Well, my McAfee license has expired and I’m in the market for a new Virus Scanner. This time I’m after something that won’t bring my machine to a grinding halt, but still has current signature goodness. Enter F-Prot. These guys have been around forever – I remember their DOS software running on our PC Labs in undergrad circa ’92 – but their current offerings are just great. You can get editions for Windows, Linux & [...]

I’ve been playing around with Perisistence frameworks lately, after been inspired by a Hibernate presento at our local JUG. After messing around with Hibernate config issues for ages, I decided to scout around for a lighter weight alternative for my little app and had my first experience with iBatis SQL Maps. All I can say is… Wow! I’ve played around with Hibernate before, and it is power unlimited. But rather than getting lost in the [...]

Ok. Not strickly Java-related, but since a lot of Java tools ship with PDF manuals, you need Adobe Reader. What’s been bugging me is how long Adobe Reader takes to start up (on Windows). It loads a stack of plugins that you probably won’t need for the majority of your work – and on my Thinkpad takes forever just to start up. Well enter Adobe Speed Up – a neat little freeware utility that you [...]

After watching a FindBugs session on JavaOne Online (2004), I am totally hooked. I’ve played with PMD and CheckStyle before (and they are both very cool), but the neat thing about FindBugs is that it runs on your bytecode rather than your source – so it picks up a bunch of things the other tools don’t. I have seen Findbugs before, and even downloaded it, but it didn’t seem as “slick” as the other options, [...]

I first learned about StatCVS on a developerWorks, and it looked pretty darn cool. Basically it’s a tiny Java app that crunches CVS logs and produces a bunch of neat HTML reports. It produces stuff for your project as a whole, and by individual developer. You can see who works the most in what parts of the source tree, what time of day you do your most commits, what percentage of mods vs new classes [...]

After much delay, I finally bought a copy of JNIWrapper, which is one very cool piece of software. Basically, it’s a set of libraries that gives you access to the Win32 libraries without the need of writing your own C wrapper classes for JNI. And it’s not just for Win32 either – COM is supported out of the box! Run their nifty swing app, select the COM library you want to use (from the list [...]