An interesting fact that i was unaware of, apple has an open source project called darwin that lets OS X run on x86 the platform. Darwin is just the underlying FreeBSD command line OS, not the rich GUI OS X shell that runs on top.

personalized menus is the feature in windows that hides most of the stuff on a menu and makes you click an arrow to see the whole thing. to disable this right click task bar, go to properties, and uncheck personalized menus. (this is a feature of windows 2000, but, as far as i can tell, it has been removed from xp)

to get line numbers to show up in jsp/java files in tomcat, cut off the jit compiler by adding -Djava.compiler=NONE to the TOMCAT_OPTS.

bookmarklets are javascript links that you put in your favorites and they link you somewhere but with some functionality. see bookmarklets.com for examples. i found a bookmarklet that takes a word you have highlighted and lets you search google for the word.

i recently downloaded a free nifty xml tool called cooktop. of course there are many tools for xml editing

as a note to myself xsl consists of three parts: xslt, xpath, and xml formatting objects. w3schools.com is a site with simple xml tutorials.

microsoft's portal offering is called sharepoint, and the jakarta project has a portal engine called jetspeed. i know of one mid-sized company that uses share point, but none that use jetspeed.

interesting documentation that jboss runs twice as fast on windows 2000 than on linux, and that linux doesn't support real threads, and jboss will crash with 200 users.

Tortoise, cvs

a handy windows cvs client tool is tortoise. it's handy because it's built into windows explorer.

according to these discussions there is a significant memory restriction for a jvm on a 32 bit windows systems.

http://forum.java.sun.com/thread.jsp?thread=272369&forum=37&message=1060964

http://forum.java.sun.com/thread.jsp?forum=37&thread=201718

Windows 2000 is a 32-bit operating system. This means that by default (Windows 2000 professional and Server), it can only support up to 4GB of memory (1/2 (2GB) for the operating system and 1/2 (2GB) for user applications). applications can use a special library called AWE (Address Windowing Extensions) to access more memory. For instance, windows 2000 advanced server (8 gig max), and windows 2000 data center (64 gig max) use AWE.

log4net is an implementation of log4j for dot net

in dot net web service or web application projects the web config file has an appSettings tag that is the answer to propety files in java.

a friend of mine sent an email to everyone in his contact list and used that to transfer his contacts to his new email program. what a simple way to transfer your contacts if your email client doesn't support an import.

on my hp computer when i boot up f1 takes me to the bios, f8 takes me to the advanced windows options.

in c# putting an @ in front of a string makes it a verbatim string. that means it doesn't try and use backslashes for escaping. ie. @"c:\MyFolderMySubFolder\MyFile.txt"

raid is Redundant Array of Independent Disks
level 0 - striping - interleaving data on multiple disks for performance. no fault tolerance
level 1 - mirroring
level 5 - at least three disks. striping with parity

toad is tool for oracle application developement.

vim is a really good windows vi editor.

links to java based blogs

i recently saw a java ide called intellij. it give jbuilder a run for the money. it appears to be a far superior tool.

i saw visual studio project using asp.net and c# and the tools are incredible. it makes doing web pages like doing vb or delphi. it's slick.

the term crud means Create Read Update Delete.

in broadvision they don't have hot deploy so they restart all the servers (not at the same time so the site doesn't go down) they call it draining the servers.

out of curiosity i looked last night to see what companies were offering portal solutions. a portal solution offers functionality similar to my yahoo. i thought i would pass it along. what i found is that there are offerings from application server companies (ibm, oracle, sun), erp companies (SAP and peoplesoft), and "pure plays" (Epicentric, BroadVision, Plumtree, and Bowstreet), to name a few. According to one article, Epicentric is the market leader, and Bowstreet is the leading innovator.

another article said:
"Plumtree and Epicentric still offer the most thorough portal products today," additionally naming named Vignette and SAP Portals to the group offering "the most usable portal framework products." It also named Oracle and BEA Systems as other vendors "best prepared to serve enterprise portal needs."

http://techupdate.zdnet.com/techupdate/stories/main/0,14179,2854468,00.html

http://www.informationweek.com/story/IWK20011101S0014

http://www.line56.com/articles/default.asp?ArticleID=3562&ml=2

here is a weird one... if view source stops working on Internet Explorer delete the offline content.

most places i work we develop on windows deploy on unix and one big problem is always file names are case sensitive on unix and not on windows.

windows shortcuts:
ctrl print screen - copies entire screen to copy buffer
alt print screen - copies current window to copy buffer

in jbuilder ctrl F6 is the file/tab navigation (ctrl tab in most windows apps)

jbuilder 6 compiles slowly due to the new dependency checker. to revert to the old one: add this to the jbuilder.config file:

vmparam -Duse.old.bmj

when writing financial applications use integer (non floats) for money fields or there will be rounding errors reference

i upgraded to jbuilder 6 enterprise hoping to use the clear case integration, but it doesn't support snapshot views. it supports only Base Clear Case with dynamic views only.

here are lists of the java/pdf libraries that i have investigated.
google listing
presentation
apache project's FOP
Big Faceless
iText

xmethods.net

here is a site that list free web services. xmethods.net. Oracle JDeveloper has a wizzard where you put in the url (uri?) and it gives you a list of all the available methods. then you are able to call those methods in your code like they were local methods and the wizzard has written code that takes care of all the underlying message and communications protocols (xml and http). It's similar to RMI or CORBA or any other remote procedure call.

next time i work on a big struts project make sure the business objects can be mapped into the struts components directly.