Daniel E. Markle's Blog

When using the subversion client built into Netbeans 5.5 on OS X with the svn+ssh protocol, it ignores the username entered and always uses the logged in user's username. This occurs both when entering a username in the field for it and when using a url like svn+ssh://username@server.com/svnrepo. Fortunately if you encounter this problem, there is a workaround:

svn+ssh://username@username@server.com/svnrepo

Netbeans only strips the first username@, leaving the second one in place. Everything then works as the correct URL gets properly embedded in the right places.

In homage to the movie WarGames, DEFCON encourages the player to replay cold war doomsday scenarios, sitting in a bunker commanding forces to destroy the enemy using silo, submarine, and bomber based nuclear weapons. Unlike other games which force the player to wage war on the developer's platform of choice, this game lets you destroy the world on Linux and Mac OS X as well as Windows.

To add some strategy instead of simple destruction, viable defenses are available if used correctly. One example are the silos which fire interceptor missiles, but only when not firing nuclear missiles themselves, preventing poorly planned attacks from hitting their targets. This creates interesting strategies and bluffs to be used against other human players.

Shall we play a game?

Looking for an easy way to launch a browser window from your swing application? The easiest solutions I found without using a library involved JNLP; not a good answer for my cross platform Swing applications. There are quite a few solutions, but I like Browser Launcher 2. Only 92kb, it seems rather good at finding the user selected system default browser, and its ease of use is hard to deny:

BrowserLauncher().openURLinBrowser("http://example.com");

I have been using the PDFBox library when working with PDF files, most commonly to extract the text for lucene indexing and generating thumbnails conveniently in Java. Recently I have started to see this error when generating thumbnails, which come out as properly sized plain white pages:

java.io.IOException: Unknown stream filter:COSName{JBIG2Decode}

Some of the latest PDFs, in this case from a new Xerox copier (which scans into PDF format), generates black and white images in PDFs using the JBIG2 format. Java has no built-in support for JBIG2 yet, and building a handler for this image type into the PDFBox library isn't an option for the development team at this time.

In my quest to avoid high fructose corn syrup (HFCS), one of the items I most frequently consume has recently become loaded with it; jams and jellies. I consume these instead of butter or worse, colorized processed vegetable oil (also known as margarine) whenever possible. I have found quite a few delicious alternative jellies with no high fructose corn syrup (and more actual fruit), but not grape.

Ironically while eating at McDonald's this morning I noticed their grape jelly has no HFCS. A small comfort perhaps compared to the other pernicious items I am consuming on my occasional lapses when visiting that facility, but at least it is something.

I made a purchase with Google Checkout earlier this week and was really impressed with the user experience. While doing some research into using it, I found they are offering free checkout services until 2008. This seems to be a killer deal for budding businesses; setting up a merchant account and transaction fees are a considerable obstacle for new businesses.

It does however lack Interchange support. It is possible to use the basic embedded-in-page checkout with Interchange now, but this HTML option doesn't provide as nice of an experience for the user. It also requires more administration work as the retailer has to manually process orders using Google's checkout site. Building and contributing Google Checkout XML interface support for Interchange may be in my future.