Daniel E. Markle's Blog

I have been trying various specialty coffee drinks lately, after years of sticking with plain brewed black coffee. Being into the hot part of summer, my primary focus has been trying iced coffee drinks. Although I enjoy some of the sweeter versions like Frappuccinos occasionally, I find them far too sweet to drink regularly.

Visiting a Dunkin Donuts on the way home late one dark and stormy night, to partake of their invariably healthy pastries, I noticed their iced coffee selections. I have found Dunkin Donut's version of black iced coffee fits my desire for a sugar free caffeinated drink quite nicely. They advertise it as double brewed, and it is indeed quite strong, so don't order it black if you don't like the taste of coffee.

MacHeist is at it again, with a whole new set of shareware applications being sold as a bundle. Although there does not appear to be a charity benefit this time, there are many more applications in the bundle. All applications have been unlocked at this point, so you are assured everything in the bundle. The offer expires midnight EDT on Thursday, July 19.

Zimbra lacks a calendar feature commonly used by serious Outlook and Entourage users, the ability to configure reminders for individual calendar entries. The workaround is to create a 'reminder' calendar entry, which does not work well as it requires manually changing the reminder if the original appointment changes. If you are a current or prospective Zimbra user and would like to have this feature added, please vote for this bug. On a related note, the Zimbra Toaster (which provides popup notification of new mail) does not support calendar reminders, which is documented in this bug.

In the area where I reside power fluctuations and outages are numerous, so having a UPS is crucial when doing serious computer work. When my old Belkin F6C800 unit recently died a malodorous death, I decided to return to APC. Browsing the local Best Buy, I saw a Back-UPS XS 1500 LCD on the shelf with, as the name implies, an LCD display. Such a geeky feature was beyond resistance for me.

I use a Back-UPS XS 1500 (without the LCD) for various machines downstairs, and it works well. The only issue with it is the noise; it beeps every time the power fluctuates with no way to turn it off. On some days when my power is particularly bad, this results in perpetual beeping every few minutes. Obviously they received many customer complaints about this, as the XS 1500 LCD has two buttons on the front; 'Power' and 'Mute'.

Update: The display readings for this device are proving to be inaccurate when tested. Do not rely on the readings from this device.

When using the subversion client built into Netbeans 5.5 on OS X with the svn+ssh protocol, it ignores the username entered and always uses the logged in user's username. This occurs both when entering a username in the field for it and when using a url like svn+ssh://username@server.com/svnrepo. Fortunately if you encounter this problem, there is a workaround:

svn+ssh://username@username@server.com/svnrepo

Netbeans only strips the first username@, leaving the second one in place. Everything then works as the correct URL gets properly embedded in the right places.

In homage to the movie WarGames, DEFCON encourages the player to replay cold war doomsday scenarios, sitting in a bunker commanding forces to destroy the enemy using silo, submarine, and bomber based nuclear weapons. Unlike other games which force the player to wage war on the developer's platform of choice, this game lets you destroy the world on Linux and Mac OS X as well as Windows.

To add some strategy instead of simple destruction, viable defenses are available if used correctly. One example are the silos which fire interceptor missiles, but only when not firing nuclear missiles themselves, preventing poorly planned attacks from hitting their targets. This creates interesting strategies and bluffs to be used against other human players.

Shall we play a game?

Looking for an easy way to launch a browser window from your swing application? The easiest solutions I found without using a library involved JNLP; not a good answer for my cross platform Swing applications. There are quite a few solutions, but I like Browser Launcher 2. Only 92kb, it seems rather good at finding the user selected system default browser, and its ease of use is hard to deny:

BrowserLauncher().openURLinBrowser("http://example.com");

I have been using the PDFBox library when working with PDF files, most commonly to extract the text for lucene indexing and generating thumbnails conveniently in Java. Recently I have started to see this error when generating thumbnails, which come out as properly sized plain white pages:

java.io.IOException: Unknown stream filter:COSName{JBIG2Decode}

Some of the latest PDFs, in this case from a new Xerox copier (which scans into PDF format), generates black and white images in PDFs using the JBIG2 format. Java has no built-in support for JBIG2 yet, and building a handler for this image type into the PDFBox library isn't an option for the development team at this time.

In my quest to avoid high fructose corn syrup (HFCS), one of the items I most frequently consume has recently become loaded with it; jams and jellies. I consume these instead of butter or worse, colorized processed vegetable oil (also known as margarine) whenever possible. I have found quite a few delicious alternative jellies with no high fructose corn syrup (and more actual fruit), but not grape.

Ironically while eating at McDonald's this morning I noticed their grape jelly has no HFCS. A small comfort perhaps compared to the other pernicious items I am consuming on my occasional lapses when visiting that facility, but at least it is something.

I made a purchase with Google Checkout earlier this week and was really impressed with the user experience. While doing some research into using it, I found they are offering free checkout services until 2008. This seems to be a killer deal for budding businesses; setting up a merchant account and transaction fees are a considerable obstacle for new businesses.

It does however lack Interchange support. It is possible to use the basic embedded-in-page checkout with Interchange now, but this HTML option doesn't provide as nice of an experience for the user. It also requires more administration work as the retailer has to manually process orders using Google's checkout site. Building and contributing Google Checkout XML interface support for Interchange may be in my future.

There is a plague of tiny sans-serif fonts being used for body text on the web. I find sans-serif to be difficult enough to read without it being tiny as well, and am rather certain the prevalence of this type of text is one of the primary reasons people find it uncomfortable to read book-length material on computer screens; that and cheap low-ppi (pixels per inch) monitors. Even I find sans-serif fonts more readable on low-ppi monitors, as such monitors reproduce serifs poorly, but I can't read for a long period of time on those either.

There are hacks available to change sans-serif fonts on-screen to larger or (as I use in cases where I will be reading a lot) serif fonts using CSS. For most sites which I only browse occasionally I find NoSquint more practical. This handy Firefox plugin allows you to conditionally resize text on pages in an easy and site-specific way, and it remembers your size settings on the next site visit.

Quotes have been displayed on my Google home page for a few months, but today one was shown which really caught my attention.

You can't wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club.
    - Jack London

Perhaps it was not what the author intended, but it made me consider the past few years. I have seen, heard, and even manufactured many great ideas; most of which have gone nowhere due to a lack of time and/or effort to pursue their completion. This quote is a good reminder and motivator to push harder.

After the Harrisburg Java User's Group meeting tonight, two items in particular came up in the post-presentation discussions which I am mentioning here mainly for my own reference, but will likely be valuable to anyone reading this doing Java programming.

The Java 2 Platform, Standard Edition 5.0 Trouble-Shooting and Diagnostic Guide is a comprehensive guide to the tools that are available as part of JDK5 to analyze Java programs. Interestingly many of these tools do not exist on Windows, but they are in OS X as well as the mentioned Linux and Solaris.

Available as part of the stock Java 5 standard libraries, the JSR 166 Concurrency Utilities allow the building of many common concurrency models without the complication of doing such programming from scratch. Concurrent programming is becoming important as more cores become increasingly dominant in modern computers.

A date chooser is a frequent element needed when building Swing applications. I have been using JCalendar widgets for my needs. They have an excellent selection of widgets to fit most needs, including separate month and year choosers for cases where you don't need whole dates (like credit card months and years) licensed under the LGPL open source license.

These work well with Netbeans. Make a JCalendar library using the Library Manager, then add the library to your Swing widgets palette. Use Tools, Palette Manager, Swing/AWT Components, then click on Add from Library to allow drag and drop of these widgets in Matisse.

When using scratchbox (a cross-compilation toolkit), be very careful when moving or deleting user data from the /scratchbox/users directory. There are hard links to /dev, /sys, and other important directories there after adding users. Recursive commands are extremely dangerous in these user directories. The LILO boot results at the left were caused after moving scratchbox into its own partition using recursive commands.

/scratchbox/sbin/sbox_umount_all is your friend.