Mind.random()

I was looking for something like JScreenSpy for monitoring my laptop’s usage. Unfortunately, there isnt something around except JScreenSpy and a portion of JScreenSpy rewritten in Python (pyScreenSpy). More to my disappointment, I found no source code for the project.

So, I thought I could write something myself and released “SnapMan” yesterday.
 https://sourceforge.net/projects/snapman/

Here goes the description of the project 

SnapMan is a tiny java program with an integrated timer (opensymphony quartz). It takes snapshots of your desktop in regular intervals and saves it into a specified folder. Intervals and target folder is made configurable.  Intervales are all Cron/At compatible.

The code is released under GPL. This is my first “public” code. So, please let me know if i need to improve (or tell me i am nowhere).  All constructive and destructive comments are welcome.

I will probably be writing a Cron expression generator this weekend because i find it very difficult to pick up.  I specially like the Gnome Scheduler interface (Python) with immediate translations to plain english.

I am also planning to make the target folder of the pictures encrypted (any pointers will be highly appreciated)

Now that Java has been open sourced under the GPL, even the most strict of the “free software only” distributions can start bundling it and integrating it into their Linux distributions out of the box. Indeed, many of them already have. In addition, the more ardent GPL supporters who have traditionally shunned Java can now embrace it as a first class citizen of the OSS world. Besides licensing Java under the GPL, The Swing team at Sun has also been hard at work improving the look and feel on the Linux desktop in Java 6. Take a look at the following two screen shots. One is the actual calculator from GNOME, and the other is a mock up in Swing using Netbeans and Matisse. Can you tell which is which?

Read this very interesting blog : Desktop Java and Desktop Linux

“Oracle has just announced from EclipseCon that it is donating the TopLink O/R persistence framework to the OSS community. This is a fairly substantial contribution of code.”

Here are some info on the framework.

When you are using Oracle as your backend, you really might want to prefer Toplink over Hibernate. From the house of Oracle (at least after all those buyouts), it obviously has lots of support for Oracle database. On the other side too, it looks like it has a stable caching and lazy loading mechanism than Hibernate. People have used Toplink against other databases in Production environment and they just say it performs slightly better than Hibernate.

“If you are using the Oracle DB then support for hints, hierarchical queries, XDB XML Type with query constructs, Object-Relational database types with queries, many SQL extended function and types (TIMESTAMP*, NCLOB, …), excellent support for complex stored procedures and functions, as well as support of Virtual Private Database will definitely be key factors in your comparison.” (source : oracle.com)

Toplink has been in the market for over 10 years now. But what stopped it from becoming popular? Struts had better documentation whereas Webwork had a better framework. Same is the case with Toplink. Lack of good documenation initially and the cost involved in buying Toplink (Toplink was, of course, commercial initially) were the top things that were stopping Toplink from becoming popular. Now that Toplink has good documentation and become opensource, what’s stopping us?

If you are Oracle user at home, you should have really felt the pain of the database server eating most of your system resources. Added to it, in all possibilities, we are using an illegal copy of the Personal Edition or the Enterprise Edition.

You would never imagine running Java applications against Oracle just because of the simple reason we can never run our application servers and database server and, of course, our IDE in a single machine. So, we just move in for MySQL, Postgre or other open-source alternatives.

You would have already known that DB2, just a few months back, came up with a free edition of its Database. And Microsoft is also coming up with its free edition of SQL Server 2005 as ‘Express Edition’

Oracle now joins the bandwagon. And, as always, Oracle is our favourite database.

(Please go through the document (at least the faq) and the pdf attachment for more details). The twp_general_10gdb_product

_family.pdf has a wonderful “feature comparison” table at the end of it.

Please dont get alarmed when they say Java development is not possible in Oracle 10g XE. They just mean that we cannot write Oracle PL/SQL stored procedures in Java. And i’ve still not seen anybody writing

“CREATE PROCEDURE DEPT_PROCEDURE AS LANGUAGE JAVA”

That because Oracle XE doesnt come with an inbuilt JVM. (You know Oracle 9i came up with JRE 1.4 bundled inside). Regular SQL, (ALL) PL/SQL, JDBC calls will just work fine.

Best part, Oracle 10g XE comes just as a 250MB iso image.

Linux users, who were denied of the privilege of using Oracle, just because we dont get a pirated version of the full database, can now download their RPM installers direct from the oracle site. Debian users (Ubuntu, Kubuntu, MEPIS, Mandriva, CentOS) can download their .deb installers. All installers are around the same size.

Good luck.