James' Blog

Why you should use Twitter

While you can use twitter to follow movie stars, I think there’s a more practical use for normal information hounds.

Here is my analogy:

A normal competent, capable, say software manager, usually seems a few steps ahead of his subordinates with technology, company news, and issues.  Usually you talk to your manager to find out what is going on and to get your task assignments.  Where does he get this information?  I think he has subordinates sending him feeds of information in the form of status reports, quick conversations, etc.  That’s why he always seems a few steps ahead of you.

Twitter is exactly the same thing.  If you follow the RIGHT people, you can get the same feeds of information for tech, news, issues, event proceedings, basically what ever you want to know about.  The emphasis is on the RIGHT people.  Don’t just follow anyone, be discriminating or you’ll just have a ton of noise.

Don’t for get to follow @jamescway

This is just one perspective on why twitter is good.  I’m sure there are others.  What do you think?

Set Default JDK on Netbeans on Mac OS X

As shown here

Just to sumarize, there is a netbeans.conf file that needs to be modified.  You can Ctrl-Click on the netbean app file to access the directory behind it from Finder.  Also, I just set it to the current JDK as follows:

netbeans_jdkhome=/System/Library/Frameworks/JavaVM.framework/Versions/CurrentJDK/Home

so that it always uses the most recent JDK.

Upgrading JAVA on Mac OS X (to 1.6)

I tried to update JAVA on MacOS X  by using the /Application/Utilities/Java/Java Preferences.app.  It seemed to work, but if you want it to work for root, then you need to run the application as root.  you can do it on the command line as follows:

root#   ./Applications/Utilities/Java/Java Preferences.app/Contents/MacOS/Java Preferences

I’m not sure if it was necssary but I also modified the symlinks also to point to 1.6 instead of 1.5.

ln -s /System/Library/Frameworks/JavaVM.framework/Versions/CurrentJDK 1.6
you can delete the original symlink if necessary. As a word of warning, I have read that changing symlinks isn’t recommended by apple.

Installing Java6 on Mac…

…was a terrible ordeal. Apple provides 3 different updates for OSX 10.5 and I ran them all. Once I installed them, I did a java -version from the command line and it still said 1.5. Apparently, there’s a /Applications/Utilities/Java/Java Preferences.app program you can run to change these settings. I ran it and it didn’t seem to do anything, until I restarted (was it my computer or my terminal?). Then it seemed to work in user mode, but in root or sudo it still says 1.5. I ended up just writing an alias to the java I wanted
alias java=/System/Library/Frameworks/JavaVM.framework/Versions/1.6/Commands/java