Recent Posts by Geertjan Wielenga

I recently reported on getting a new laptop. I also mentioned I was now on Ubuntu 7.10 and that the world looked good. Well, it's now 10 days later and I've encountered my first BIG gotcha. To sum it up: I found that I was unable to watch DVDs. Some weird message appeared, about 'libdvdcss', among other things. I've now solved the problem, completely, as far as I can tell. And solving the problem was the same as every other time I've solved similar problems. The typical...

When you use the "Add to Palette" action in NetBeans IDE, because you want to make your domain objects reusable, the new items look like this in the palette: Not very nice, because that's the icon for unknown palette items. Somehow you should be able to at least assign icons to the item, as well as, preferably, a display name and tooltip. I looked at the XML file that is generated by the IDE when adding a new item to the palette. That XML file does not contain an attribute...

I've been in touch with NetBeans user Corey Hunt over the last few days who was working on creating an applet that would make use of the NetBeans Visual Library. At first I didn't think it would be possible at all, but David Kaspar, the library's creator, assured me that it was. There were several problems to solve first, though. Some general guidelines follow:Work through the applet tutorial to understand how applets are constructed in NetBeans IDE. Next, add the Visual...

Yesterday's hint showed up whenever System.out.println or JOptionPane.showMessageDialog are used in the code. Today, let's enhance the hint so that it turns into a lightbulb that the user can click. When clicked, the offending line of code will simply be removed: Here's the same class as yesterday, supplemented with an implementation of the EnhancedFix class, which is the third argument of our ErrorDescription. The code below produces the result shown above; when the hint is...

I have a bad tendency to use JOptionPanes and System.out for debugging, rather than the IDE's state of the art Debugger. What's almost as bad is that I tend to leave those method calls in my code. But now I've solved my problem. I created a hint in the NetBeans editor that tells me about all the instances where I'm using these 'antipatterns': Helpful marks appear in the right side of the editor, so that I can see everywhere in my code where these method calls are found. As...

I believe it would be really cool if we had a Hints wizard, which would generate the basic stubs for new hints for NetBeans IDE. Imagine if we had that—wouldn't that increase the chance (a lot) of NetBeans IDE getting hint contributions from the broader community? And getting more hints is one significant step to NetBeans IDE's editor (especially its Java editor) becoming an even more valuable tool to its users. One part of such a wizard would let the hint developer register t...

On Friday night I met with Roumen and Vaclav Pech (IntelliJ evangelist), Ann Oreshnikova (JetBrains Marketing Director), and Michael Hüttermann (Cologne JUG leader, among many other things). We had a really good time, it was extremely cool and interesting. Vaclav's camera ended up with a lot of pictures, here's the one where I look least crazy: It was also cool because Michael and Ann are the Zone Leaders of JetBrains Zone, so these were the first DZone Leaders that I've met,...

My pet peeve in NetBeans IDE is that the hint that appears when I'm instantiating a non-existent class can only create a new class in a new file: But I don't want a new file. I want the class to be created in the same file, as an inner class. But the IDE doesn't offer that hint. So I inspected the sources and found that all the code for the generation of the inner class is actually already there. It seems to simply be a bug. The appropriate code isn't called at the right...

I came across Mark Ashworth's Connext-Graphsproject a few days ago and then found that the project sources, including samples, are provided as Maven projects. Mark told me that I would first need to do a "mvn install" on the main project, after which I would be able to build the other project, i.e., the one that provides samples. So, being ignorant of Maven and all it entails, I thought: "Hmmm. I guess I'll go to the Synaptic Package Manager and see if I can find Maven...