NetBeans turns 10

It’s NetBeans’ 10th birthday and to celebrate I thought I’d write a quick blog post about how I use the NetBeans IDE to develop Dvorcode.

Stripping tags from ogg Vorbis files

I have a bunch of free Ogg Vorbis audio files that I’ve downloaded from Kahvi.org. They’re great! But recently they’ve been including cover art within the files, which breaks Windows Media Player (it can’t handle the very long tags of binhex-coded JPGs).

Since I rather like WMP’s integration in windows (keyboard shortcuts), and Amarok isn’t quite ready for win32, I thought I’d find a way to strip the troublesome tags from the data files rather than change to another player.

Here’s a quick-and-dirty shell hack to remove the tags from the files and get them playable by daft players such as Windows Media Player

Cascaded revision control strategy

Okay, this isn’t rocket-science, and in fact it’s not even my idea (heard it on the FLOSS POD about Git). A problem with centralised repository systems such as Subversion (which is used on SourceForge) is that you need network access to do many things, and also to just save your work. You can’t do commits to the repo’ while on the train, for instance (which is where I do most of my hacking).

One option is to switch to a distributed revision system, such as Git or Mercurial.  I may do that some day, but right now is not a good time for me to be learning a new revision system. Plus to have SourceForge host my project in Hg (for instance) means installing it myself and blah-blah-blah. Then there’s IDE integration to consider…

I want to have my cake and eat it too.

Project: Dvorcode

I’ve just finished hacking together a simple little program to transcode my “dvorcodes” for when entering on a QWERTY keyboard. I’ve created a new project on SourceForge and I’ve uploaded the code and a pair of pre-compiled executable JARs (one for Java 5 and also a re-worked version that’s been tested on Java 1.4.2).

Unicode chars between Emacs/X11 cygwin and Win32

I’m using Emacs/X11 on cygwin as my main editor (when stuck on work’s machine) and Emacs 22’s Unicode support really rocks.  However, getting it to pass unicode between the kill ring and Windows /X11 clipboard doesn’t work out-of-the-box (mainly because Emacs thinks it’s on a Unix host).  The fix is easy though: