Onyxbits

OK, I rooted my Nexus 7 because I wanted a firewall on it. Why you have to go out of your way to install something on it that's common sense in the Desktop world is beyond me. Anyway, from time to time I now see a toast flashing up a couple dozen times stating "Shell has been granted Superuser permission". That's kinda troublesome. I did not authorize the SuperUser App to give root to anything beyond Droidwall, especially NOT to a shell (most certainly not to a shell because commandline interpreters are meant to start other programs).

I wasn't exactly thrilled when I saw the first picture's of the surface. Sure, a build in stand is a nice addition to a tablet for watching movies while lying in bed, but it also makes the tablet either thicker or sacrifices battery space. The real issue, however, I have with the surface is it's keyboard cover, a feature, no review so far failed to praise, even though it is an awful and backwards idea.

I seem to have a knack for fulfilling Murphy's law: when something can go wrong, it will. First, I miss the Nexus 7 launch in Germany due to getting sick. Then, when I finally get around to picking one up in the store it's two days before the first rumors about a 32 GB version starting to spread.

I just noticed something funny. Normally, the daily routine of a website owner is all about getting more visitors (preferably from search engines) and getting less spam.

Now, I made a mistake with this project, resulting in getting hit hard by a spambot. The project in question features a bugtracker module and I honestly thought, limiting posting bug reports to registered users and protecting the signup form with a math CAPTCHA would suffice to lock spammers out. I could not have been more wrong about it.

Well, Java is cross platform, granted. But if you want your application to look native to the user's desktop environment, you have to jump through a lot of hoops (and some of them are burning, too). Take icons, for example. Nowadays, an application is expected to use icons in menuentries and on the toolbar to increase usability. Nothing wrong with that, except that Swing does not ship with any. You have to provide your own and you have to bundle them with your application. For Windows and MacOS, that's ok.

Hooray! I finally opened my ScenePainter website up for the public, did some minor SEO for it and after only about a week or two, my most diligent user is a russian spambot. It visits me about once every half an hour and tries to publish it's crap in a "head against the wall fashion": It first tries to log in, then attempts to add a new node eleven(!) times, but fails on several required fields.

Know what I really hate about Java? This half-assed attempt at establishing a virtual filesystem. On one hand, you have the java.io package by which you can access the native filesystem of the host OS, on the other, you are suppose to load every application resource via ClassLoader.findResource(). Got a resource, you can't reasonably bundle in a JAR file (e.g. because you have to update/modify it occasionally)? Tough luck!

Seems like Java developers shun the idea of having to do anything out of their cozy virtual machine, so I couldn't find any good code examples for doing this problem: Fork a new JVM from your current JVM and capture it's stdout/stderr stream to a JTextArea. Allow the user to kill the subprocess at any time.

Well, here's my solution:

import java.awt.event.*;
import javax.swing.event.*;
import javax.swing.*;
import java.io.*;
 
public class ForkDemo implements ActionListener {
 
  protected JTextArea output = new JTextArea(10,20);

I have this love/hate relationship with SATA hard disks. Today, my father had this problem again, of his PC not booting. It happens once every few months and the problem always has the same symptoms: the computer slowly crawls through the BIOS POST, has trouble detecting the hard drives, and then ultimately fails at the bootloader.
Every time, I keep telling (and showing) him, it's due to a loose contact in the SATA data cable and fixing the problem is as easy as shoving the plug properly back into it's socket. Yet, every time, I have to get involved in this.

I hereby proclaim that I now officially hate Twitter. The usability of that microblogging "service" is absurd to put it mildly. It's beyond me, why people would even want to use it, let alone, feel the need to tell the world about when they get up, eat dinner, and go to bed again. Making heads or tail out of individual tweets, without knowing their context, is a horse of a different color altogether. But does that mean that Drupal's twitter module (v6x-3.0-beta3) has to be equally braindead in design!?