Month: September 2008

Again for Vista and SP1

After SP1 was installed 7 months after it was released my Vista started downloading updates on an hourly basis. It was like SP1 was too big and my Vista was constipated. After it was installed it installed a couple of other updates, restart, then it started downloading new updates immediately, and this repeated twice. Installed so far:

Off topic: SP1 required an amazing 4.5 GB?! Dudes at microsoft, my HDD is 80 GB, do you plan to fill it all up with this shitty operating system?!

My windows folder is 14 (fourteen !!!!) GIGABYTES. And I have to clean it up, because windows is unable to do that for me.

Vista's "lock user" feature

Sometimes I lock my machine using WinBtn+L.
Sometimes while locked, windows thinks Alt is pressed. So I can't write my password because certain characters invoke some commands.
It's really annoying. I have to press the control (gray ) buttons several times, sometimes this does not help I have to use "swich user" which is (as every single part of Vista) SLOW.

I should make a separate "Vista SUCKS" section.

JAX-WS, the knowledge I gathered during my research

Some notes I could later use.
A stack comparison of most (I don't see JAX-RPC) of the available Web Service stacks in Java: http://xfire.codehaus.org/Stack+Comparison
(Could be somehow biased since it's made by the guys that do one of the stacks).

https://metro.dev.java.net/ = JAX-WS+WSIT

JibX - fast XML processing tool, JAX-WS can't use it - it can only use JAXB.

SoapUI - cool tool for testing web services, as a standalone and as an eclipse plugin - www.soapui.org

WSIT - Java API for better integration with .NET WCF and the WS-I standards.

Windows Server did something so Microsoftish

It's 2 o'clock in the morning. I'm tired, I'm frustrated and I hate all that is Microsoft more than ever.

What happened.
Few hours ago there was a power surge. After the power was all back, my server started, I could ping it, but that was pretty much it. Nothing else worked.

I had to get a monitor at one past midnight to diagnose.
Long story short (it's 2 o'clock remember?) it came out that RRAS (Routing and remote access services) somehow started itself up to such an extent as to f*ck up my firewall, so my server went dead (network wise) - the ipnat.sys issue - very common it would seem.

After an hour of trial and error I fixed it using Safe Mode (Stopping the Firewall, starting RRAS, stopping RRAS, starting the Firewall, and the ICS afterwards). Fortunately neither the ICS, nor the Firewall lost their settings.

And..... I have to get up after three hour to drive to Greece.

I hate you microsoft software..

My eclipse shortcuts and tweaks

In a project where requirements change on a daily basis, refactoring is one's biggest friend.
I'm currently in such a project - not my kind of thing but reality sometimes sucks.
Anyhow, I've tried to look at it from the bright side.

I'm currently perfecting my refactoring skills in eclipse.

Here's what I can share.

Everybody knows about
Ctrl + Shift + R - find resource (file )
Ctrl + Shift + T - find type (class)

Alt+Shift+C - Change method signature

Alt+Shift+S - Context menu for source generation.


Alt+Shift+X, J - Launch current focused code as Java Console App
Alt+Shift+D, J - Debug current focused code as Java Console App
Ctrl + L - go to line - when watching stack traces. NEW
Ctrl + O - find method in class.   NEW
Ctrl + T - Hierarchy of a class (subclasses + base classes).   NEW

But do you know these:
Alt+Shift+X, Q - Launch current focused script as an Ant Build Script (focused on a target in the 'Outline' window launches only that target, very handy)
Ctrl + >, Ctrl + < - Navigates through warnings and errors in a source file. Extremely handy.

Ctrl + 1 - launches the solution box or whatever that's called.
Ctrl + 3 - finds any window.
Middle button closes tabs as in browsers (only IE does not do that) - VERY, VERY COOL. Ganymede (Eclipse 3.4) only.
Ctrl + E - list of all the open windows (by Joke). NEW
Ctrl + J - incremental search (like Ctrl + F, F3 in browsers (real browsers, IE can't do that)), then arrow up/down to go to next previous, Enter to stop (by rado). NEW

Ctrl + Shift + / - collapse all. NEW2
Ctrl + Shift + * - expand all. These are very nice in long classes. NEW2

Debugging
Ctrl + Shift + I - inspect selected source code while debuging.
The 'Display' window is my biggest friend - inside it you can write code and evaluate it with Ctrl + Shift + D (print result in the box) and Ctrl + Shift + I ( inspect the code in a context window.

That's for now, I'll update this regularly. If someone uses something regularly that is not here, please tell.

Young people, voting and Michael Moore

Michael Moore's new movie's gonna be out in a week. It's about his going to colleges and making young people vote 4 years ago. It's gonna be free for download.

In my own country young people don't vote, they don't care about politics. It's a kind of silent protest, they say.

To my fellow country men (The aforementioned young ones):
So somebody is f*cking you in the *** and all you do is silently protest?! What kind of behaviour is that?!

Take a little responsibility, you're going to live in this country for quite a while, not the elderly people (who vote).

Currently we're being governed by coalition of ex-communists and an ethnic party and we're the laughing stock of the EU.

You put under the same denominator the last two right and the last two left governments.

Please, shut up, read a little more and go and vote the next time. There aren't any good candidates, you say? CHOOSE THE LESSER EVIL. I'll bet that you won't vote for that ethnic party, right? We all dislike this guy, right?

Vote for the single reason of getting him out of the parliament, he has done enough harm.

Just vote, please.

My new favourite rapper.

He's like a parody version of Eminem.
The chosen topics.
The lack of delicacy discussing the topics.
The topics nobody wants to speak about.

I very well understand that this is a parody but it's an Eminem-styled parody. I connect because I recognize myself as the looser character in his Everyday Normal Guy 2.
Please, my one good reader, don't write nasty comments, please.

Some info on the guy:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jon_Lajoie

Some songs:
Everyday normal guy (favourite)
Everyday normal guy 2 (favourite, part 2)

Stay At Home Dad

S60 Sucks, The phone rulez

S60 is a software platform for mobile phones, running on Symbian OS.
I have to work with it since I got my new Nokia E71.
Well I don't know if it's Symbian or S60, but I don't like it.

First, I can't save my laptop as a trusted bluetooth device. So it asks me on every single operation if my laptop is trusted. WTF? My previous phone could do that.
Second, I can't see my IP while in a wireless connection. No such option. This is important to me.
Third, I can't find the control panel which is for the keyboard layouts installed. WTF? I can't find the control panel for bluetooth. I can't find the control panel for anything.
Fourth, the Cyrillic language layout is really weird. Yea, ok, it's actually Russian, but still, it's weird.
   MTEL, YOU BASTARDOS, MAKE A BULGARIAN PHONE, YOU LAZY FUCKERS, FOR ONCE DO SOMETHING ON YOUR OWN AND DO IT RIGHT.
Fifth, I can't get the flash card and plug it in, the phone has to be restarted. WTF? My previous phone could do that.
Sixth, The phone crashes too often. At least it reboots fast and goes right in the menu where it crashed. This is nice.
Seventh, I can't use the Cyrillic capital characters of М, Н, О, П in my address book, since the Address book crashes. It cannot list them, but the quick search works. WTF? My previous phone worked perfectly with Cyrrilic.
   Now my whole Address Book is in Latin. I don't like that. I want to use Cyrrilic. I'm really dissapointed.
Eighth, The software for editing the address book sucks. It's slow. Opening a contact list - 3-4 seconds. Saving it - 4-5 seconds. WTF?

These are the bad things, and they are driving me crazy. I'm waiting for an update. This is an example how Nokia can skrew such a nice phone with such a stupid OS.Do
Don't get me wrong I don't regret bying this phone and I'll find a way around all those things.

java.lang.Throwable, the "... 3 more" case, how to read it

We have the following:
(The code is taken from here http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.5.0/docs/api/java/lang/Throwable.html#printStackTrace())

HighLevelException: MidLevelException: LowLevelException
    at Junk.a(Junk.java:14)
    at Junk.main(Junk.java:4)
Caused by: MidLevelException: LowLevelException
    at Junk.c(Junk.java:24)
    at Junk.b(Junk.java:18)
    at Junk.a(Junk.java:12)
    ... 1 more
Caused by: LowLevelException
    at Junk.e(Junk.java:31)
    at Junk.d(Junk.java:28)
    at Junk.c(Junk.java:22)
    ... 3 more

What does ... 1 more or ... 3 more means?

This is what it means:

HighLevelException: MidLevelException: LowLevelException
    at Junk.a(Junk.java:14)
    at Junk.main(Junk.java:4)
Caused by: MidLevelException: LowLevelException
    at Junk.c(Junk.java:24)
    at Junk.b(Junk.java:18)
    at Junk.a(Junk.java:12)
    ... 1 more = (take the last line from the upper stack)
=> at Junk.main(Junk.java:4)

Caused by: LowLevelException
    at Junk.e(Junk.java:31)
    at Junk.d(Junk.java:28)
    at Junk.c(Junk.java:22)
    ... 3 more = (take the last 3 lines from the upper stack)
=>  at Junk.b(Junk.java:18)
    at Junk.a(Junk.java:12)
    at Junk.main(Junk.java:4) (taken from the upper upper stack)

Michael Moore

Michael Moore is a kind-of-a journalist, a filmmaker and a writer in the US. I have read and watched almost anything he did, going back even to "Roger and Me" (please search them up, I can't constantly write target="_blank"). He caught my attention with "Bowling for Columbine", a movie for some kids that armed themselves and killed some co-students and teachers in school. Especially the interview with Marylin Manson and the part where he mocks the locals claims that it was the bowling that put these kids to the idea.

Since then he got an Oscar, written a lot of stuff. He is not always absolutely objective, lets himself carried away sometimes but the personal touch makes him so likable.

He's in my blogroll now.

Chrome's EULA and Spying

Galcho
commented out in a previous post of mine that Google Chrome's EULA said something like
whatever I do with Chrome is property of Google. They of course revoked that and said it was a mistake. If it wasn't I would, obviously, have stopped using it.

Later on I read on the history of the browser and how A browser is very important to Google.
This brings me to another topic. How much info does any corp have about me? Google has a lot - mail, calendar, reader, search.....(there are claims that Google is misusing cookies so they can track anyone - gmail cookie used in search). I don't like the idea that a single entity has so much info about me. As much as I don't like my Government spying on me via the ISPs (an ongoing issue here). I don't trust my Government and I don't trust Google. But until now there's not much I can do. Google's services are really good and free. Maybe if I have some free time, I'll spend it on finding ways to make collection my private info a lot harder, especially for Google. I'll share the experience, of course.

Google Chrome, part II, processes

Here's how browser looks process wise:

They really do have multiple processes as they promised.

Update: Chrome just can't play cacao.fm

Update2: Firefox's new super-duper-nice search in history feature...

...is not in Chrome, too bad, it's a great feature.

Actually I don't see history in Chrome. I don't use it too often, but it's nice to have it.

Ctrl+Shift+T is working in Chrome, great

Google Chrome

The new browser from Google - Google Chrome - is out.

First impressions: the html editor in the blog is NOT working, no idea why. I have to write html, it's really annoying.
It's fast. I don't see anything that's that much different from firefox.
The plug-ins are missing, I miss them.

Update: It's really fast, but so was firefox before all the pages and plug-ins.
Drag and drop works really nice:



Writing html really sucks.

Update2: It has something like the Firebug plug-in:



It has a javascript debugger, or at least it says so - I couldn't see what it can do.
The interface is really minimalistic, Google Talk style, I enjoy it. I could browse through all the options in a single minute.
It has the firefox shortcuts, downloads (Ctrl+J).

Update3: In maximized mode it uses even the title bar for the tabs. Cool. The tab text is too short to show the full title bar 🙁
I REALLY HATE WRITING HTML, I'm going to post to the blog with firefox :((((((((((((
This thing is really fast.

Update4: The dream is over - it crashed (while opening an online radio):

Still, it's a great piece of software, especially the interface.

Did you know what 'Klaatu barada nikto' is?

I'm starting a new section "Did you know" where I'd share stuff I find interesting.

So, do you know what "Gort, Klaatu barada nikto" is?

It is considered the most famous science-fiction phrase ever. It has been quoted in almost all important science-fiction movies and not only.

It's from the 1951 movie called The Day the Earth Stood Still. It was said as a safe word to stop a robot from destroying the earth.
Gort was the name of the robot.

More on the subject: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klaatu_barada_nikto

Copyright policy: no rights reserved

I've just changed my copyright policy to: no rights reserved.
Not that I have something useful here.

I
find it really annoying that every body has some rights reserved on the
things they produce - from coca-cola to a newborn blogger. This is my
humble protest on the subject.

It's always better to ask than to enforce, so "if you mention my name, thank you".

MS Word 2007 shortcuts listing

When one presses Alt key while in MS Word 2007 the shortcuts for all the commands are listed:

When one enters one of the tabs with the given shortcut, a next level of shortcuts are displayed:

I first saw this feature in Joel's FogBugz:

http://www.fogcreek.com/FogBugz/docs/60/topics/basics/KeyboardShortcuts.html

It's a really nice feature for the Ribbon (the new MS Office interface) to have. Great stuff, guys at MS.
Cons for Word 2007 Shortcut feature: some of the shortcuts are with
really strange letters, some of the things don't display shortcuts, for
example, some stuff in the status bar.

Flex, Silverlight, Java what-ever and how Google sees it

There's Adobe Flex. There's Microsoft's Silverlight. There's Java's JavaFX. Maybe there are others.
These are platforms that would allow developers to put real applications in the browser. And not just the request-response model (http) and the async calls that javascript allows (ajax) and the modification of the DOM tree - SPI (Single Page Inteface - no wikipedia page for it). Or another way to put it - allow real applications to the user, while the browser is only the transport. The code is compiled, object-oriented, which makes is most-importantly much faster.
Pros: faster, a lot faster. developers write in real languages (javascript is a developer hell) - Silverlight is managed, Adobe's ActionScript is ECMA (which is not very promising, I don't know it in much detail, so I can't say), JavaFX is Java. The GUI definition is largely XML in most platforms.
Cons: plug-ins. Not standard. Different user interface and different rules for every platform. Compatibility issues with browsers, operating systems, elevation of rights (admin rights for install, elevated rights for execution).

Most modern web apps (gmail, youtube) exploit the browser to it's limits, my firefox just can't keep up (here and here).

What google thinks: make a browser that fixes all of the problems with the current browsers: most importantly speed, malware issues. Unfortunately developers will still have to write javascript. Fortunately, I'm not one of them. Fortunately, the model will stay open (html, javascript are no one's). Fortunately, the well-known rules of html/javascript pages will stay the same.

Their presentation of their new browser, called Chrome, is very ambitious:
http://books.google.com/books?id=8UsqHohwwVYC&printsec=frontcover#PPP1,M1
If they can do what they promise, I'm going to use it, I promise.
They hit exactly where current browsers fail (or at least with me) - speed, saparation of different pages (for some time I've been wanting to create multiple firefox processes, but don't know how), separation of plug-ins (to know who's fault it is), sandboxes, minimized rights, incognito mode.

I don't know much about Google Gears, but for offline reading of my feeds, it dissapointed me all the times I tried to do it.

JAX-WS wsgen tool

Now, fix this one:

...>wsgen SomeInterface -wsdl -cp .;more.jar
Problem encountered during annotation processing;
see stacktrace below for more information.
java.lang.NullPointerException
        at com.sun.tools.internal.ws.processor.modeler.annotation.WebServiceAP.isSubtype(WebServiceAP.java:418)
        at com.sun.tools.internal.ws.processor.modeler.annotation.WebServiceAP.isRemote(WebServiceAP.java:413)
        at com.sun.tools.internal.ws.processor.modeler.annotation.WebServiceVisitor.isLegalType(WebServiceVisitor.java:8
13)
        at com.sun.tools.internal.ws.processor.modeler.annotation.WebServiceVisitor.isLegalMethod(WebServiceVisitor.java
:644)
        at com.sun.tools.internal.ws.processor.modeler.annotation.WebServiceVisitor.methodsAreLegal(WebServiceVisitor.ja
va:624)
        at com.sun.tools.internal.ws.processor.modeler.annotation.WebServiceVisitor.isLegalImplementation(WebServiceVisi
tor.java:542)
        at com.sun.tools.internal.ws.processor.modeler.annotation.WebServiceVisitor.shouldProcessWebService(WebServiceVi
sitor.java:352)
        at com.sun.tools.internal.ws.processor.modeler.annotation.WebServiceVisitor.visitClassDeclaration(WebServiceVisi
tor.java:145)
        at com.sun.tools.apt.mirror.declaration.ClassDeclarationImpl.accept(ClassDeclarationImpl.java:95)
        at com.sun.tools.internal.ws.processor.modeler.annotation.WebServiceAP.buildModel(WebServiceAP.java:347)
        at com.sun.tools.internal.ws.processor.modeler.annotation.WebServiceAP.process(WebServiceAP.java:232)
        at com.sun.mirror.apt.AnnotationProcessors$CompositeAnnotationProcessor.process(AnnotationProcessors.java:60)
        at com.sun.tools.apt.comp.Apt.main(Apt.java:454)
        at com.sun.tools.apt.main.JavaCompiler.compile(JavaCompiler.java:258)
        at com.sun.tools.apt.main.Main.compile(Main.java:1102)
        at com.sun.tools.apt.main.Main.compile(Main.java:964)
        at com.sun.tools.apt.Main.processing(Main.java:95)
        at com.sun.tools.apt.Main.process(Main.java:85)
        at com.sun.tools.apt.Main.process(Main.java:67)
        at com.sun.tools.internal.ws.wscompile.CompileTool.buildModel(CompileTool.java:605)
        at com.sun.tools.internal.ws.wscompile.CompileTool.run(CompileTool.java:538)
        at com.sun.tools.internal.ws.util.ToolBase.run(ToolBase.java:56)
        at sun.reflect.NativeMethodAccessorImpl.invoke0(Native Method)
        at sun.reflect.NativeMethodAccessorImpl.invoke(NativeMethodAccessorImpl.java:39)
        at sun.reflect.DelegatingMethodAccessorImpl.invoke(DelegatingMethodAccessorImpl.java:25)
        at java.lang.reflect.Method.invoke(Method.java:597)
        at com.sun.tools.internal.ws.Invoker.main(Invoker.java:63)
        at com.sun.tools.internal.ws.WsGen.main(WsGen.java:30)
error: compilation failed, errors should have been reported

A NullPointerException from a tool bundled in the JDK, how serious is this? Too bad for the 150 000+ test the guys at Sun did.

"errors should have been reported"?, yea they have been, but SO WHAT?