In my Maven build, I use exec-maven-plugin to run an external tool for Java code generation. In this case the flatbuffers compiler (flatc). By default, flatc always runs, so you always get a new .java file. This will always trigger Java compiler to run, which will in turn always trigger jar packaging to run, etc. I would like flatc to only run if it’s source file is updated, so I can get a properly incremental build and avoid needlessly recompiling.

Android TV is included in some modern Smart TVs, and there are also external set-top-boxes to get Android TV for any TV with HDMI input. However, there are also some set-top-boxes which almost, but not quite, support Android TV. With not so much extra effort, it is possible to make an Android app supporting those fake Android TV devices as well as the real ones. In addition to the guidelines from Google for building Android TV apps, do this to support the fake TV Android TV devices as well:

After listening to a presentation about Domain Driven Security, I got some additional insights about what a data structure (as opposed to OOP object) should be able to do. Data structures (I call them struct) should have a subset of OOP features which I think is useful and harmless. A struct should allow constructors. Such constructors can have two purposes, to convert one type of data into another and to validate the input.

Several popular statically typed programming languages, including C++, Java and C#, have a serious design flaw. They make no useful distinction between objects in the OOP sense and plain data structures. A plain data structure should only be a dumb container for data. It should not have any behaviour, only simple accessors for data items in it. It should not be possible to override data accessors. It should be clear and transparent what it does.

In their quest to promote Reactive, Typesafe is beating up a straw man by portraying blocking I/O in a particularly stupid way which is rarely (if ever) done in practice. In a recent webinar, I found this slide which suggests that a blocking I/O operation will waste CPU time while waiting for the I/O to complete. If I understand it correctly, it does not actually work like this in any reasonable runtime environment / operating system.

I want a simple, fast and lightweight text editor for my Linux desktop. I don’t want to learn a lot of new arcane key bindings, so not Vim or Emacs. I want a real GUI desktop application, not a console based one, so not nano (even though nano is nice when you only have a text console available). I don’t want a full-blown IDE for programming (I already have that) so I don’t need syntax highlighting and similar features.

I regularly use Swedish keyboard layout, but I keep the English layout around in case I would like to temporary switch to it. Ubuntu 14.04 sometimes mess this up and I suddenly get English layout when I log in. I fix this by installing dconf-editor, go to desktop/ibus/general, and make sure that the values engines-order and preload-engines are the same and in the desired order with the default layout first.

I need a setting with a numeric value in my Android app. There is no obvious fit among the standard Preferences in Android, so I decided to implement my own Preference subclass. This was a bit more involved than what I hoped for. I ended up with this. An improvement would be to be able to configure min and max values through XML attributes. public class NumericPreference extends DialogPreference { private static final int DEFAULT_VALUE = 0; private NumberPicker mWidget; private int value = DEFAULT_VALUE; public NumericPreference(Context context, AttributeSet attrs) { super(context, attrs); setDialogLayoutResource(R.

I use Adobe Lightroom 4.4 for photo editing. There is one very annoying aspect of this program, it is not available for Linux (only for Windows and Max OS X). In order to run Lightroom on my computer, I had to use VirtualBox and install Windows 7 in it. This works, but is quite clumsy and annoying. And since Lightroom is the only reason for me to run Windows, I would like to get rid of it.

If you want to create a self-contained .jar file, with all library dependencies included, you can do it with Maven. Include this in your pom.xml: <build> <plugins> <plugin> <groupId>org.apache.maven.plugins</groupId> <artifactId>maven-assembly-plugin</artifactId> <version>2.4</version> <configuration> <archive> <manifest> <mainClass>com.yourcompany.youapp.Main</mainClass> </manifest> </archive> <descriptorRefs> <descriptorRef>jar-with-dependencies</descriptorRef> </descriptorRefs> </configuration> <executions> <execution> <id>make-jar-with-dependencies</id> <phase>package</phase> <goals> <goal>single</goal> </goals> </execution> </executions> </plugin> </plugins> </build> Then when you run mvn package, you will get a target/*-jar-with-dependencies.jar file which you can run with java -jar.