A BufferedReader which returns line terminators

I am working on a parser which must take into account line numbers, and make correlations between them and document’s offsets. For instance, I need to know at which line is the character #145 of a given text file. The problem is that different OSs use different line terminators: \n on Linux, \r\n on Windows, \r on Mac.

How small is the sun down there!

I saw this wonderful movie taken from Mars Rover Opportunity.

The most incredible thing to my eyes was how small is our sun viewed from down there. Looks not so bigger than other stars, but its light is still so strong to bring day light to te whole planet.

How to make gwibber open Firefox (or any other browser) instead of the default one

Since I found Gwibber installed by default with my Ubuntu 10.10 os, I started using it  as my Social broadcast messages client, and I really enjoyed this way to stay informed about anything.

The only annoying thing about this brilliant piece of software was the fact that the links were opened with Epiphany instead of Firefox, that is my default browser.

I googled a little until I found the solution here.

Here is all you have to do to fix this problem:

1) install galternatives

sudo apt-get install galternatives

2) Change the values of these configurations:

gnome-www-browser
x-www-browser

Now gwibber opens the links in the browser you want. Perfect for me

A mobile phone that works as a mobile phone!

I travel by car everyday to reach the office, as millions of people do. One of the bad things that can happen to workers like me is to have some problems with the car AND, at the same, having the mobile phone out of battery. Very bad condition, don’t you agree?

This is the reason why I LOVE serious mobile phones that are loyal to the most important mission a mobile phone must have to follow: being reliable.

Most of modern devices waste their batteries doing a lot of unessential jobs (pictures, browsing etc.). Yes, they’re funny, cool, beautiful… but what about discovering at 19:00, inside your broken car, at 10 km from home, that the facebook app inside your IPhone has sucked up all your battery?

That’s the case you will regret a real, trustable, old (?) mobile phone!

The new web site is online!

As promised

www.ammentos.org

Finally a top level domain for ammentos

Ammentos has finally a top level domain: www.ammentos.org .

A completely new website is under construction as well. It wil be ready for the end of September 2009. Stay tuned!

What’s cooking in the project?

Maybe somebody could have tought that Ammentos project was freezed, or maybe abandoned because, I see, an unusual time delay has passed since last official release 1.3.7.

Instead, not only the project is still absolutely alive, but it’s growing very quick, and so let me anticipate some of the important news about the present and the next future.

Over 5000 downloads!

I am very proud to announce (with a little of emotion) that Ammentos has been downloaded more than 5000 times since its start in the April of 2005.

This big result has been reeched this weekend; i was expecting for it to happen in the next month, but an unexpected, sudden growth of contacts (which currently I cannot explain) has made it possible much before that date.

Thank you very much to all programmers that make all this possible, that still think lightweight, that fight everyday my same battle against overweight and polluting software 

The KISS WebApp Framework? Maybe I found it!

“Sometimes Less is More”. This is the slogan of SLOTS, a templating framework for servlets and JSP. “However, ‘framework’ isn’t entirely accurate, unless you consider 2 class files a framework”, said its author. Yes, incredible, a framework composed by two classes, and yet very flexible. No XML at all, just one .properties file à la old manner.

The framework is composed by a servlet to map into web.xml file, for handling the requests, and a wrapper which performs the templating work. The base concept is that pages content are wrapped into templates before being returned to the browser. Templates can be referred each other into the simple configuration file, allowing lots of possibilities.

And what if you actually need more? Well, are you actually a Java programmer? Take the source code and write down your changes; with SLOTS you can

And finally, do you want a KISS servlet container as well? See Simple, a Java based HTTP engine. Its name says everything!

Showing query results within a JTable

One of the most boring and error prone operations to do while writing desktop applications with database access is to show query results into a JTable. Here’s a simple EntityTableModel that can be used every time you need to need to do so, if you are using Ammentos.