open source

GWT and Ext GWT (GXT) are interesting platforms to develop complex web applications using Java. It supports fancy UIs and all client-side code gets compiled into JavaScript.

There are a couple of non-obvious gotchas though that will make your application crash and burn without a clear error message.

If you have a lot of projects in your Eclipse workspace you should check out the Dynamic Working Sets plug-in.

Ant includes a Tstamp task that allows a property to be set to the current date and time in a given format. Unfortunately there is no way to get that value as a Unix time (epoch).

I have a new Dell Precision M6500 laptop. It replaces my 4 year old Dell XPS M1710.

I'm not a big fan of the new default theme in Ubuntu 10.04. It's a bit too much I-wanna-look-like-Apple IMHO.

Fortunately the bisigi project contains a couple of really nice themes that you can use instead. Check them out.

After a recent update on my Ubuntu server some directories had disappeared from a couple of Samba shares.

I have released an open source Twunch application for the Android platform.

After upgrading a Dell Inspiron 6400 laptop from Ubuntu 9.04 to 9.10 the machine was so slow it was barely usable. top was showing a load average of 7 after opening Firefox or OpenOffice.

Both drush and rsync are handy tools to automate the deployment of Drupal sites. You just have to be careful how you combine them.