When building a reasonably complex Swing application, more often than not you might end up needing a GUI component that is not made available in the Java distribution. In the following tutorial I will present the required steps to make a working treeview with checkboxes that allows the user to browse his/her filesystem.

Continue reading "Building custom Swing components (JTreeView with checkboxes)"

• #7 London
• #10 Forbury Gardens in Reading
• #11 Reading
• #13 Kingham to Chipping Norton
• #15 Charlbury
• #16 Reading
• #17 Charlbury
• #18 Reading

• #1 Business Park
• #2 La Ciotat (city / beach)

After waiting for 2 days for a reply from SUN, this is what I get:

Hi. This is the qmail-send program at [mycompany].com. I'm afraid I wasn't able to deliver your message to the following addresses. This is a permanent error; I've given up. Sorry it didn't work out.

<[Somebody]@Sun.COM>: Sorry, I wasn't able to establish an SMTP connection. (#4.4.1) I'm not going to try again; this message has been in the queue too long.

Now what are the odds of either a) your web hosting company, that hosts almost 100k domains, has it's internet connection down for a few days or b) sun's mail servers are down ?!

Can it get any worse than that?

Today a friend of mine told me that XMMS package was missing from Slackware 12. At first, I thought it was a codec (mp3?) issue, but upon looking this thing up, I found out that the last release was in 2004 (!). I can't believe it :)

I got so used to the release early, release often model and also, considering that just a few days ago I upgraded to the new Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon (version 7.10, that is) I could have bet I don't have any software older than 6 months.

Oh well, seems I have to look for a replacement for XMMS soon.

Update:

I have switched to Audacious, because it looks similar to XMMS and also takes less screen space than other players, such as Rhythmbox.

In the past few years I've noticed an increasing amount of sites that are being translated from English into other languages (specifically, Romanian). Even though I'm sure this will help those that don't know english that well, I find this transition to be disturbing for me:

I am used to reading stuff in english, even though I have to admit, my Firefox language preferences are: 1. Romanian, 2. English, 3. Russian. Stumbling upon a site that has been translated into romanian is ok, but what I hate is sites that are posting half-translations online, because at first glace you can't figure that the text is in multiple languages on the same page!

So, my mind starts "parsing" the text using english, then I get to some incomprehensible text, which after some time I figure that it's Romanian, now my mind has to "load" the Romanian dictionary to "parse" the following text, then it becomes incomprehensible again, this is the moment when I realize that the text is alternating: english, romanian, then english again.

Wtf? Stop messing with my head, just post the whole page in Romanian if you have it, or leave it in English!

An example of such a mess is that PHP Manual TOC:

Continue reading "Issues with multilanguage sites"

Recently, I've started a project and selected CakePHP as the framework I should build it on. I was somewhat familiar with Cake and MVC, so starting up wasn't such a big problem, but (as with many other "magic-based" frameworks, I guess) I quickly ran into trouble:

Continue reading "Cakephp - first impressions"

Really nice Linux Ad:

Yesterday I upgraded my system from Ubuntu 6.10 to 7.04 (how to?). The installation went well, the only thing the installer complained about was my tomcat 5.5 package, which I just ignored because I was going to uninstall it anyways.

Some thoughts:

• the system boots faster with the new stock kernel
• hdparam shows me ~60MB/s with my PATA hdd
• no JMicron-related problems on my Gigabyte 965P-DS3P
• mplayer is working (used to crash on 6.10)

Finally, check the Howto: Set up Feisty for speed guide for tips on how to further improve your system performace.

I found an interesting site that allows you to draw various diagrams (www.gliffy.com) only using your web browser. The application is made in Flash, has undo, copy/paste and export to PNG, JPEG and SVG features.

Yet another nice free thing :)

A little rain flooded the intersection in front of my apartment:

Here are some interesting pictures took in the middle of Bucharest:

About 3 weeks ago I went on a trip to Brasov. I thought I'd post some pictures during my trip through the woods :) to Poiana Brasov.