Recent Posts by Geertjan Wielenga

My daily routine in Alexandria...Wake around noon and check out the view from the balcony: Prepare for three hours of Arabic class: (The picture above shows me and Lou, from Syracuse, chilling out at Mahmoud's coffee shop, which is on the corner of Khaleed Ibn El Waleed and Mohamed Nabil Hamdy in Alexandria.) Spend three hours learning Arabic: (In the picture above you see me, Osman the interior designer from London, Yusuf the construction worker from Brussels, and Mohamed our...

The closer your coffee approaches the texture of mud, the better it tastes. No beer, against religion, but sheesha has same (better) effect. (Example of how life gets around religion.) Everything is dirt cheap, depending on how well-honed your bargaining skills are. At first you don't realize it, but everything is available, if you know where to find the tiny shop that specializes in it. A new Arabic word is easier to remember once you've written it a few 100 times. The important...

...nobody! Here's a small clue... And, in case you're thinking "Photoshop", here's another one: So, I've been studying Arabic in Egypt. I'm going to be here another week or so. I'm at the Qortoba Institute in Alexandria. I'm sharing an apartment with a guy from Syracuse called Lou Ruppert, who, believe it or not, was a lapsed NetBeans user when we first met. (In fact, he even had NetBeans IDE 4.0 Beta 2 on his laptop.) After I raved a bit about NetBeans IDE 5.0, he spent an...

Guess where I am and what I'm doing with my vacation? Scuba diving in Thailand Learning Arabic in Egypt Playing a djembe (African drum) in Senegal Trudging through snow in St. Petersburg Teaching English to Estonians One of the above is true. Take a guess, send it (g_wielenga@yahoo.com), and everyone with the correct answer will get a postcard from me (probably from the airport on the way back). By the way, you can only enter once... Closing date: 31 December.

One of the trickiest—and most important—aspects of the MultiView API is the part where you indicate to the user that the file is 'dirty', in other words, unsaved. That's normally done by means of an asterisk. But somehow that's pretty hard to program—the entire API is pretty hard to work with—but I'm trying. Here's my first stab at the source code for a JBoss deployment descriptor multiview editor. And here's part of the result (note the asterisk): But, it's still got...

I have a pretty amazing colleague in the States, called Dave Havrda. Not only did he provide me with the basis of my jboss-web.xml multiview editor, a few days ago, but yesterday I received something even better. You'll have to check it out for yourself, the picture is really cool (click to enlarge): If you're itching to get your hands on this source code, you'll have to wait a few more hours while I wrap up a first draft of this new tutorial. By the way, did you know that Tim...

So, I'm quite excited about what I'm about to reveal, but I suspect that there's trouble afoot. It's quite possible that the powers that be—and usability guys like Jano Rojcek—are going to put their foot down and squash this Easter Egg before you get a chance to try it out. In other words, they might remove it from the build. I really hope that they don't, but you never know. So, this is the story: somewhere towards the end of last week, a deadline loomed—the keyboard...

I've applied Dave Havrda's (see yesterday's blog entry) multiview editor to my own data object—one that I made for the JBoss deployment descriptor (jboss-web.xml). Earlier, I made a component palette for this file type (see the NetBeans Component Palette Module Tutorial), and now it has a multiview editor, as you can see when you click the images below to enlarge them (however, the multiview editor seems to cancel out the component palette, which is one of several issues I...

It's not always easy to get just the right sample code for the NetBeans Module Development tutorials. I've been really lucky in some cases, especially with Andrei Badea's Manifest File Syntax Highlighting module (which forms the basis of the Syntax Highlighting tutorial). But today it was just as good—Dave Havrda, a colleague from the States, who I never met but regularly e-mail with, sent me a module that very nicely demonstrates the NetBeans MultiView API. Here's what it...