November 30, 2004
Presentations and iPod Photo!
ZappTek have come up with some software to convert your powerpoint, PDF and keynote presentations to images which can be automatically uploaded to your iPod Photo via iTunes.
Engadget has a tutorial about how to do this manually as well.
Combine this with the navipod, when it supports the iPod photo and you'd have a remote control for queuing your slides, even with background music :)
November 29, 2004
Filesystem from files!
Freshmeat is running an interesting tutorial about how to format and mount an arbitrary file as a filesystem on your Linux box.
Rather than using a physical drive, this lets you experiment with newer & alternative filesystems, including cryptographic ones, and things like ACL, etc.
Quite interesting.
Enlightenment E17 released!
Enlightenment E17 has been released. Some of the screenshots look quite nice, and there's even a movie showing it in action :)
Looking forward to giving it a whirl on my desktop.
Eclipse as a Gnome development platform!
Fernando has been playing around with using Eclipse CDT as a development environment for Gnome.
The results looks quite promising:
November 23, 2004
Commons VFS and Excalibur SourceResolver!
Just added a patch to Excalibur JIRA that adds support for using Commons VFS as a protocol engine in the Excalibur SourceResolver project.
Commons VFS supports quite a range of protocols, using CommonsVFSSource/Factory, they're all now available in the SourceResolver as well :)
Currently only the Source interface is implemented (ie. read-only), but I'll add support for Modifiable and Traversable Source soon.
What does this all mean? Well, anyone using the SourceResolver component (directly or via a framework like Fortress or Cocoon, etc) can now read from sources using any of the supported Commons VFS protocols, including for example CIFS, SFTP, WebDAV, BZIP2, and more.
November 22, 2004
X.org under Debian Sarge
Just installed X.org on my Debian Sarge system. Awesome, using transset and xcompmgr you can add window shading, transparency, window fading, etc, to your desktop for some great eye candy effects :)
Installing X.org was quite easy, I followed the instructions available here, aside from compilation time, it was done in just a few minutes.
November 12, 2004
November 11, 2004
November 09, 2004
Mozilla Firefox 1.0 Released!
Mozilla Firefox 1.0 has been released!
Get it now while it's still hot! :)
Eclipse Visual Editor 1.0!
Just had a brief play with the Eclipse Visual Editor project today, and I'm quite impressed.
It supports, SWT, Swing and AWT contols, and the GUI can be modified at any stage via the builder or code which is great.
Also, the widgets you can use to build a GUI with are stored in a funky 'outlook' menu style container, which looks really nice, and could be reused quite well in other projects.
November 08, 2004
November 05, 2004
Running a single test in Maven?
We've been using Maven pretty heavily in a few projects, and after seeing what it can do, I couldn't go without it now. It's a really useful tool and can make things quite easy, especially being able to look at a build from a project view, rather than a task view. This is all probably worth another post on its own :)
Integrated unit testing is one useful feature, by supplying your unit test source directory to your project object model, all JUnit tests are automatically run, post compile. The user guide goes through all of the details.
What if you want to run one unit test though, without the others - this I found out today:
$> maven -Dtestcase=<testcase-class-name> test:single
The maven test plugin page has descriptions of the different goals that can be run on your test cases.
