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.

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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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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Introduction:

Subversion is arguably the most popular version control system as of now. No wonder NetBeans has very good support for Subversion. I personally feel that a java developer must be familiar with both these tools. This article shall help you to get started with both these tools.

Objectives:

- To create a simple java project in NetBeans.

- To import the java project into the subversion repository.

- To commit the changes made in a java source file.

- To view the revision history of a java source file which was changed.

- To rollback to the previous revision of the java source file.

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Apart from your favourite IDE, I feel, a Java Developer might be very productive with the following tools (in no particular order):

- Firefox (Do I need to say anything about it?)

- Apache Ant (Not needed, if you use NetBeans. NetBeans has got bundled ant)

- JEdit (Mainly for it’s wide range of plugins. I use it’s LogViewer and HexViewer plugin frequently. Also it has got excellent syntax highlighting for your properties file, java files, nsis scripts etc)

- Subversion Version Control System(Got excellent integration with NetBeans and Eclipse. You must consider it atleast for your personal development.) You can read more about installing subversion here.

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