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Because I don’t use a social bookmarking service…

Nothing against them, but my blog is the most useful thing at present to record interesting sites that I may or may not read later.

To have hope that Scala can work in the enterprise: The Book Of JOSH – but more so to feel the state of where Java is.  Also the comments form a point of very interesting discussion.

To increase learnings in Spring through the use of a purpose built (Eclipse based) IDE: SpringSource Tool Suite

To learn Maven through all lessons learnt by others: Five tips for successfully deploying Maven

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Want AJAX, why not try GWT?

GWT or Google Web Toolkit, is a platform that lets Java developers write Java apps and have them compiled in native javascript to run in the browser.  There are a lot of neat optimisations and support for RPC.  Although I’ve heard about GWT many times before, this article made things crystal clear.

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Blank PDF tabs in Firefox

If you ever have issues with PDF’s not displaying correctly in your browser then this Adobe support link appears quite helpful.

I installed Foxit Reader then uninstalled it on my Windows 7 box and now my Firefox wont open PDF’s.  Just a blank page. 🙁

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A look to the past to see where you are going

I read a great article just now by Bruce Eckel ‘The Positive Legacy of C++ and Java’.  Bruce talks about Java as a language gettings stuck (complicated Generics, etc) but paving the way via the efficient JVM to develop and host new higher languages very quickly (Groovy, Scala).

It finishes with this great line

All future languages should learn from this: either create a culture where you can be refactored (as Python and Ruby have done) or allow competitive species to thrive.

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Easily Unhide an NTFS partition with included Windows Tools

Warnings:

Make sure the hidden partition is NTFS!!!! 

No responsibility taken if you follow these instructions and you fubar your disk.  If in doubt, use a graphical tool like Partition Magic to help you out.

Open a cmd window

Type diskpart and enter

A seperate diskpart window kicks off with a DISKPART> prompt.

Find the partition you want to unhide using LIST and SELECT commands

DISKPART> list partition

  Partition ###  Type              Size     Offset
————-  —————-  ——-  ——-
Partition 1    Primary             55 MB    32 KB
Partition 2    Primary             89 GB    55 MB
Partition 3    Primary             60 GB    89 GB

DISKPART> list disk

  Disk ###  Status         Size     Free     Dyn  Gpt
——–  ————-  ——-  ——-  —  —
Disk 0    Online          149 GB      0 B
Disk 1    Online         5831 MB      0 B

DISKPART> select disk 0

Disk 0 is now the selected disk.

DISKPART> list partition

  Partition ###  Type              Size     Offset
————-  —————-  ——-  ——-
Partition 1    Primary             55 MB    32 KB
Partition 2    Primary             89 GB    55 MB
Partition 3    Primary             60 GB    89 GB

DISKPART> select partition 2

Partition 2 is now the selected partition.

DISKPART> detail partition

 

Partition 2
Type  : 17
Hidden: Yes
Active: No
Offset in Bytes: 57576960

There is no volume associated with this partition.

DISKPART> SET ID=07

DISKPART> detail partition

Partition 2
Type  : 07
Hidden: No
Active: No
Offset in Bytes: 57576960

Volume ###  Ltr  Label        Fs     Type        Size     Status     Info
———-  —  ———–  —–  ———-  ——-  ———  ——–
* Volume 3     F                NTFS   Partition     89 GB  Healthy

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Its all Greek to me

Ok, so I’m learning Greek right now.  When venturing onto a colleagues PC, I noticed he was running Firefox in French.  So I thought what a great opportunity to expose myself to the Greek language by running my apps in a foreign language also.

Although when we design apps, we generally include locale’s for different regions, switching an already installed app to a different language doesn’t seem to be as easy as changing a setting in Preferences.

For Firefox and the windows live apps, special language versions exist.  I downloaded the Greek Firefox from here to get started.  Interestingly, the installer looked all gyberish characters (yes more gyberish than greek!), but once installed all the menu’s, dialogs, status bars, etc came up in the Greek as expected.  I decided to keep my installs separate as well rather than over the top of the existing one, but it does share the same profile folder without any strange issues so far.

Once your browser is in Greek, when you go to browse websites such as Windows Live, Google, etc, you’re results are all in Greek also (where applicable).  Its one thing to read about (and even implement support for) internalisation and another to actually see it in practice.  Nice touch.

The next thing you need to do is setup the Greek keyboard so you can type in Greek.  There are a couple of keyboard layouts.  Basically a modifier so you can type the accent characters.  Greek Polytonic seems to be working for me.  This Microsoft site has keymaps for each of the layouts showing you what key types what and how to get access to the modifiers.