blog.leenarts.net

More details on the dutch trading site Marktplaats.

hoekbank-chaise-longue-rood

Edit:
It sold on january 29th.

I was planning on live blogging the J-Fall conference I am today.

Well, after losing two complete posts due to crashes and problems in the Wordpress app, I gave up.

Mac OSX Snow Leopard has revived the Services menu.

I’ve implemented a really simple Service called “Open Terminal Here”. It’s a small service which becomes available in the context menu of every file and folder in the Finder with an entry called “Open Terminal Here”.

It’s function is really simple, it activated the Terminal application and changes the current directory to selected directory or the containing directory, depending whether you selected a file or folder.

The linked zip file contains a file named: “Open Terminal Here.workflow”
If you would like to change the name appearing in your services menu, just change the name of the file to something else. make sure the extension remains the same. For example: “Any other Name.workflow”.

After you are happy with the services name, copy the resulting file to the directory “Library/Services” in your user’s home directory. Now you can open a Terminal window at the location you’ve just selected, it works for multiple selections too.

Here’s the link to the zip file: Open Terminal Here 0.2.zip

Oh just a little tip, to open the current Terminal.app path you’re at into a Finder window, just type “open .” followed by a return. (Yes, that’s 4 characters, a space and finally a dot.)

Some people have reported some issues while installing this service. Please see the comments for a workaround by j.g. Owen.

Version 0.2:
-should fix a localization problem.

I’ve also created a SVN repository for this little bit of code: http://leenarts.net/svn/opensource/Open%20Terminal%20Here/
When asked for a username and password, just enter empty strings.

This is the first big issue i’ve seen with Snow Leopard so far.

Nothing to bad for me for now, but I discovered this while loading the intranet site at my work. The welcome page contains a Silverlight applet. Removing Silverlight from my internet pluging folder resolved the issue.

I’m guessing Microsoft will have a solution for this pretty soon.

Friday Joseph Darcy announced through a blog post that Project Coin is final.

Project Coin is just one of the changes coming to JDK 7. But, since the changes in Project Coin are all small changes to the Java language, every single Java developer will have to deal with these coming changes.

• It’s looking like we can use Strings in switch statements:

  static boolean booleanFromString(String s) {
    switch(s) {
      case "true":
        return true;
      case "false":
        return false;
    }
    throw new IllegalArgumentException(s);
  }  

• Automated Resource Blocks, Josh Bloch proposed a construct like the one below:

  try (BufferedReader br = new BufferedReader(new FileReader(path)) {
    return br.readLine();
  }

  instead of:

   BufferedReader br = new BufferedReader(new FileReader(path));
   try {
     return br.readLine();
   } finally {
     br.close();
   }

• Improved Type Inference, the diamond operator. Instead of:

  Map <String, List <String> anagrams = new HashMap <String, List <String>();

  you can do:

  Map <String, List <String> anagrams = new HashMap <>();

• Simplified VARARG method invocation:

  static <T> List <T> asList(T... elements) { ... }
  
  static List <Callable <String> stringFactories() {
    Callable <String> a, b, c;
    ...
    *// Warning: ** uses unchecked or unsafe operations *
    return asList(a, b, c);
  }

  After this change:

  *// Warning: ** enables unsafe generic array creation *
  static <T> List <T> asList(T... elements) { ... }
  
  static List <Callable <String> stringFactories() {
    Callable <String> a, b, c;
    ...
    return asList(a, b, c);
  }

• Something with better literal integers, can’t seem to find the details at the moment.
• And language support for JSR 292. But this one is only interesting when dealing with dynamic languages.

Today I had a bit of a fuss with JBoss and SQL Server. For some reason, when I declare an entity with an Id field, the persistency layer tries to push a bad query to the database.

Let me explain.

I’ve got an entity sort of looking like this:

@Entity
public class Contract {

@Id
@GeneratedValue(strategy = GenerationType.Identity)
private int contractId;
...
}

When tryin to persist this through the entity manager SQL trace on MS SQL show a query somewhat looking like:

insert into Contract (contractid, ...) values (null, ...)

You see, a null value. Sounds reasonable, I didn’t set any value on the contractid field. BUT the persistency layer should not try to insert anything into the contractid column, because MSSQL doesn’t allow it. The above SQL results in a “DEFAULT or NULL are not allowed as explicit identity values.” I’m not sure what to try next though, everywhere I looked on the internet, all examples boil down too: “Something similar should work in MS SQL too, but I haven’t tested that…”

Better luck tomorrow. For now, I googled my brains out trying to find anything helpfull.

Anybody out there have any suggestions?

Update on the next day:
It turns out that the problem was the dialect configured in the Hibernate properties in the persistence.xml. By default our development environment enters the right value for Hypersonic DB, while it should actually be like this:

<property name="hibernate.dialect" value="org.hibernate.dialect.SQLServerDialect"/>

And now it all works. A default SQL Server 2005 with JBoss and the latest MSSQL JDBC driver, all running EJB3.

I’ve updated Wordpress to 2.8 last night. I haven’t seen any problems myself so far. But if you do notice something, please let me know.

Which reminds me, does the mail form still work after this update… I’ll go check that right now.

.
.
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It still works.

Phew, back from the JavaOne 2009 again.

First time I’ve been there. And boy could you feel the recession at the JavaOne… I think the number of visitors was at an all time low. Also in San Francisco itself recession was around you. Loads and loads of properties available for lease or sale.

But me and my colleagues did our best to support the global and local economy by living large. Besides the conference we did all sorts of fun activities. I even biked the Golden Gate the last Friday afternoon.

I also learned a valuable lesson when returning from another time-zone. When I got home I did some things and then went to my girl’s place. I should’ve asked her to keep me awake at all costs. Sunday I sat down on her couch and I kind of instantly fell asleep. I paid the price on Monday and Tuesday. Fortunately my employer was very understanding about Monday and Tuesday I’ll recover by working a few extra hours this week or next week.

More to come later. Suffice to say that on record nobody from Sun was allowed to spill any details on the Oracle/Sun merger. I understood of the record that there will be another JavaOne next year. Let’s hope that by then it is clear what will happen with Java, cause right now it’s anybodies guess what Oracle has in store for us. I’m expecting a whole lot, but it is still a bit early to say what exactly Oracle will keep and what Oracle will throw away. I do think JavaFX is here to stay though, the new JavaFX 1.2 is a major improvement compared to the 1.1 release. Check Paul Bakker’s entry on JavaFX for more details.

Too bad the assistant of Jonathan Swartz didn’t allow my camera to focus properly.

Also many thanks to Bert, Paul, Marcel and Hans for being such great travel companions throughout the week.

Something I ran into on a system of a relative.

When running AVG 8’s outbound mail scanner and your ISP does not require you to provide a username and password when connecting for an outbound SMTP session…

Make sure that you do NOT check the checkbox in the SMTP settings dialog near the username and password field in ThunderBird. If you do, you probably have trouble sending email.

This seems to only happen with AVG 8 or later when you check the scan outgoing messages option in AVG system tray application.

It seems Oracle has put forward a bid on SUN Microsystems. Sun apparently has accepted this offer and both parties are now in final negotiations.

Personally I didn’t see this one coming. The IBM/Sun brush a short while ago was kind of obvious to me. Still a bit of a surprise, but yeah IBM absorbing SUN I can dig that.

Now Oracle has stepped up to the plate and dumped a load of money on the table. Oracle never has been my favourite when it came to Java related technology. Lots of cool demo’s that are hard to reproduce in real life situations if you ask me. Also Oracle doesn’t give me that welcoming feeling when getting into contact with them. I guess we’ll just have to wait and see how this ordeal is going to affect Java in general.

I see a lot of competition between IBM and Oracle in the future. Because let’s just face it, is there any other big Java player to speak of if this deal gets finalised? There just aren’t any other vendors that could offer a complete no holds barred JEE stack besides those two big names.