R2D2 Translator

I have just received an email from a friend with an amazing feature: the R2D2 translator.

If you are a friki, freak, nerd or geek (like me?) probably this like you a lot.

A quieter theme for the eyes

I found this post (via DZone) pointing to a new NetBeans editor color theme, called Aloha, that is more quiet, not as highlighted as the default but similar to norway today theme.

A file format repository

Today, via Black Byte I found wosit.

The Wosit slogan is The programmer's file and data resources. It contains a lot of file format specifications categorized on different areas: music, GIS, image, etc.

Probably you can read many of these file formats through a library but if you are who program the library you are welcome to take a look.

Some notes on GlassFish v2, JDK6 and JDBC4 (PostgreSQL)

These are my today experiences (really my today headaches) porting a couple of applications from GlassFish v1 running with JDK5 to GlassFish v2 running with JDK6.

The applications was developed with NetBeans 5 and consist of a couple of EJB modules and a couple of web applications using the VisualWebPack in the NetBeans 5 (JSF).

First, I downloaded and installed JDK6 and GlassFish v2.

Before deploying the application you must take into account that my JDBC driver in GF1 (running JDK5) was a JDBC3 PostgreSQL driver. This driver is compiled for JDK5, thus I need to download and install (in the GF2 server) the JDBC4 version (not completed yet).

Next, I have created some database resources using the JDBC4 drivers. This works but generates a lot of warnings when application runs. To avoid them you need to put this option in your resources JDBC30DataSource=true.

Finally I have developed the applications. I this step I found strange behaviors and some server crashing problems. After trying 1000 thing I found that the problem was in a hyperlink in a JSF page. For an unknown reason, changing the hyperlink by a button (mantaining the same action) resolve the problem.

If you are working, like me, with PostgreSQL I would like to point this link about sequences:
http://wiki.glassfish.java.net/Wiki.jsp?page=FaqPostgresSequences

Wikia is here !!!

Wikia is the wiki search engine of wikipedia author. The results of the searches are based on people , in the same way the wikipedia is based on people.
Wikia's search engine concept is that of trusted user feedback from a community of users acting together in an open, transparent, public way. Of course, before we start, we have no user feedback data. So the results are pretty bad. But we expect them to improve rapidly in coming weeks, so please bookmark the site and return often.

It has a lot of interesting things, like the miniarticles, people matching the same search, different indexes and the "next results button" (usually we don't see far away than the first ten o twenty entries).

NetBeans and the suite chaining

Lately I was fighting with the suite chaining concept. Although you need to do some thing manually (there is no automatic task in NB) it is very straightforth to do it.
Sorry, but I think for reading the next lines you must be familiarized with the NetBeans jargon. It is not too much complex but sounds you as a foreign language you can't understand. You can start reading this first.

As the documentacion in the $NETBEANS/harness/README file says:
Suppose you have one platform P1, say the bare NetBeans Platform. Then you have a module suite S1 with modules M1a...M1z which uses P1. Now it may happen that you want another suite S2 with modules M2a...M2z to depend on S1 as well as P1. This is possible, though not yet trivial to set up. Basically, you will make a new platform P2 by building S1 + P1.

The idea is create a module suite S2, instead of based in the NetBeans platform, based on a derived platform build from a previous module suite S1.

Ok, that sounds easy but what about a real study case? Well, to explain it I prefer to point this post in the Fabrizzio's blog: NetBeans RCP - beyond suite chaining.

Emulating a click event on XWindow

A couple of weeks ago I found this old peace of code to emulate a mouse click button event on XWindows systems.
If somebody has programmed with IDL or executed a distributed program with its virtual machine, you'll have noticed that you must click obligatory in the eternal IDL splash srceen.
Well, this code makes this for you. You can create an script that launch your IDL program and a few second later execute this little program.


/path_to_idl/idl -vm=you_program.sav
sleep 3
xboton


I want to point that the next code has HTMLified thanks to C++2HTML:

/* Name: xboton
 * Author: Antonio Santiago [asantiagop(at)gmail(dot)com]
 * Description: xboton emulates a click with a mouse pointer in the middle
 *              of screen.
 * Compile: gcc -o xboton xboton.c -lX11 -L/usr/X11R6/lib
 */

#include <stdio.h>
#include <string.h>

#include <X11/Xlib.h>
#include <X11/Xos.h>
#include <X11/Xutil.h>

int main() {

 Display *display;

 Window root, win, subwin;
 XEvent event;
 XWindowAttributes attrib;   
 unsigned int width, height;

 
 /* Open a display connection and get root window size. */
 display = XOpenDisplay(NULL);
 root =  RootWindow(display, DefaultScreen(display));

 if( XGetWindowAttributes(display, root, &attrib) == 0 )

  printf("Error: Can't retrieve root window size\n");
 
 width = attrib.width;
 height = attrib.height;

 
 /* Move mouse pointer to middle if screen and get the ID of
     * the window at this point.
  */ 
 XWarpPointer(display, None, root, 0,0,0,0, width/2, height/2);

    bzero(&event,sizeof(XEvent));

 event.type = ButtonPress;

 event.xbutton.button = Button1;
 event.xbutton.same_screen = True;

 
 XQueryPointer(display, root,
  &event.xbutton.root, &event.xbutton.window,
  &event.xbutton.x_root, &event.xbutton.y_root,
  &event.xbutton.x, &event.xbutton.y,
  &event.xbutton.state);

 event.xbutton.subwindow = event.xbutton.window;
 event.xbutton.state = Button1Mask;

 
 
 /* Walk down through window hierachy to find youngest child */ 
 while (event.xbutton.subwindow) {
  event.xbutton.window = event.xbutton.subwindow;

  XQueryPointer(display, event.xbutton.window,
   &event.xbutton.root, &event.xbutton.subwindow,
   &event.xbutton.x_root, &event.xbutton.y_root,
   &event.xbutton.x, &event.xbutton.y,
   &event.xbutton.state);
 }

 /* Send a ButtonPress and ButtonRelease (of button 1) to the middle screen window */
 if( XSendEvent(display, event.xbutton.subwindow, True, ButtonPressMask, &event) == 0)

   printf("Error: XSendEvent error on ButtonPress event\n");
 XFlush(display);
 
 event.type = ButtonRelease;

 event.xbutton.state = Button1Mask;
 if( XSendEvent(display, event.xbutton.subwindow, True, ButtonPressMask, &event) == 0)

   printf("Error: XSendEvent error on ButtonRelease event\n");
 XFlush(display);
}

Be happy don't worry.

Working with wizards

Looking for information about how pass data among the panels of a wizards, I found these links posts in the Geertjan's Weblog about how wizards works in NB:

How wizards work: part 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5.

Not another bubble

I found this video referenced in the Emilian blog, but don't worry we are not living another bubble.

Do I want a Mac?

Sure, I think not ;) I prefer a Linux box, but if you like the Mac LaF take a look here.



Note to configure Grub and Usplash in Ubuntu there exists an easy way called "StartUp-Manager" package.