Scala, Java, Unix, MacOS tutorials (page 369)

Too funny ... Apple rejects Mark Fiore's iPhone application "because it included cartoons that ridiculed public figures." Fiore then wins the Pulitzer Prize, and mentions the next day that his iPhone app was rejected.

Immediately Apple "encourages" Mr. Fiore to re-submit his app for consideration in the App Store. (Do you think Apple will "approve" him now?)

Here are some more notes from the New York Times article where I just read about this:

Just a quick note that if you happen to be looking for a license key generator (or "license key manager") for a Java desktop (Swing) application, I've been taking a look at the TrueLicense library on java.net, and although it is several years old now, it seems to work well, and the author certainly put a lot of time and thought into it.

I just had a couple of problems installing the Drupal Nodewords module (aka, the "Drupal meta tags" module) on my One Man's Alaska website, so I thought I'd share my Nodewords installation notes here.

Drupal theme websites: I recently started looking at free Drupal themes for a new website I'm developing, so I began with the usual Google search for "free Drupal themes". The good news is that there are hundreds of free Drupal themes, and dozens of websites that try to display these Drupal themes.

The bad news is that none of these sites do a really good job of displaying Drupal themes, so in an effort to save you a little bit of time I thought I'd share what I think are the "best" free Drupal theme sites.

April 12, 2010: I just read that Palm is seeking a buyer. Moments like this always raise the question for me, "If I had the money, would I buy Palm?"

Of course the logical response to that question is "What would I do with them if I owned them?", or more precisely, "How would I make money off my purchase?"

IMHO, Apple's motivation for their changes to the iPhone SDK developer agreement are clear: They want you to write your code in Objective C, written to the iPhone API, so your apps will run on their phone, and nowhere else.

Wow, I've never been near the epicenter of an earthquake before, but this morning I was. A 4.6 magnitude earthquake hit just north of Wasilla, Alaska at 8:19 a.m. local time, 10.4 miles north on the George Parks Highway from my current location.

Java/Mac OS X FAQ: Where are Java Preferences stored on Mac OS X?

The preferences you store from within a Java application on a Mac OS X system are saved in a file in the user's ~/Library/Preferences directory. For instance, for a Mac user named Alvin, and a Java class named com.devdaily.Foo, preferences for that class will be stored in this file:

iPhone photos FAQ: How do I delete multiple iPhone or iPad photos at one time?

Solution: As my iPhone photo album fills up with more and more photos, I finally looked into how to delete multiple iPhone photos. It turns out that deleting multiple photos is pretty easy -- once you realize the intent of the icon that takes you to the "delete" button -- and I'll walk you through the steps here.

I'm finally on the road back to Alaska. I don't plan to write any more about this trip on this website, but if you're interested, you can follow my travel adventures on my website about life in Alaska, OneMansAlaska.com.

All the Toyota recall news lately remind me of the problem I've had with a klunking noise in the steering column of my 2006 Toyota RAV4, which leads me to wonder: Hey Toyota, where's my RAV4 recall?

I was talking with a friend the other day about what bad software code ("smelly code") looks like, but I found it very frustrating. I ran into that a lot in my consulting career; it's hard to describe to a non-technical Project Sponsor or Project Manager why their existing code er ... isn't in great shape.

After that discussion, my friend -- who is an engineer and former electrician -- forwarded the following pictures to me, and asked if this is what smelly code looks like. I could only laugh and say yes, that is exactly what it looks like.

I just wanted to put a quick note out here today to let you know that I'll be moving to Alaska over the course of the next few weeks. Because of this I won't be posting nearly as many new tutorials here during that time, but hopefully the current collection of nearly 2,000 Java, Perl, Ruby, PHP, Mac OS X and Linux tutorials will keep everyone busy for a while, lol.

I just read nearly a dozen reports on the Kneber BotNet, and none of the reports mention it, but this BotNet only affects Microsoft Windows computer systems. According to the actual NetWitness report, the top five Windows systems affected are variants of Windows XP (Home and Professional, SP 2 and 3), and Vista Home (SP 0, 1, and 2).

I've been thinking about rewriting my old tutorial on how to execute system processes from a Java application for a while now (How to run system commands from Java applications), but it's a topic that quickly becomes complicated if you want to do it right, so I kept postponing it until I could give it some quality time in a real-world project.

Google released a new beta version of the Google Chrome browser for Mac OS X late last week. To see if you have this new release as an automatic update, look on the Chrome About dialog, and this new release is labeled "5.0.307.7 beta".

The new Google Chrome for Mac OS X browser contains the following new features:

Here's a link to a great story that shows where Microsoft's profit comes from. Remember when looking at that chart that it shows profit, not revenue.

Summary: A look at free Java software license managers.

To help supplement my income, I've been thinking about creating some Java-based shareware applications. As I started thinking about software to time-out my application after 10 or 15 days, and requiring a license to use the software after that initial trial period, I've started down the rabbit hole of Java software license managers.

In "Diaries of a Core Maintainer #6: A tale of two developers", Angie "WebChick" Byron describes the differences in the approach of two hypothetical developers, Sloppy Sam and Perfectionist Pat. Her article is about a year old now, but if you haven't read it yet, and you have never worked on a bazaar-style software project, I really recommend reading it to understand how bazaar-style software development works (specifically the Drupal development process).

I'm sorry that I don't have my other Java/Mac OS X tutorials moved into the Drupal CMS here, but I will try to get that corrected somewhere down the road. In the meantime, here are links to each section of my complete "How to make your Java application look and feel like a Mac OS X application tutorial":