More puzzling behaviour

Still in the spirit of Java Puzzlers; can you provide declarations for i and j to make this statement fail at runtime?

i = j;

I spent quite some time debugging this, once...

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Puzzling behaviour

In the spirit of Java Puzzlers, what does this program print (if anything)?

public class java
{
    static lang lang = new lang();
    
    static class lang
    {
        static Long Short = new Long();
        
        static class Short
        {
        }

        static class Long
            extends Short
        {
        }
    }
    
    public static void main(String[] args) {
        System.out.println(java.lang.Short.class.getSimpleName());
    }
}

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Git == good

git-stash and git-commit --amend. Killer features.

Add to that excellent support for named branches, and git-cherry-pick, and you've got yourself one wonderful DVCS.

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Telling Skype which browser to use on Ubuntu

Skype (as the only thing on the planet, it seems) uses the x-www-browser alternative to open links. Fix that, and you're good to go.

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Fun on the bleeding edge

My pet project jde-mvn depends on bleeding-edge snapshots of Maven 3.0. The reason is simple: MvnServer needs maven-embedder, which pre-3.0 is only available in a buggy and frankly unusable version 2.0.4.

Mostly this is not a problem; however, the recent work Shane Isbell has done on the POM model breaks some existing POMs. Among them, unfortunately, is the CXF parent POM; this means that jde-mvn will choke on any project that depends on CXF (or any other POM that triggers the underlying bug).

I've reported this issue as MNG-3838; no word yet on when it will be fixed (although "sometime before 3.0 goes final" is a safe bet).

Since some of the things I work on in my day job use CXF, I've made my own nastyhack version of Maven and created a "release" of jde-mvn that embeds it; read more about this "release" on the BitBucket site.

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More fun with JDEE

With jde-mvn having reached a more-or-less stable point, I've played with some other ideas to make JDEE an even better environment.

One of these ideas is jde-refactor, which has now gotten far enough to unleash upon the unsuspecting masses. Er. Maybe there is one other person in the world who might find this useful?

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Running a secondary X server

Sometimes it is useful to run a second (or third, or fourth...) X server for testing porpoises. I find this invaluable when hacking at window managers (such as my current favorite, awesome).

It is also occasionally useful to be able to kill an X server with impunity, e.g. to check how an application behaves when its X connection goes away.

Even better: You can use this to deal with less-than-well-behaved programs that require a given resolution or color depth; I use it to be able to play Might and Magic VI full-screen using Wine, without having to fiddle with XRandR to get my resolution back afterwards.

So how do I do this? Simple:

startx /path/to/program option1 option2 -- :1

It really is that simple. If you wish, you can add more options after the double dash to pass them to the invoked X server. For instance, to run MM6 I do this:

startx $HOME/bin/mm6-core -- :1 -depth 16

Where the -depth 16 tells X that I want 16-bit color. mm6-core is simply a script that takes care of invoking Wine with the right options.

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