Byte Me (Tech Blog)

I have been working on my Sun Certified Java Developer assignment recently and I decided to use Subversion for source control. This gives me the ability to roll back any mistakes and reassures me that my work is safely stored somewhere (in addition to my backups).

I am using VisualSVN Server. It comes bundled with Apache and everything you need to setup the server. Once this is installed, you might want to set it to authenticate using it's own user list instead of Windows authentication (I have one account for my home pc and it isn't password protected, something which Tortoise SVN client doesn't like. Maybe your client will accept empty passwords).



Go to the VisualSVN management console. Right click on the VisualSVN Server node and choose Properties. Click on the Authentication tab and select "Use Subversion Authentication". You can then add users by right clicking on the User node and choosing "Create User...". Each user can be added to repository and thats it!

Once VisualSVN is up and running, you can install something like Tortoise SVN client and away you go!

Ever have Windows explorer crashes wipe out your icon layout on your desktop? Wish you could restore your layout with one click of a button? Then you'd better take a look at this: Saving the desktop layout in W2K (works for Windows Vista as well).

I have been playing with the PsExec program from PsTools v2.44. This little tool allows you to execute programs and commands on a remote system. This could be very useful if you have a build server that you want to allow developers to access in order to run a development build script. If I can just get past the "Access Denied" messages...

Sometimes you come across software that is just so useful, you wonder why didn't think of it and code it already. I have that feeling with dropbox. Install it on your home machine, your machine at work, the machine at your parents house and the tool will create a special folder; your dropbox. When you put a file into the dropbox, it will be synchronised to the web and all your other machines will also receive the file. Perfect! No more emailing files to yourself from your work email to your home address, no fiddling around with USB sticks.

I've been using it since public beta and I have to say it has become an important part of toolkit. You get 2Gb of space online to fill with your files and you can shared certain folders with friends. There is even a web interface.

Tim Boudreau's Blog: Sneak Preview: Java Card tools for NetBeans 6.7: "Sneak Preview: Java Card tools for NetBeans 6.7"

It seems that in the up and coming release (6.7) of the NetBeans IDE (used by many in Product Development for Java development) there will be support for Java Card applications. This functionality could be of interest to those of us in the world of smart card development. Will have to keep an eye on this one to see where it goes...

I just installed IE 8 and one of the new features are accelerators. Thes are essentially small pieces of functionality that let you do something with a piece of selected text, like blogging about it (like this!) or using that text as a search term to look for someone on LinkedIn! Very useful stuff, I will be interested to see what is developed in the future!

I am currently loving the Event Bus design pattern and the Java implementation from the javadesktop project on java.net.

From the project page:

"The Event Bus is a single-process publish/subscribe event routing library, with Swing extensions. The EventBus is fully-functional, with very good API documentation and test coverage (80+%). It has been deployed in many production environments, including financial, engineering and scientific applications.

The Event Bus is easy to use and yet very powerful. It requires no setup and the API is small and clear. The EventBus solves many problems, and promotes loose coupling, particularly with Swing applications."