JSR List as OS X dashboard widget

The Specification numbers of specs created via Java Community Process: Java Specification Request, AKA JCP JSR or just JSR, are often hard to remember.

A nice description of communication problems arising from this can be found in this post in blog of Adriaan Bloem:

I’ve recently had several conversations that went something like this. A vendor told me, “we’ve added JSR-186 support,” (confusing it with JSR-168, which is not uncommon). So I replied, “you mean the JCR?” (guessing they may have meant JSR-170. ) To which they said “yes, the JSR.”
[mvmn remark: JSR-170 is Content Repository for Java, AKA Java Content Repository or JCR]

So I’ve decided to actually make a complete JSR “cheatsheet”, featuring current state of list of JSRs from JCP site.
The form of implementation was chosen as HTML/JS, “packed” as Mac OS Dashboard Widget (although it can be opened in browser as usual HTML page) – I had some free time and wanted to finally try making a dashboard widget.
And here it is: bundled and source code. And I guess you’ve noticed already the screenshot at the beginning of the post.

The widget doesn’t look very “hot” for now, and doesn’t resize, which is not very good, but it’s a very first try, so be forgiving. I might improve it in future in case somebody finds it useful (and is too lazy to fix things [him/her]self (-: ).

And a small lesson learned about widget making: the OS X Property List Editor sucks? is tricky – when creating with it Width and Height properties in Info.plist file for your widget you might find that they don’t take effect and widget has default size. The cause of this in my case was that Property List Editor created values for those properties with type String, but they are expected to be Integer.
So open your Info.plist in text or XML editor, and if you see something like:

<key>Height</key>
<string>170</string>

be sure to change it to

<key>Height</key>
<integer>170</integer>

(and same for Width, of course).

UPD: Known issue – clicking on ">>" external links (they lead to JSR website) closes the widget )-: , but doesn’t open the browser for linked page \-: /-: .

What happend?

According to stats I rarely have more than 1-2 visits per day, and suddenly I’ve got 40 visits yesterday!
I wonder what happened? Attack of crawlers/bots? Or just some error in WP stats module?

See below (under the “cut”) for stats graph “screenshot”.

Windows shell lang neckbreak

Now I have one very good reason to never install anything again in “Program Files (x86)” folder where 64-bit Windows XP usually puts 32-bit apps. The reason is closing bracket character “)” in path, which in combination with “special” behavior of windows cmd.exe shell can (and will) give you a lot of pain in the neck if you do shell scripting (under Win AKA batch scripting). And even if you don’t do shell scripting yourself, some shell scripts that you or any soft you use might need to run, may break.

Eclipse quirks

In Eclipse 3.3 (Europa) When installing Maven plugin (or just doing software update), do not update GEF SDK to 3.5.1 or… all server adapters except for Tomcats and Basic HTTP server will stop working )-:
And you won’t be able to uninstall it in configuration managing window ))-:
Make sure you have GEF 3.3.2.
(Took me couple of hours to find what exactly was causing the problem with the Weblogic adapter I needed )-: )

Linksys WRT54GL automated DHCP renew

I’ve been having trouble with my Internet connection at home – from time to time the connection stalled and I had to make router renew IP via DHCP to get connection back (any my router is Linksys WRT54GL).

Don’t know whose fault it is – router or provider (I blame provider because this tends to happen more often at night, and I don’t think my router has a clock in it (-; ), but I’m not that good at networks to find the problem and fix it (especially if it’s at provider side – I can never convince them that something that happens “once in a while… oh wait, it just happened, yes!” (-: is their fault).

So I decided to make a little program that would do this for me - check Internet connection on timely basis, and make router renew IP if connection is dead (by sending POST request to it’s web interface page), so I wouldn’t have to do it myself (and also could leave downloads for night (-: ).

Terminal… (-:

- Why is terminal called a terminal?
- Because it’s a terminal stage of software usability…

—–
Not that I don’t like working in terminal, mind you, but for “average PC user” the picture is ~ like this I guess (-:

SOLR NOT condition trick

Apache SOLR, an “open source enterprise search server”, demonstrates indecently inconsistent and illogical handling of NOT conditions in it’s queries (like “x:1 AND NOT x:2” producing 0 results, yet “x:1 AND (NOT x:2)” producing correct results etc).

We couldn’t play with braces because our conditions are autogenerated, so we needed a generic solution for this.

Fortunately, workaround has been found for this with simple Googling. Instead of querying for “… AND/OR (NOT [condition])” just use “… AND/OR (*:* NOT [condition])” or “… AND/OR (*:* AND NOT [condition])“.

LibContainer

LibContainer – an Eclipse plugin that may come handy.

LibContainer allows one to add a whole folder containing jars/zips to build path, meaning each jar/zip in the specified folder (and, optionally, it’s subfolders) would be added to build path of your Eclipse Java project. This is very handy ’cause you won’t hassle with adding/removing each of your dependencies files to and from build path manually.

(Sounds like a basic feature, right? But, unfortunately, it is not part of default Eclipse functionality. I wonder why – it should definitely be there).

Сopyright marasmus #N

A bit of old news I missed… (original article dated 4-th may 2009)

Another relapse of copyright marasmus.
Apparently, the copyright paranoia is incurable.

Quoting the original text from BoingBoing.net:

Over on the Sire Records web site, they have a big page full of music videos from all their artists… Except that if you actually click on any of them to play, they’ve *all* been taken down for copyright infringment… by Warner Music Group, Sire’s parent company.
Their long arm of the law has stretched all the way around the internet to spank themselves in the ass.

Hilarious!

Maudlin of the Copyleft Audiophile

One of the problems with music “piracy”, often named by copyright advocates, is that musicians themselves won’t have money to pay for studio time and other recording related services. I’ve been thinking about this from the copyleft point of view, and had an idea of “record pre-order”: the fans that ask for new album pay for it before the creation/recording starts. If in alleged time the sum is enough to do recording, the process starts. Otherwise everyone gets back his money and all the participants go home with nothing.
I didn’t really think it is possible in practice, because this kind of scheme requires decent level of “audiophile culture” from fans and decent organization from band/artist. On the other hand – who knows, maybe it already works for some bands. Anyway, since I’m not the quickest person on this planet, someone probably had already tried it.

Recently I’ve learned that the great Maudlin of the Well band, which has disbanded some time ago, reformed and released a new album. Great news!
But even more pleasant and surprising was that the album is officially available for free download (including lossless formats) because it’s recording was completely paid of fan pre-pays/donations (but still you may donate to the musicians themselves to reward them for their time and effort). So there is at least one completely working example of the above mentioned idea in practice.