wg, or WebGraphics, has an interesting little tutorial on how to create inline mini tabs. These are tabs where, when you mouse over them, you get a little highlight bar appear below the text. This is a nice little affect to add to a main navigation area running across the top of your site. One thing that makes this tutorial nice is that it uses nothing but css to achieve the affect.
I am currently writing this from a hotel room in Windsor, Ontario, hooked up to a wireless access point. However, I am not using my notebooks wireless card. I am literaly hooked up to a wireless access point. To be precise, a SMC EZ Connect g2.54 GHz wireless ethernet adapter.
If you want free high speed internet access, they give you this little box that contains the ethernet adapter. You then plug the adapter into the wall outlet and, using an ethernet cable, plug it into your notebook. The adapter then connects to the wireless network and sends the signal to your computer. This is a cool, reverse use of a wireless acess point (although I am not totally certain that this thing is an access point).
I have not put my wireless card in yet to see if I can snoop on their network or connect to it without the adapter. My guess is the answer will be no. Using the adapter, they can program it with the passcode and ssid for the network and not have to worry about giving this information to guests. Cool idea for a hotel though.
Say you write an overly large chunk of code that you want to apply some code folding to, say 5 methods in your class that you want to get out of the way so no-one edits them. There is a method to do this. Normally, NetBeans would simply allow you to fold each method, but this still shows the methods. Here is a trick for forcing a fold for all 5 methods.
// <editor-fold defaultstate="collapsed"
desc="hidden methods - don't edit">
public method1 {}
public method2 {}
public method3 {}
...
// </editor>
When you open the class in NetBeans, all you methods will be nicely hidden behind a single fold with the message “hidden methods - don’t edit”. Cool, eh?
Danielle just bought a nice new iMac. This iMac comes with an airport extreme wirelesss card. In normal speak, that means it comes with an 802.11G wireless network card. However, my home network is only 802.11b. So, I decided to upgrade. Strange thing about wireless hardware, a straight access point–which is what I had before–is more expensive then a wireless router. And much, much harder to find (I phoned my local computer store about one only to be told they could get it for the middle of June). So the logical thing to do was to get a wireless router and use that as an access point.
On first look, this was easier said than done.
After a little investigation I found out that this is incredibly easy to do. You just have to make sure you don’t do one thing. Do not plug anything into the WLAN port! This effectively side-steps the router part and allows you to use the wireless part. There are a few more steps, you also have to turn off DHCP and give the router a static IP address and enable all the wireless parts. Most of the information I needed to get this up and running came from a quick Google search.
Here is a cool little tip for accessing the Ruby on Rails documentation offline. I picked this up from the Digital Media Minute website.
eWeek.com has an article on their site entitled Eclipse Casts Shadow on Sun. The article basically says that Eclipse has won the Java IDE war and it is only a matter of time before Netbeans is dead.
“This used to be a flashy debate but is losing luster with the rapid adoption and growth of Eclipse as a platform for developing rich client applications,” said Benjamin Booth, a developer with webMethods Inc. “There’s no real debate here. Those who debate NetBeans versus Eclipse are out of touch with inevitability.”
The above quote is an example of the tone set by the article. This is carried throughout the entire piece. Basically, the entire article is one big love-fest for Eclipse as it goes into point after point on why Eclipse is the best IDE on the market and why it will eventually kill NetBeans.
Personally, I disagree with a lot of the article. I think Eclipse is an excellent IDE with a lot of cool features as long as you don’t mind looking for the right plugins. However, without the plugins, Eclipse is nothing more then a really good text editor with refactoring support. Currently, It contains no J2EE or J2ME support and it can not be hooked up to any app servers. In addition, because Eclipse uses its own internal compiler, it is very hard to change the default java compiler. Another strike against Eclipse, in my opinion, is the lack of Ant based project management. Yes, Eclipse does support Ant, but only throught the external tools menu, this does not count as true support. NetBeans supports Ant from its project management on up. The entire IDE is based on Ant. This means that the same way I compile and build my project in NetBeans is the same way I compile and build my project outside of NetBeans. And for me, that is a huge advantage.
In my opinion, NetBeans is finally giving Eclipse some real competition and some people in the Eclipse camp just can’t take it. So their response is the to write articles declaring Eclipse king and all others history. Not so. If this kind of outright arrogance continues, then I think Eclipse is in for a very rude awakening as NetBeans slowly pulls past it in the Java IDE race.
Walking into the Apple store can be a dangerous thing.
Apple opened their very first Apple store in Canada yesterday and we decided to go and see what it was like. In addition, about 2 weeks ago, Danielle placed an order online for a new Mac Mini. So we went to the Apple store with only the intention of purchasing a Mac Mini and speeding things up. Never walk into an Apple store if you have any intention of buying something, even a little something.
We walked in wanting to buy a Mac Mini and walked out having purchased an iMac. We picked up the smalled iMac available:
This is one very nice little computer, but man is it heavy to carry home on the subway. Out slow transformation over the Mac has begun.
