I love the (now aging) Apache collections15 library, but here’s a small ugly detail that is good to know.

The following call doesn’t do what you would think it does – or what I thought it would do anyway (and the JavaDoc isn’t clear enough):

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Imagine you are dealing with multiple workspaces, which for example can be expected if you split up a code base in several Eclipse projects and you are working on several releases at once. Now wouldn’t it be handy if Eclipse would tell you which workspace is active?

There are two ways.

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Bluetooth supported? Checking in on 2016: yep, still the same.

Pairing up your Bluetooth device was relatively well documented, by the community anyway. It was mostly done using the bluez package from bluez.com. Ubuntu town and in fact all of Linux land was generally at peace and the trendy folk at the BlueTooth Bar were being all trendy-like.

Then it happened. Ubuntu went up one release: Jaunty came to be and subsequently Bluetooth support died. Even now the Internet is teeming with Bluetooth bug reports, problems and forums are filled with questions such as ‘my keyboard is not being paired’. In fact, Debian seemed to be hit as well as some other distributions that leveled up.

What had happened?

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Here’s another gem from the Ubuntu malaise: partitioning a disk hangs when booting from an Ubuntu Live USB stick.

Depending on a couple of factors partman, Ubuntu’s installer partion manager, will hang on ‘scanning disks’, from around 43% to 47%. Following are two possible reasons and solutions.

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Bezier curves are cool. They are curves calculated through a formula with control points. These control points are crucial, as these determine how long, big and curved the Bezier curves are. There are optimized formulas for three, four and five control points, but in this post we’ll deal with an arbitrary number of control points and interactively drawing the curves.

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If you are looking for a cool sun effect (no pun intended) with flaring corona, you’re in the right place. This post isn’t about some practical sun in some shooter though: it would require some tweaking to make it useful in such context, as the animation is rather cpu heavy due to its massive corona noise textures.

No, this post is about combining cool PV3D features in order to achieve a nice looking animated sun. I’ve used the trunk of the papervision code repository, revision 851 (it works up to r910, after that a bug was introduced). Note that I’m no PV3D guru; I’m just sharing what I’ve learned so far.

(note: this sun uses the skybox from the skybox tutorial)

Closely watch that corona for a while!

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Yes, I play video games too. I won’t miss out on Mass Effect, which I think portraits a world almost as intricate as any good sci-fi novel (oh yeah I read those too, you should try A Fire Upon the Deep, by Vernor Vinge).

Since Mass Effect is going to be a trilogy (and more apparently), Bioware included a system that will use old save games as input for continuity in upcoming games, including ME2. Note that you’ll still be able to pick a different face and class.

Get your Mass Effect 1 save games at masseffectsaves.com

I didn’t know there would be an option to use ME1 save games as input until recently and I’ve deleted my save games a long time ago. No undelete program would find them. Annakie recognized this would be a problem and started a small site that offers various save games each with a different set of key choices made over time in ME1.

How awesome is that!

Take your pick as the list is growing fast and the website is becoming a popular hub for Shepards.

Mass Effect 2

Here’s a quick workaround for connecting and reconnecting a bluetooth keyboard (or any bluetooth device for that matter) in Ubuntu Jaunty and Karmic, even after rebooting. In short it’s a shell script that keeps connecting to your device in the background on a regular interval. Dirty? Absolutely. Does it work? Absolutely, no bluetooth configuration required at all.

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Today I was trying to figure out how to exclude certain resources/classes from the war that was being deployed to my embedded server in Eclipse. I couldn’t find out how to do this in the Eclipse settings file.

Apparently, it has nothing to do with the source folder you see in the Project Explorer view, or the export settings in the Buildpath dialogs: instead you need to edit the Eclipse settings file “project-war.settingsorg.eclipse.wst.common.component” (viewable in the Navigator view) and modify the deployed source folders in there. Changes there do *not* reflect in the Project explorer (at least not with my version of Eclipse, Galileo). I’ve removed the test sourcefolder from there and everything was honky dory.

Eclipse has the annoying little problem where Eclipse will copy .svn folders to the target/classes output folder and then complain about duplicate resources. After wading through some vague solutions, here’s a clear and simple post I found to solve this annoyance.

Make Eclipse ignore .svn directories

Window -> Preferences…, Java -> Compiler -> Building. Under “Output folder” add “, .svn/” to “Filtered Resources” (so that you get “*.launch, .svn/”).

It still works like a charm. Thanks Brian.