One of my few complaints about MacOS X is that at times I feel like it treats you with kids gloves– many options for power users either require some sort of hacking, or simply don’t exist. One such thing which is fixable is getting Finder to show hidden files. It’s a quick and [...]

The default Eclipse for Mac OS X font is kind of annoying since it’s way too big and reminds me of MS Comic Sans. If you try to replace it with one of the wonderful ProggyFonts without tweaking them first, you get stuck with anti-aliased fonts that look terrible. During my quest to [...]

I'm in the process of setting-up a new Apple MacBook Pro today, and during the process of trying to import and get some old SSH keys working correctly I accidently changed the permissions on my home directory. Even after scrolling back through the commands I used I'm still not even sure how it [...]

In my experience, the hardest thing to work around when using a VPS for hosting is limited memory. It's definitely a challenge to try and tune a database, web server, and application server for load under the constraints of a VPS plan (typically 512 MB or less of RAM). The best [...]

I've had an Dell 1100 laser printer for several years which has been both cost-effective and dependable for my low volume printing needs (coursework, maps, shopping lists, etc.). Trying to find how to get it to work on Linux wasn't quite as easy to find on Google as it should have been, so I [...]

Between many machines at home, Virtual Machines, a work laptop, etc, I always seem to manage installing Firefox from scratch at least once a month. There are several add-ons that I pretty much require for Firefox to work for me, and I thought I should post them somewhere. I know that [...]

One of the newer features of Java as of 1.4 is non-blocking IO, yet it's very hard to find decent documentation about it or even a simple tutorial. NIO is a very powerful feature but easy to get wrong given it's complexity. However, James Greenfield, an engineer for Amazon, recently announced that he'd [...]

Fillp Hanik recently posted a blog entry about a load test comparison he did using Glassfish, Jetty, and Tomcat 6 using the new NIO (non-blocking io) connectors in which Tomcat 6 was able to handle 16,000 connections. As always load tests should always be taken with a grain of salt, but it certainly did [...]

Google recently released yet another interesting piece of Java machinery, Guice. Given the direction that Spring 2.0 is going in, this looks like a good alternative if you're looking for a simple dependency injection framework. If you're curious about what is different between Guice and Spring, you can read more about their differences [...]

This past Friday marked the end of the second week at my new job which has brought many changes for me. I left a good sized development team at large company for the uncertainty for a VC funded start-up without revenue, I'm miles from a ColdFusion server and instead am working on a Java [...]