As always there are too many ideas in my head, stuff I want to learn, books and blogs I want to read, things I want to share with others. When there’s too much going on it becomes more difficult to write about any of those, but I’m trying to become more organized so I’ll do my best to post regularly and more often, whenever I have something to say. I’ve found some really cool free online magazines about BSD operating systems and hacking:

The Environment From time to time I need to do some Apache httpd + Tomcat installations on Linux servers and usually they come in different flavors. While you’re still experimenting it’s a good idea to use a pre-installed Linux on a virtual machine. I’m using the free VMware player to run virtual appliances, a list of which can be found on VMware page. Personally I like the clean Linux installations without any extras, this way you can install anything you need and create multiple virtual machines of the same Linux flavor with different purposes if you need to.

After writing about keyboard oriented software I’ve been doing a little experiment for a few weeks now and I thought I’d share the results. I’ve been using a little program called Click Counter, well actually it’s a compiled AutoHotKey script which I found on this forum. Source for the script is available if you don’t like the idea of using an executable found on some forum. My idea was to track all my mouse clicks throughout the day and see how much I can reduce the amount of times I reach for the roddent. The Click Counter tool only produces data as a text file, but it’s way more fun to see some graphical representation of my clicking habits, so I threw together a simple Java program that reads the produced log file from the Click Counter and outputs a nice graph with monthly mean average. It’s done with maven and contains .bat files to further simplify the building and running process. So without further ado here are my results

This time around I want to share with you a little Python library I found called PIL. If you’re a Python developer chances are you already know of it, but I use Python only from time to time, usually to automate some tasks so I was very excited to come across such a library. First thing’s first, download PIL and install it. I’m using it on a Windows platform so I used the packaged binary version, but you can get the source code and use it on any platform that supports Python.

This post is a continuation on my quest for applications that help me do more by doing less. After choosing and installing an application launcher mentioned in my previous post the next thing I wanted to do is automate a few tasks that I do several times a day. Each one takes a while and throughout the day this adds up. The worst thing is that sometimes another person distracts you from what you were doing and then it takes a while to get back into it.

Last week I set out to find the best tools I could to increase my overall productivity when doing my everyday tasks and I want to share my experience. When writing this I quickly realized that putting everything in one chunk would make it quite long and as a fan of blog post brevity I decided to split it into a few posts. This one will cover applications that allow you to quickly launch other programs on your machine.

When dealing with source code from projects of various sizes the disk quickly gets filled up with literally tens or even hundreds of thousands of files. Especially when the project is under source control and has metadata files for each of the project’s file. While you may still have a lot of disk space left on the drive I found that this kind of setup is highly inefficient when jumping from file to file in an IDE or doing a full text search.

A little while ago I was developing a small application from which I wanted to reuse the Spring beans that are defined in a context of another application. I thought this might be useful for someone so here’s a short explanation of how I achieved this result. Both applications were deployed on Tomcat 6.0.18, but I don’t think that minor version number differences would have much of an impact on the technique.

Recently I’ve been thinking about how quickly technical books go out of date or sometimes just can keep up with the new versions of software constantly being released. I do like holding in my hands a nice printed book and enjoying the process of reading it, but for IT books it’s just a whole different story. You don’t usually need to read the entire book cover-to-cover, most often these books are used as references to help solve a specific problem.

Today I tried out the new Maven-3.0-alpha-6 on a multi-module project which uses profiles inside POM files and profiles.xml file. The first thing I noticed that Maven3 still uses the .m2 directory for local repository. I kind of thought they would change that, but I guess this is good for backward compatibility. Another thing that immediately strikes you is that Maven became more strict. I was getting warning messages because the POM file wasn’t living up to Maven’s standards of well defined build script.

If you’re using a profiles.xml file to store your profiles and want to migrate from Maven 2.0.x to Maven 2.1.x or later chances are you’ll run into a build failure. In my case the error message was “Reason: Failed to activate local (project-level) build profiles: Cannot parse profiles.xml resource from directory: …” The root cause of this from the stack trace might look like this: Caused by: org.codehaus.plexus.util.xml.pull.XmlPullParserException: Expected root element 'profilesXml' but found 'profiles' (position: START_TAG seen <?

In an ever-growing sea of parameters that one needs to memorize for tens or even hundreds of command-line programs I decided to keep a list of some of the more useful and frequently used Maven parameters in case I forget anything. This should be run from a parent POM’s directory. It lets you view the POM file that would be in effect if you were building the project. The result is a composite POM containing all your child POMs that you defined as modules in the parent POM.