Enigmastation.com

The Synergy Project announced the release of Synergy 1.6 beta, which among other things offers an autoconfiguration mechanism. Synergy allows you to use one mouse and keyboard for multiple computers – almost like a software KVM (although chances are they’d say it was exactly like a software KVM.) I’d tried it before on Fedora and [...]

One of the things that drives me crazy about Windows (among many) is the missing “compose key,” a key sequence that allows me to enter unicode sequences easily. For example, if I want to use the word “clichés” properly, I want an easy sequence to enter, like I have on my Linux installation. Enter WinCompose. [...]

Java recently added a more strict verifier to the class loading mechanism. This isn’t really a bad thing, necessarily, because it conforms to what Java was always supposed to do – except a lot of projects now rely on the verifier doing what it’s always done. For all intents and purposes, the Java 8u11 (and [...]

It’s easy to look at life’s little hurdles and respond with something trite, like “It could be worse,” or “You could have brain cancer.” The thing is: those things are true; it could be worse, you could have brain cancer… and sometimes you do. Sometimes the bump in the road is minor in comparison to [...]

I’ve recently started contributing to another book, and one of my tasks was, like, “start the book.” I’ve been dealing with the tyranny of choice – poorly, as it turns out – and I think I’ve finally solved one of the hardest problems: In what format should the book be written? I’ve gone around and [...]

Let’s see if we can figure out how to use PencilBlue. It looks interesting enough, and I like much about the approach they’re taking (“Eventually someone who’s not in love with the technology has to manage the site”); let’s see if we can hammer out some basic workflows. The philosophy PencilBlue seems to prefer is [...]

Tom Callaway (spot) mentioned a company local to the Raleigh area, publishing an open source CMS, called PencilBlue. PencilBlue is written with Node.js, a server environment leveraging Javascript. You might wonder why I’m even considering trying a different platform. After all, I’m already a user of WordPress; I also work for a company that produces [...]

What happens when you have tests that need different resources with similar names? Confusion, that’s what. Let’s map out a project so we can see what happens: Parent Project Test Resources 1 Test Resources 2 Library Code (depends on both test resources projects) Now, in our problem code, the resources for the test data use [...]

This morning, a user on ##java asked if private variables could be shadowed in subclasses. Upon being asked to try it and see, the user said that they didn’t have the time, which was ironic (and wrong), but errr… what the heck, I’ll write a test case to demonstrate that no, shadowing private variables (and [...]