ksymeon

Discovered this website these days, some good stuff in there, like Bruce Eckel 's Thinking in Python and Thinking in Java and lots of others. Worth a visit for all the geeks out there :-)

Started to follow David Lanham's work from the Iconfactory , now I'm a regular visitor to his web-site. The artwork is awesome, style is unique, and his icons and wallpapers often decorate my desktop. Don't miss it: http://www.dlanham.com/

This was a bit tricky... So here it goes, in case anybody else in the world would like to do it. Full installation instructions can be found here , however I hope that these steps will help: 0. Downlad the Debian pacakge (oracle-xe-universal_10.2.0.1-1.0_i386.deb) from http://www.oracle.com/technology/software/products/database/xe/index.html . 0. First of all, you need to su as root, and unfortunatelly sudo is not enough! Oracle will not install properly unless you do that: sudo -s You might want to add 1GB of swap space space. Use these commands: mkdir /swap dd if=/dev/zero of=/swap/swapfile_1gb bs=1024 count=1048576 mkswap /swap/swapfile_1gb swapon /swap/swapfile_1gb To make the swap file stick add the following lines to /etc/fstab : /swapfile swap swap defaults 0 0 To check that the swap file is used, type: swapon -s free 1. Install libaio1 if you don't have it: apt-get install libaio1 2. Start the installation: dpkg -i ./oracle-xe-universal_10.2.0.1-1.0_i386.deb 3. Configure yo...

Years of waiting are now over. I have succesfully configured an instance of the Ubuntu Server v6.06 (Dapper Drake) on a VMWare machine and I'm over the top with joy! All these years, my linux experience has been somewhat "limited". I had installed all sorts of distros but never had a reason to drill down anymore. Played with the UI and a few apps and that was it, and even though I have been a using BSD and Solaris for quite sometime I never had to learn more than the basics (moving files around, writing scripts, making coffee (java), tailing logs, grepping, etc.). This time though, I not only installed Apache , Tomcat and Java 5 ; I went to great lengths adding a second hard-disk, partitioning, extending my swap to the second disk, installing and uninstalling Oracle 10g XE etc. All sorts of "advanced" stuff ;-) I have now a fully functioning virtual Ubuntu server on VMWare (love this stuff), with Apache, Tomcat and Oracle . I can ssh to them from my cygwin, I ...

The next big thing I found today (see previous post) is called FastStone Image Viewer 3.2 and it's an image viewer. Fast, lightweight and nicely done, looks very promising and could possibly replace my ageing ACDSee Classic 32 I've been using for years! I keep a folder on my disks with the most useful freeware programs I find on the web. I call it My Freeware Suite :-) Here's the contents: FileZilla SyncBack, HashOnClick and other utilities from 2BrightSparks CSS Tab Designer AutoHotKey WinAmp SysInternals AdAwareSE 7Zip MediaPlayerClassic ...and others... :-)

I've been getting quite a lot of emails regarding ToolBox my little application launcher which I've been developing since 1996. Most users are asking for a hot-key feature that will allow them to bring ToolBox to front with the press of a button. I have looked at how to implement such a feature, years ago, and when I found out that I had to write a keyboard hook I decided to resist the temptation and keep ToolBox as "clean" and non-intrusive as possible. What is more, the portable nature of ToolBox (it can run from almost everywhere, doesn't need installation, etc.), requires some consideration on how far new features can go into the host's internals. Having decided to provide some solution to those emails, I did a bit of investigation on third-party tools that could be used to bring an application to the front and I found a real Gem!: AutoHotKey is an open-source utility that can do just that. With a simple script that looks like this: #z:: IfWinExist Too...

Not very often you come across a piece of software so complete, so full of nice surprises, so comprehensive in scope and functionality. I was a beta tester, I installed the trial, I decided to buy it and never looked back. I'm not going to post a full review, I just wanted to say how fascinating it is using Lightroom . Every single day I learn a new thing, I dive more into the abyss of functions and features and every single time it puts a smile on my face. I initially thought that Lightroom is just for RAW photography workflow (non-destructive exposure control, etc.). It turns out to be that on top of that, it gives you massive metadata, labelling and generally cataloging functionality which can be used on all sorts of images. What is more, you can clone pictures for editing and "stack" them with the originals. Moving on, you discover it's amazing usability in terms of sorting out pictures, comparing shots and selecting collections of pictures. It has this "spra...