November 2007 archive

Picture Filer: A free Java program for naming and sorting image files

I made this program to go along with my process for handling incoming digital pictures, but I hope you might find it useful also.
I copy files from my camera in to a working directory, and bulk rename them using my Nautilus script: rename-with-exif-date.sh. This gives me a bunch of files with a timestamp in [...]

On the Sharing of Free Software

Hi, loyal readers. I'm still here. Last week was busy at work, and getting up at 3:30am tends to make my evenings shorter. Any time I've had, I've been working on writing a Java utility to help with naming and sorting my pictures. It's always a battle between finding time to write [...]

Martin Sexton, 'Hallelujah'

Martin Sexton, Hallelujah
Absolutely loving Black Sheep and Wonder Bar, and I've already ordered two more of his albums: In the Journey and The American. I may have missed out on years of listening enjoyment, but now I get to experience it all for the first time. Woo Hoo!
I read some of the comments [...]

Displaying a Scaled Image with Java Swing

I'm working on a small application to help me with naming and sorting my pictures, so one of the basic things it needs to do is load and scale an image. Found lots of information here and there on this, and this post is to share what I came up with.
When searching around trying [...]

NetBeans Gotcha: GUI custom component problem when package and class named the same

Let's say you have a project with package Example, and in that package you have:

Example.java // troublemaker!
ExampleUI.java // "form" - extends JFrame
LabelExample.java // extends JLabel

One of the cool things about the Matisse GUI Editor in NetBeans is that you can add LabelExample.java as a [...]

At the St. Paul Curling Club

Lunch today at The Happy Gnome and then a walk across the parking lot to the St. Paul Curling Club for a couple of hours of curling. The Happy Gnome is a nice little restaurant and bar (although I apologize for their web site which seems to be all Flash). Went back afterwards [...]

NautilusSvn and New Emblems

After writing last week about how I missed the Windows-only Tortoise(CVS|SVN) in GNU/Linux and sharing my simple scripts for running Subversion commands from Nautilus, I found Nautilus Svn by Jason Field, an Extension written in Python. (And available under the GPL v2.) It's very nice, and adds (among other things) a major feature that [...]

Code Format Helper for WordPress (Java Program)

Displaying code on a web page can be tricky, and even trickier if you use WordPress. You may have noticed in WordPress that straight quotes turn in to curly quotes, multiple dashes turn in to en dashes and em dashes, and so on. While this may make our posts look prettier, it does [...]

HTML Character Entity References of Potential Interest to WordPress Users

character
 
ref #
ref name

curly left single quote
‘
‘
‘

curly right single quote
’
’
’

curly left double quote
“
“
“

curly right double quote
”
”
”

en dash
–
–
–

em dash
—
—
—

ellipsis
…
…
…

left angle quote
«
«
«

right angle quote
»
»
»

single quote (apostrophe)
'
'
'

double quote
"
"
"

hyphen
-
-
 

backslash
\
\
 

forward slash
/
/
 

period (dot)
.
.
 

space

 
 

non-breaking space
 
 
 

ampersand
&
&
&

less than
<
&#0060;
&lt;

greater than
>
&#0062;
&gt;

I was going to include this table as part of a longer, related entry, but then I thought it might be better posted as a stand-alone reference.

The [...]

Thoughts on Invention, Innovation, and Patents from 'Guns, Germs, and Steel'

Originally published 17 October 2007 in Free Software Magazine.
I'm working on Guns, Germs, and Steel, by Jared Diamond. Good book so far, although I've ground almost to a halt halfway through. (I'd probably make better progress if it showed up in blog-sized chunks in my feed reader every day.) I like sweeping accounts of history, [...]