Fitt's Flaw

Seems Joystiq found a funky flaw with the Nintendo Wii's cursor, in that it has a life off screen where you won't see it, leading to a bit of dissonance as you waggle to find it. (via Digg)

That "Apple" wifi hack...

WiFiNetnews brings us the news that the Ellich/Maynor hack applies to Windows too and that Ellich and Maynor in this case behaved like whiter than white hats. Good work chaps.

4 seconds of er...

Oh my, 18 months to get four seconds of reverb and clonks... yeah, thats the Microsoft brand, reverby clonking. (Via Digg)

Speed and ajax....

Speed and ajax; no, not a dodgy offering from a retailer of illegalities, but SpeedTest.net the most Ajaxy, Flashy broadband speed tester you'll come across today.

Something going awry with the Zune launch?

Who can tell but it ain't going to go with a RocketBoom if this Dear Bill letter is anything to go by. (via Techmeme)

It's Symbolic you know...

Engadget report on the end of the Symbol/PalmOS relationship. My Palm relationship ended with the Treo 650 and Palm aren't getting me back with their current road map. Symbol were one of those companies you liked to see applying Palm's tech in an industrial situation... and now they won't be.

Unhappy Samba Campers

The Samba chaps express their unhappiness in no uncertain terms to the Novell-Microsoft "We'll warm the lube first" agreement. (Via /.)

PS3 Explicit Video

See the nice people strip a PS3 and go ooh at the big ass fan.

Vista RTbootsale "ships"

Already there's a slight crack for Vista. So, hows that user irritactivation working out for you Microsoft?

Welcome to the Codepapacy

Hi and welcome to the Codepapacy, a linklog of interest. Stay a while, STAY FOREVER!*

* Links may be accompanied by cheesy references to 80s computer games.

Let loose the lawyers on Hibernate

Firestar hase filed suit against RedHat. The text of the complaint cites Hibernate 3.0 as the offending item, and looking at the patent in question it looks like there's quite a can of worms being opened.

Google Web Toolkit... looks nice but...

The Google Web Toolkit looks nice, but dammit Google, really it's 2006 and you should be in the habit of launching things with Mac support from day zero.

GWT looks more than nice actually. It's AJAX development with no writing Javascript; you write Java top to bottom, and GWT takes care of everything else.

They'll have to rename JavaOne to JavAjaxOne if this keeps up.... it's been a deluge of Ajaxy Java this year.

What would be handy...

What would be handy is a simple hotkey for the command line so that when you type in...

somecommandthatneedsroot

and it comes back permission denied, you hit it and it recalls the line with "sudo " in front...

sudo somecommandthatneedsroot

(Another suggestion here is that you could just catch the permission denied and change it to "permission denied... sudo it y/n?" but that'd a lot harder to implement and probably bugger up all sorts of scripts)

Ah now we know the Secrets of the Swing Team

A Netbeans Bug thats bugging me...

Netbeans has a bug where it gets the indentation wrong after annotations which have no braced parameters after them, when you use it's reformat code. See the bug entry here. A quick workaround is to tag empty braces after your annotations so

@Entity
public class ....

becomes

@Entity()
public class ....

Brilliant - Omnicore

I went hunting for my serial number for Omnicore's XDevelop. Couldn't find it anywhere. So I mailed Omnicore and asked.....

And within 5 minutes, I had a reply with my serials. So apart from making a brilliant code focussed IDE, they are also still one of the most responsive companies I've come across.

Why am I pulling out XDevelop? Well, I was looking at the RIFE site, and apart from it being very interesting as an application stack, I noticed that the first flash demo uses XDevelop to show the neatness. And it reminded me of how nice XDevelop's code environment is; especially compared to NetBeans which is "almost fast enough".

Sitting on the Doctype....

Tim Bray talks of dropping the Doctype from XML and I have to concur. For me, is a carrier for cognitive dissonance in XML... contrary to the nature of an XML document, human readable but not human meaningful... But I suspect Mr Bray is right when he says it won't go away.

Switching to Tiger on Tiger (J2SE 5.0 on OSX 10.4)

The number of times I see someone post "Here's how to use J2SE5.0 as default on Mac OSX 10.4..." and proceed to tell you how to change the JDK symlink for the current JDK....

It's not necessary.... Here's how I do it. Add to your .profile

export JAVA_HOME=/System/Library/Frameworks/JavaVM.framework/Versions/1.5.0/Home
export PATH=$JAVA_HOME/bin:$PATH

There we go. JDK set. If you want to set it for webstart and applets as the default, go to /Applications/Utilities/J2SE 5.0 and run Java Preferences, which lets you change the order of use safely (and lets you get at a whole bunch of run time settings)....

There, no messing with sudo, no changing symlinks, no danger when Apple update Java runtimes.

A clean sweep in the toolbox

So, I'm revising my toolbox for 2006. What looks like it's going to be in it? Netbeans 5.0 for an IDE, EJB3 Persistence+Derby/Java DB for storage, Spring+Struts for server framework (I think), Mochikit for Ajaxness... Now, a decent Javascript editor and debugger would be good (Come on Netbeans!), but what else...

Break out the Festivus Pondering (post the airing of grievances)....

What am I up to...

I'm playing with Mochikit to write an Ajaxy application. I'm finding Netbeans jolly nice, but it really needs to get up to speed for Ajax with some Javascript editting support.