Eclipse button problem with Kubuntu 9.10 (Karmic Koala)

I ran into this issue while installing the Google App Engine... a quick description of the problem is that some buttons in Eclipse were not responding (doing nothing) after I upgraded to Karmic Koala, after checking the log file, network connection settings and some other things that didn't work I decided to ask the oracle (Google) about it and after a while I found a simple and quick solution here.

Just create an executable file with the following content:

 #!/bin/sh  
 export GDK_NATIVE_WINDOWS=1  
 /opt/eclipse-3.5/eclipse  

Now back to coding ;)

Eclipse Galielo and Google App Engine Plugin

I just installed Galileo and I went straight to the update site to install Google App Engine plugin but for some reason after adding the site (http://dl.google.com/eclipse/plugin/3.5) and following the instructions, Galileo simply didn't do ANYTHING after I clicked on the "Next" button, anyway I found the zip files here and it is just as simple as any other plugin.




1. Download the zip file here for you version.
2. Unzip it at the "dropins" folder in your Eclipse (Galileo) directory.
3. Restart Eclipse

That's it ;)

Windows Task Manager through command prompt

Today I was playing my CSI role as a software developer, also known as: fixing a possible bug, that ended up being a configuration problem. It took a couple of remote desktop sessions to reach the the right environment and finally there I couldn't open Windows Task Manager with the normal shortcut "CTRL + SHIFT + ESC",  so I had to do it through MS-DOS command prompt, this is quite easy but still everyone forgets about it or maybe just don't know it, honestly I will be the first one to forget it, so I decided to share it with the world and at the same time keep the knowledge in a safe place.

How to disable Kubuntu login sound

I don't know about you, but in my case the login sound can be a problem at home while rebooting the system when my wife is sleeping, so I took a couple of minutes to find out how to disable it and here it is.
 

1. Go to "System Settings"
2. Click on "Notifications"
3. Select "KDE System Notifications" from the drop-down menu
4. Find the "Login" event
5. Untick the "Play a sound" option and that's it.

Here you can check the screenshot

Setting Java Virtual Machine memory heap size for your server

Do you need to set the heap size (min and max) available for the java virtual machine being used by your server? well I ran into that annoying OutOfMemoryError message today and I took a couple of screenshots describing how to do it, check it out.

Here you can see WebSphere's console:

In this other case I used Eclipse, you can check how to set the values in the virtual machine parameters at the server connector tab for Geronimo:

 

Java version being used by your server

Today I was solving an issue on different environments and I had to check the Java version being used in BEA Weblogic, IBM WebSphere and Apache Geronimo, it is not difficult but again I thought it would be useful to share it with everyone.

Here you can see how to check the Java version through the log in the Weblogic console:

In this case for WebSphere, you can see where to find the version by directly checking the log file:

The final screenshot is from Geronimo, with a lot of information about Java:

How to get rid of Internet Explorer

I am not a big fan of Microsoft products and using Internet Explorer is one of the most painful experiences I have to go through while testing a UI for a web development or just while browsing the intranet at work, but today I took a look at a Firefox addon that allows you to open an IE tab inside Firefox called (not surprisingly) IE Tab.

The best part of it is that I can add trusted sites just as in IE, something that is not available in the current version of FF, and this avoids having to enter my credentials every time I go to a different page in the intranet! The addon is not perfect, IE 8 sites don’t look exactly the same but still it helps a lot while testing previous versions.

That’s it for now ;)