Windows 7 on Dell Inspiron 8600

The first installation result was a little dissapointing, because of two points:

1. there is only a standard video driver for my ati radeon graphic with a limited support for resolution options
2. the sounds did not work

Point 2. is working now. I downloaded the old audio-sigmatel-driver from dell-support (for win XP). Cancel the Installation when it is extracted on disk. Go to the device Manager. Select the audio question mark and choose “install driver from disk” and point to the extracted files.

Systables in Oracle

In Informix-Databases they are called Systables, where i get the Meta-Info about tables and columns. In oracle i get this basic infos with the following sqls:

select * from ALL_TABLES where TABLE_NAME = ‘<TABLENAME>‘;
select * from ALL_TAB_COLUMNS where TABLE_NAME = ‘<TABLENAME>‘

Accessing Excel with Java

Excel is Microsoft. Java is not. Nevertheless there are ways to manipulate the XLS-format from Java.

Some Open Source solutions are listed here:

“Handle Excel files” by Réal Gagnon

I tested two of them:

1. JXL
2. POI

Jxl is straightforward and easy to use. POI is for all kind of Mircosoft formats, not only for Excel. IMHO it is a little more tricky to use.

Coding by Convention with Grails

Not so long ago the 0.3-Version of grails was released. A good reason for me to check what this coding-by-convention is all about.

An it seem to be all great! The opposite is the application i am working with. And with our app all came up with good intentions for the following reasons:

• being flexible: The cutomers/users dont have to decide what they want or what they need, we can configure this later…
• being different: the different companies dont want to adjust their internal workflows and they dont have to. we can configure all the differences

This is becoming more and more configuration with every new implemented feature. In the end your are not a developer any more, your are a configurer. –> Configuration Hell!

Coding-by-convention must be precise. You must exactly know whats best, what you need or how to name something. No more maybies.

Ressources for grails:

• www.grail.org
• Sven Haiges blog

My mule impression

This week I run into Mule. This is an open source ESB (Enterprise Service Bus) and is all about integration. In one article it is described as a kind of Leatherman of integration tools.

Here the best examples I have found so far:

• A File Sucker-Example, monitoring a directory for files to import. This is based one Spring and Mule.
• A Snowdude-Example why an ESB is useful

Another ESB open source implementation is part of the JBoss tool collection. Is a comparison out there?

The unix find command…

…beyond the man-pages:

find

• by text in file’s name
  find . -name "my.file" -print
• by text in file’s content
  find . -exec grep "4therecord" '{}' \; -print

A detailed explanation and more examples here.

Misc Java Notes

• Intelligent WEB-GUI-Components (kind of Ajax):
  • example one
  • example two
• New eclipse version: What’s new in Eclipse 3.2?
• Java-classpath-configuring in Windows: with the following two Batch-Files it is possible to add all the files of a directory to the classpath. (Copied from here)

  build.bat
  ---------
  set CP=
  
  for %%i in (lib*.jar) do call cp.bat %%i

  cp.bat
  ------
  set CP=%CP%;%1

• how to let tomcat destroy a session. Two options: in the web.xml-configuration or in ur application.

Free Download of JavaOne Sessions (2005,2006)

Here you can find all the JavaOne Session of 2005 and 2006. The PPT-PDFs (or maybe star-office slides) are downloadable directly, for the Multimedia-Version you have to register.

Web Framework Comparison

Last week I had a discussion about the future of Client Technology (web vs. rcp). For web technology it is really hard to decide which underlying web framework to use. So here is the best comparison i have seen so far.

dollar signs ($) in tomcat’s server.xml configuration file

The problem has begun with a new security policy in the company. Beside other conditions how a password must look like (length, numeric-alphanumeric, upper-lower-case) it was said that it is necessary to include a special character in each of the passwords. My favorite one was the dollar sign ($)…

For accesing a databases with tomcat (i used version 5.0.28) I need to configure a jndi data source via jdbc as it is described here. I typed my password like (this is not the real one) with the $-sign:

iGet$4work

Result: The jdbc-driver said that the password was wrong.

After different tries of rechecking and checking some encoding stuff I used ethereal to see what my tomcat was actually sending:

iGet4work

What do I get 4 work? No dollars – Nothing – Huh – maybe next time I stay at home. Not the right solution.

How it worked?

You need even more dollars, just use

iGet$$4work

and the right password is send over the network. Tomcat got the DB-Connect and I was happy.

What I have learned?

• Internally in most tomcat confguration files the dollar sign is used for variables
• sometimes it is better to double the dollars

Next time: Maybe I cover the topic how to specify a password with #-signs in unix-scripts or java.propertie-files;-)