Compass, JPA & Spring, or How I Added Searching in a Few Hours

I just added full search support to a web application in about 3 hours.

That’s all the data model objects automatically indexed, a proper query language for searching, and mapping between the search result and model objects so dealing with results is easy. All in a few hours – not bad going for an afternoon’s work I feel.
Continued reading >

Desktop Theming & Panels

Recently I’ve spent some time playing around with the theme and panels I use. I haven’t changed much from what I’ve been using for a while, but there were a couple of subtle changes.

Here’s what I’ve ended up with, on my laptop at least (from the default Ubuntu 9.04 settings):

  • Industrial Tango theme (apt: industrialtango-theme).
  • Compiz desktop wall, expose and scale plugins.
  • Reduced font size to 8pt for everything except window titles which is 9pt.
  • System monospace font set to Terminus (apt: xfonts-terminus).
  • 6 virtual desktops (3×2 grid)
  • Auto-hide bottom panel, which contains only a window list. Other panel items from here either get removed or moved to the top.
  • Customised applications menu, as I have some software not installed with APT.

Continued reading >

JME Utilities

Today I am releasing a collection of JME utilities to the world, in the hope that someone might find them useful. They’re free software under an Apache license.

More details, and downloads can be found here.

This is a collection of various helper/utility classes that I’ve written over the years to solve various problems in JME applications. It does things like: logging, HTTP, XML, properties files, etc. It’s not the most amazing (or well tested!) code in the world, but I’ve been using it for some time without any issues.

One Year’s Uptime

I just noticed that I’ve tipped one year’s worth of uptime on omicron.

Woo yeah!