SolitaryGeek

I received a mail from Microsoft today morning about Windows 7 expiration. Here is the essence of the mail:

It’s time to upgrade from the Windows 7 Release Candidate

While most people who tested Windows 7 have now moved to the final version, some are still running the Release Candidate. If you haven’t moved yet, it’s time to replace the RC.

Starting on March 1, 2010 your PC will begin shutting down every two hours. Your work will not be saved during the shutdown.

The Windows 7 RC will fully expire on June 1, 2010. Your PC running the Windows 7 RC will continue shutting down every two hours and your files won’t be saved during shutdown. In addition, your wallpaper will change to a solid black background with a persistent message on your desktop. You’ll also get periodic notifications that Windows isn’t genuine. That means your PC may no longer be able to obtain optional updates or downloads requiring genuine Windows validation.

To avoid interruption, please reinstall a prior version of Windows or move to Windows 7. In either case, you’ll need to do a custom (clean) install to replace the RC. As with any clean installation, you’ll need to back up your data then reinstall your applications and restore the data. For more details about replacing the RC, see the Knowledge Base article KB 971767. For more information, visit the Window 7 Forum.

Thanks again for helping us test Windows 7.

The Windows 7 Team

This sounds very unprofessional and disappointing. Why shutdown the operating system every 2 hours? Why change the wall paper to “a solid black background with a persistent message on your desktop”?. Why display “periodic notifications that Windows isn’t genuine”?. Did we cheat Microsoft by running Windows 7 RC? Why not just expire gracefully with some friendly reminders.

What do you think about this?

You can get more information about Windows 7 RC expiration from Microsoft Knowledge Base.

Most of the applications we use on daily basis are pluggable. Popular applications like Firefox, Eclipse, NetBeans, JEdit, Wordpress, Hudson are all pluggable. In fact, pluggability has played a major part in the success of most of these applications. Why not make the Java applications we develop pluggable as well? Yes, we get pluggability out of the box, if our applications are based on a rich client platform like NetBeans or Eclipse. But for some reasons if you decide not to use those platforms, it doesn’t mean that they should not be pluggable. In this article, we will learn how to write a simple pluggable application that will load it’s plugins dynamically.

The API
First, let us define a plugin interface that should be implemented by all the plugins of our application. We are going to keep it very simple. Create a project called “plugin-api” in your favorite IDE and create the interface “ApplicationPlugin”.

package com.pluggableapp.plugins.api;

public interface ApplicationPlugin
{
    String getName();
    void init();
}

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Recently I read the article “Free UML tools” which explains about the various free UML tools available. That article made me think “What UML tool do people actually use?”. Over the years, I have used tools like Microsoft Visio, ArgoUML, NetBeans UML, StarUML and finally settled with JUDE. How about you? What UML tools do you use? Some of you might use more than one tool (at work, at home etc), so feel free to choose all the options applicable.

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In a world where everyone is using technologies like Flash, Silverlight etc to present rich content, are Java Applets still used? Are they still relevant? The answer is – “Yes”. Apart from being used primarily for playing online games, Java Applets are still used in many different ways. Here I would like to highlight a few applications that put Applets to good use.

1. Online Office Suite
ThinkFree is a very popular and professional online office suite based on Java Applet and Ajax.

2. Virtualization
JPC or Java PC Emulator is a pure java based virtualization software that can be used to boot your virtual computers right inside the browser. Yes they run as “Java Applets” inside the browser.

3. Remote Desktop Viewer
Products like TightVNC and UltraVNC provide a java applet based client to view remote desktops.

4. (Web) Operating System
iCloud, is an web operating sytem that makes use of XML and Java Applet Technology (atleast for Firefox).

5. File Upload

Facebook uses a beautifully designed Java Applet to upload photos to facebook photo albums.
net2ftp is a web based ftp client that makes use of tiny Java Applet to “drag and drop” files from local computer to the browser and upload them to the remote ftp server.

If you have come across any website that make use of Java Applets, please share your thoughts in the comments.

Do you use Subversion as your version control system? Then, please share with us what is your favourite Subversion client.

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Subversion is a very popular version control system. Though Subversion provides a very robust command line client, most of us prefer using a nice GUI front end. Windows users are really fortunate to have a powerful tool like TortoiseSVN which without any argument is simply the best front end for Subversion. Unfortunately, TortoiseSVN is available for just the Windows platform. Here I would like to highlight about RapidSVN, a cross-platform GUI front end for Subversion.

This tutorial is directed towards new users of Linux or people who migrated from Windows to Linux recently. If you are a Windows user, TortoiseSVN might be the best bet for you. Learn more about TortoiseSVN from the post “Extending Subversion by using TortoiseSVN“.

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Introduction

Continuous Integration is a software development practice where members of a team integrate their work frequently, usually each person integrates at least daily – leading to multiple integrations per day.
- Martin Fowler

Hudson is a popular open-source continuous integration server used by many organizations like Redhat JBoss. Though there are many well known and well established open-source projects like CruiseControl, Continnum and some commercial offerings like Bamboo, what makes Hudson special is it’s powerful yet easy to use web interface, it’s simplicity and it’s extensible architecture with many plugins.

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In my previous post, I explained how to convert audio files from one format to another in Ubuntu. Ubuntu provides native support for this through Sound Converter which can be installed using a simple command. After trying Sound Converter, I was confident that there will be similar applications to convert video files. That made me to install applications like WinFF, Avidemux.

My objective was to convert *.DAT files from a VCD into *.mp3. I decided to try WinFF first. The interface was pretty simple to use.

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“Linux lacks good multimedia applications“. How many times have we heard this! This was my perception as well. Not that I do my living based on these tools but I do use them often at home. Atleast, many of us might be in a need to convert audio/video from one format to another and rip tracks out of audio cds.

Traditionally I use softwares like Any Video Converter, Format Factory to convert audio/video files but unfortunately they are available only on Windows and I had to boot into my old Windows XP in order to use them. I thought I had no other choice and also since those tools did the job for me, I was eventually using them whenever the need arises. Fortunately there are some good tools in linux as well.

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NetBeans 5.0 – Simplified Swing development
NetBeans 5.5 – Simplified Java EE development
NetBeans 6.0 – Made the NetBeans editor and other core infrastructure on par with competitors
NetBeans 6.5 – Looked beyond Java development by supporting languages like PHP
NetBeans 7.0 6.7 – Tries to make collaborative team development seamless.

I was quick to download the “All Java” pack of NetBeans IDE for linux. Installation, as usual was pretty smooth on my Ubuntu 9.04. The installation didn’t give me much surprises and it was very much similar to version 6.5. I customized the installer to install Glassfish v2.1 and Tomcat 6.0.18 for me.

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