Sunday, December 13, 2009

Thunderbird 3.0 Feature: Missing Attachment

Today, I installed Thunderbird 3.0 on may Mac to check out the features that have been added. The experience of installing and setting everything up was pretty good (just drag and drop).
But the surprise happened right away during writing an email where I wanted to send a PDF to a friend. I wrote „Attachment“ and Thunderbird instantly showed a message of the bottom of the Window to remind me of the „Attachment“ that I was about to sent (and which shouldn‘t be missed in the mail).
Perhaps this is a feature that other E-Mail clients have since decades, but it‘s the first time I saw this really useful feature. I looked into the preferences and there is a section where you can specify „keywords“ whose appearance will bring up this reminder to you. So if you prefer to name the Attachment differently, then you can specify something else here.
BTW: The reminder appears only if there is nothing already attached.

Thursday, November 19, 2009

livescribe released Version 2.0 of Livescribe Desktop for Mac

Today I found the announcement that livescribe released the 2.0 version of the Livescribe Desktop (LD) for Mac.

I downloaded and installed the new version and I’m really happy to see that I’m now able to print my own Notebooks on the Mac. Now I can get rid of the Windows version that I used for this reason only. That’s really great! Thanks for this long missing feature.
The other big change is the integration of the Livescribe Store into LD. I’m really curious what I’m about to find there once it’s up and running. I hope to find some Goodies there to pimp up my Pen. Perhaps I get an Application which will help my Pen to write alone. Without any intervention from my end. That would be awesome. ;-)

Thursday, October 8, 2009

Never use System.exit(1) in a groovy script

I wrote a small groovy script to to do some maintenance tasks on my machine. At some point the logic got a little bit more complicated and I decided to write some simple testcases. I executed the testscript and was really surprised about the output: the test should fail but it didn‘t! Now I tried to nail it down with limiting the scope to a very simple method call but the result was exactly the same. Hm, I thought it must have something todo with log4j that I used to write everything into the logfile. So I removed the log4j dependency and started the tests again. To my surprise the result didn‘t change at all. There was no output from junit on the console. I started to look a little bit closer at the class and walked through the constructor call to the method that I called during my test. Bang! There is was! In the constructor I checked for the existence of a certain resource (in this case a mounted volume). If the volume wasn‘t mounted I terminated the script with System.exit(1). I guess this was a really bad idea. Now I changed it to throw new RuntimeException(‘Volume not mounted‘) and everything is fine again.
Lesson learned: Never call System.exit(1) in constructor calls!

Tuesday, June 2, 2009

Clean Code Developer Plugin for Eclipse

Ich werde mir ein Plugin für Eclipse programmieren um die Prinzipien, Regeln und Praktiken eines Clean Code Developers immer vor Augen zu haben. Ich habe bis jetzt noch nichts passendes für Eclipse gefunden um einen Einsteiger in die Materie gezielt zu unterstützen. Also werde ich mich an die Arbeit machen um das Plugin zu basteln.
Was soll das Plugin machen? Nun, es soll den aktuellen CCD-Grad und die damit verbundenen Prinzipien, Regeln und Praktiken zusammenfassend darstellen. Am besten wäre es, diese als Links auf die Clean Code Developer Website verweisen zu lassen. Dort kann dann die genaue und erweiterte Erklärung zu den einzelnen Punkten nachgelesen werden bis sie in "Fleisch und Blut" übergegangen sind.
Meinungen?

Thursday, May 7, 2009

This year I'll miss the JavaOne

I‘m really sad that I can‘t attend the JavaOne this year. It has always been a fun event for me. Meeting old friends, see new and mature technology, attend some nice parties. I‘ll miss it this year. But we all impacted by the current economical situation.
Travel expenses are really short these days. I hope that the economy will gain new strength by the end of this year to give us the opportunity to have a fresh start in 2010 and the money to attend these developer conferences again.
I‘m not quite sure how many of you are going to San Francisco this year for JavaOne? I wish you a have fun time over there. Get the news and spread it to the absent folks.

Thursday, April 9, 2009

Do you know Fluid?

Are you using a lot web based applications these days? Do you have multiple browser windows or tabs open at a time? Is the Mac your preferred working horse? Well, then you should have a look at Fluid. Fluid creates a so called "Site Specific Browser" aka SSB which is a native MacOSX Application.

How does it work? Simply download the provided Application for the Mac (sorry Windows User!) and start it right away. Fluid will open a very simplistic dialog which requires only a few information about the Website you want to convert to a SSB:

So the most important thing in this case is the URL of the Website you want to have as a separate launchable application on your Mac. Providing a distinct name will make things easier to find your SSB on your mac. You can choose the location for your SSB. I think it's a good idea to place it in the Applications folder. You can even provide an Icon for your new App. You can either use the Website's favicon or you can provide your own icon. Note: I tested this with gmail and the Favicon didn't work for me. So I chose the gmail icon from Chris Ivarsons site. There you can find some more Icons for popular Websites. Press the Create button and you're set.

What is created for you? Well, you get a native MacOSX Application with the icon you selected at the location you specified. If you now start this Application the Website from the provided URL will be opened and displayed in the window. Now you can start weaking some of the Preferences for this specific SSB. Below is a screenshot of my GMail SSB.

Usually you can live with the default preferences, but I recommend to step through each section to find out what you can modify with each of these settings. I also recommend a closer look at the website and the community part to find some more tips and tricks on the other available features that could make your life easier. My favorite feature so far is the conversion of the SSB to a MenuExtra SSB. This will relaunch your SSB and create an entry in the system wide status bar at the top of the screen. Now your favorite Website is located right at the top of your screen.
I hope you will like Fluid as much as I do. Have fun!

Sunday, March 1, 2009

Growl Binding for AS3

Today I wanted to realize an idea I had for a long time: I wanted to have growl notifications for an AIR application that I'm currently writing. But I realized at some point that I need an UDP Socket to communicate with the growl subsystem and that this kind of Socket is not available from Flex. I was really disappointed but I finally found a different solution: there is a project as3growl which implements the network protocol for growl which uses the distributed objects over tcp approach. I'll give it a try tomorrow.

Tuesday, February 17, 2009

Tabbed Browsing mit Tabhunter

Ich hab mich in den letzten Jahren an den Gebrauch der Tabs in allen möglichen Applikationen so sehr gewöhnt, dass ich mich manchmal dabei ertappe, wie ich die übliche Tastenkombination ⌘+T (zumindest auf dem Mac) drücke und nichts passiert. Fast alle verwendeten Applikationen (zumindest mit Multi Dokument Fähigkeit) unterstützen Tabs. Besonders häufig verwende ich die Tabs aber in Firefox. Ich hab immer so zwischen 30 und 50 Tabs geöffnet. Das Navigieren zwischen den Tabs wir hier auch immer durch den Gebrauch der Maus begleitet. Da ich aber viel lieber mit der Tastatur arbeite, habe ich nach einem Firefox Add-On gesucht um die Tabs per Shortcut auszuwählen oder zumindest einen Tab zu suchen und ihn auszuwählen.
Tada! Gesucht und gefunden: Tabhunter ist meine Rettung. Einfach installieren und los geht's.
Der Shortcut ⌘^T öffnet ein kleines Fenster mit der Liste aller Tabs. Einfach etwas aus dem Title der geöffneten Seite tippen und schon reduziert sich die Trefferliste. Sollte der gesuchte Tab dabei sein, dann reicht das betätigen der Return Taste um diesen Tab anzuspringen. Das ist ein echter Timesaver.

Saturday, January 31, 2009

Ehrlichkeit ist eine gute Tugend ...

Heute morgen habe ich meine Freitag Umhängetasche im Bagel Park in der Europa Passage vergessen. Leider habe ich den Verlust erst bemerkt als ich gerade die S-Bahn Richtung Harburg bestiegen hatte. Mir gingen alle möglichen Gedanken durch den Kopf, da ich in der Tasche mein Telefon, mein Portemonaie mit allen Kreditkarten und Personalausweis aufbewahrt habe. Ich hab mich schon in der Telefonwarteschlange der Kreditkartenfirmen gesehen und wartend auf dem Einwohnermeldeamt um alle Papiere wiederzubeschaffen. Meine Frau hat noch während der Fahrt zum Hauptbahnhof beim Bagel Park angerufen und nachgefragt, ob dort eine Umhängetasche abgegeben wurde. Und siehe da: ein Mitbürger hat sie dort abgegeben und es befand sich noch alles in der Tasche. Mir ist ein Stein vom Herzen gefallen. Vielen, vielen Dank an den ehrlichen Finder. Ich hätte Dich gerne zum Cafe eingeladen um meine Dankbarkeit zu zeigen.

Sunday, January 18, 2009

Strange MacOSX problems

Today I was helping a friend of mine to upgrade the memory of her little cute iMac. She bought two 512MB Memory modules which were supposed to give her Mac a boost. But then happened is more than weird (at least for me).
I plugged in the new modules and the max didn't start up. It beeped everal times (I think two times in a row) and nothing happened. I removed the memory modules and replaced them with the old ones. Now the iMac was back to life but the system clock was now set to 1/1/1970. Hhm, that is strange. I changed the system memory and nothing else.
Now the whole story was about to drive me mad. The dialup settings seemed to be resetted too and the Network Preferences always showed a message saying "Your network settings have been changed by another application".
But who changed the settings? It wasn't me at all. Due to the repeating upcoming dialog I was really upset. Someone changed the setting and I'm unable to change them back? Silly! This is a Mac. I'm the boss on this machine. So after two hours on trying to resolve this problem I had to leave. I left the machine in a real unusable state and my friend was really sad that I messed up everything. It was a real embarrassing feeling that I got from this.
Now I need to figure out what happened. Perhaps this thread could help me. I'll be back on Tuesday to look again after the machine. Since I was unable to change the network settings I was unable to repair the dialup settings (where is the f***ing password?) and let my friend read her email again.
Did anyone of you ever had such a bad experience?

Saturday, January 3, 2009

Zimmertausch endlich geschafft.....

Ein guter Start ins neue Jahr 2009! Heute habe ich endlich mein Langzeit-Projekt “Ein Zimmer für Nikolas” fertiggestellt. Nach fast 13! Monaten Arbeit ist es endlich geschafft. Jetzt frage ich mich schon warum ich 13 Monate gebraucht habe. Naja, es hat alles ganz harmlos mit dem Entrümpeln des Kellers begonnen um Platz für eine Wand zu schaffen, damit wir es nachher auch Zimmer nennen können. Als das “neue” Arbeitszimmer im Sommer dann bezugsfertig war, haben wir erstmal das “alte” Arbeitszimmer aufgeräumt und ausgemistet. Mit dem restlichen Inhalt sind wir dann vom Dachgeschoss in den Keller gezogen. Halleluja! Das war geschafft!
Jetzt musste das “alte” Arbeitszimmer neu gestaltet werden, da dieser Raum unser “neues” Schlafzimmer werden sollte. Das habe ich dann endlich im Oktober geschafft und wir sind aus dem ersten Stock unters Dach gezogen. Unser “altes” Schlafzimmer haben wir leergeräumt und Nikolas hatte vorübergehend ein sehr grosses Zimmer. Das Wochenende nach Weihnachten haben wir dann das “alte” Schlafzimmer ausgeräumt und neu gestrichen damit Lennart dort einziehen kann und sein Zimmer endlich für Nikolas frei wird.
Heute habe ich das Zimmer von Nikolas endlich fertiggestellt und er kann morgen endlich in sein eigenes Zimmer einziehen. Ich glaube, dass er sich schon darauf freut ein eigenes Zimmer zu haben. Und ich bin froh, dass dieses “Zimmertausch-es-wird-niemals-enden-Projekt” doch noch erfolgreich beendet wurde. Jetzt kann ich mich in Ruhe um andere Aufgaben und Projekte kümmern ohne ständig ein schlechtes Gewissen haben zu müssen. Wie sagte ich doch bereits Eingangs: “Ein guter Start ins neue Jahr 2009”