So I use a *nix style windows shell geared more towards power users called bblean. One of the features it provides is the ability to shade windows ala *nix window managers. It does this by overriding the style for the title bar for all the windows. This was causing a problem with Chrome since chrome draws it's own title bar replacement ( tabs in this case). It was really annoying.

Well, it turns out that this has been solved. Short answer is: blackbox -> bbleanskin -> Edit Exclusions and then just add 'chrome.exe' to the list.

http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=13766

very cool! 

I've been playing with Swing lately. The layout managers are quite a challenge and a UI with any kind of complexity beyond simple things quickly degenerates into gobs of unmaintainable code. It's no wonder that frustrated users usually end up using a gui/code generation tool. I generally prefer hand written code or declarative markup for UIs.

So if you're sick of laying out components in swing by hand, take a look at the MigLayout layout manager. It will solve all your problems.

No wonder it's item #3 in the list of most requested RFEs for java.

Watched Loins of Punjab with the folks the other day - hilarious movie with a very cool ending! Recommended :)

Enjoy this youtube music video with scenes from the movie.

I had been asked to put together a list of reasons why I would prefer to use a Linux desktop rather than Windows at work ( we currently develop on Windows and deploy to RHEL). I put together a couple of reasons; you may find them handy to convince folks too :)

1. extensive developer toolchain built into the OS. Merge, diff, grep, svn, git etc etc all built into the OS. On windows I have to download and install freeware/open source programs to fill in that functionality gap.
2. more powerful desktop user interface. I can setup keystroke shortcuts to commonly used applications, virtual desktop support is built in, scp/ssh support is built in. Again, I can install freeware/open source programs to fill in that functionality gap but it's all built into linux.
3. handles load better. I have found my windows box to become somewhat unmanageble when I fire up a couple of programs which are memory hogs. In fact, I have had to cold boot windows because the UI becomes unresponsive. As a result of this I actually ended up corrupting my hard drive a while back and IT spent 2 days fixing it ( thankfully it was fixed!). I have rarely seen this on Linux. Even when the UI is non-responsive you can usually just kill the Xwindows daemon and restart it or access the box remotely via ssh and ask it to do an orderly reboot.
4. interoperability with Outlook. I have IMAP working with my home email client on linux and activesync working with my cell-phone to sync with emails and calendar info. So there is no reason why I shouldn't be able to use linux with exchange in place of outlook.
5. our production environment runs linux. This is an important albiet subtle point. Although Java runs in a cross platform manner, there are still OS specific traps that programmers can fall into ( for example, using files on the filesystem) which don't manifest themselves until we are ready to run the code on the production environment. That is the reason we have the test/integration environments. It would be even better to catch them upstream on the linux dev box.
6. the current solution at work for running linux consists of a production vmware image for devs to run their stuff on. Something's better than nothing but there is the overhead of going through the OS translation layer since it runs on top of Windows. I would much rather run on linux directly and use Windows within a VM if I need to.

My sister forwarded this YouTube video to me about motivation and how/why people do what they do in their lives, especially as related to work. Excellent read and as someone who lives, breathes and thinks bsd/linux/java and everything in between lemme tell you it really resonates well with me :)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6XAPnuFjJc&feature=youtube_gdata