Today I had an amusing problem… a friend wanted me to send him all of the pictures that I took this weekend, and he wanted to get them in about an hour or two. No problem I thought, so I just took the memory card, slapped in my laptop, and prepared to zip the files up and send them.

However, the files were the usual 3000×4000 (you get the idea) sizes, and would take ages to upload to a server, let alone download. I needed to do a batch resize on about 400 images, and in the absence of a good program on my laptop to do this, I decided to go about writing my own little program to do it.

Half an hour later, I have a stand alone java class running, processing all of the images in my pictures folder, resizing them and writing them out to a new folder… and it’s almost done.

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Been spending this morning in a local coffee shop hacking away and improving my JSF skills, when I ran across an annoying problem… each time I undeployed my webapp so I could redeploy, it leaves the jar files behind (keeping me from redeploying). The only way I could successfully deploy after this was to stop tomcat, delete the files manually, and restart. How annoying!

Luckily, a little googling yielded this fine solution, which I am sharing in hopes google picks this post up for other people, as it took me looking through 3 or 4 pages of google results to find it.

Good luck.

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After making my last post, my estimated time to finish extracting eclipse jumped from 2 hours to 5 days. 5 days to extract 300mb of data from a zip file. Maybe I’d been duped? Maybe my new laptop is really as low rate as my last one?

I decided to make a beeline to 7Zip’s site in a vain effort of hope that maybe a different program can do the trick. Downloaded, installed, and extracted the zip file in 5 minutes.

It’s still a little frustrating getting a new laptop with software broken out of the box… I just hope this is the only notable bad experience I have.

Good grief.

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Today I finally replaced my old and busted Dell Inspiron 1100 with a spanking new Sony Vaio (with 2.33Ghz Dual Core, 2GB of RAM, and all that good stuff) and finally got to use Vista…. I got to say I was impressed with the eye candy. But now I’m a little annoyed with the built in zip extraction program.

I’ve been driven to write this post while waiting for Eclipse to extract. You read that right… I got so fed up with waiting I was able to go online and post a rant about it. And according to the dialog, I still have 5 hours to wait for the eclipse zip file to finish extracting, and as I write it’s still going.

Ridiculous.

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Just after lunch today I saw the following email in my inbox from the xunitpatterns mailing list:

The book “xUnit Test Patterns – Refactoring Test Code” is now
available at your favourite book seller and via PDF download. Please
see http://xunitpatterns.com for details and referral links to amazon.xxx.

Thanks for all you help,

Gerard

Awesome. Don’t walk, but run to your favorite online book sellet seller to get a copy.

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