Daniel E. Markle's Blog

Our family has made ice cream using this recipe for many years. It produces an ice cream with a fluffy texture which is quite tasty and unique but does not freeze well (it tends to become rock hard in the freezer). We have always used a hand-crank White Mountain churn for it. It turns into a whole family activity with someone turning the crank (we make a game out of never letting it stop), a drain hole opener (it is critical that the drain hole stay open unless you are trying to make salty ice cream), and a runner to add ice and rock salt as well as retrieve supplies as needed.

When storing preferences for applications on Java, there is a built in Preferences API. If you need full control of preference storage or need to change it from applications external to Java or manually, one of the options I discussed last year may be better (if you need an XML file in a specific location for example), but if you just need simple cross-platform preference storage, the built in option is ideal.

Usage Summary

import java.util.prefs.Preferences;

Preferences prefs = Preferences.userNodeForPackage( getClass() );

prefs.get("keyName", "default value");

prefs.put("keyName", "new value");

The JavaDoc for it is quite confusing, so try this tutorial on java.util.prefs.Preferences instead.

Netbeans 6 has been released. I have been using it since beta 1 and have found it an invaluable improvement over the old version. The editor and layout is improved, and subversion support is now built in. The major change in this release is the language support; Ruby support is now available, and there is a PHP plugin. I'll report as I try these other plugins over the next few weeks.