this increadibly useful (and simple) elisp function to pretty-print a block of XML code:

Solaris X11 and Dvorak simplified keyboard layout

Michael Lockhart

2008-06-18 14:00

I've recently been playing with OpenSolaris and Solaris Express DE running in VirtualBox. They're fine so far (except audio isn't working) but I stumbled on a usability issue that was nearly a show-stopper: dratted QWERTY layouts! The GNOME GUI for switching to Dvorak doesn't work, and setxkbmap₍₁₎ can't find the rules file for dvorak either (they don't seem to be installed where the man page indicates)...