MacosX Java Update to 6 (JDK 6)

Recently, I had a problem with the version of JDK on my system. The MacosX (Leopard) has the 1.5 as the default install. It actually download the update but does not activate it. Anyway, from Applications/Utilities/Java Preferences, you can organize the order of the Java installations however this would not unless the you break the links :
sudo rm System/Library/Frameworks/JavaVM.framework/Versions/CurrentJDK
sudo ln -s 1.6 System/Library/Frameworks/JavaVM.framework/Versions/CurrentJDK

Stay tuned.

Macports and Fink

Recently I came by two very useful tools for MacOSX : Macports and Fink. Macports enables to port many open source applications to MacOSX very safely. It checks the dependencies and installs them when needed. It also supports updates for the installed packages. Fink is a package manager with a nice interface. It is useful to see the state of the installed software.

Macports is available at : http://www.macports.org
Fink : www.finkproject.org/

Online Reputation Management

I will comment on this later but put it here as a further reference: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Online_reputation_management

Extremely interesting for future technological privacy concerns...

Text to Speech in Macosx 10.5... Nice

I recently discovered that MacosX has a built-in text to speech tool that enables the transformation of a piece of selected text to speech. I just select a piece of text, use my shortcut keyset and listen to the text.

Go to System Preferences --> Click Speech (at the system Tab)

In there you can configure different voices, shortcut keys for function activation. The tool is very powerful as one would not expect, there are good tunings (tonations) based on commas etc.

Unlocker (The phenomena of "Can't delete the file/directory")

Did you ever have the problem of "Can't delete the file, the file/directory is open in another program"? Some processes in Windows do not close the handles when they finish their operations. A really quick solution would be to use the tool : Unlocker.
Right click the directory you want to delete and unlock it! You are done, ready to delete it.

Stay tuned.

Macosx Apache Directory Server

I just installed Apache directory server on my Macosx leopard.
For stopping the server:
sudo launchctl unload /Library/LaunchDaemons/org.apache.directory.server.plist

To start:

sudo launchctl load /Library/LaunchDaemons/org.apache.directory.server.plist

The configuration files are located in: /usr/local/ ...

P =? NP

There is a new interesting publication at http://www.hpl.hp.com/personal/Vinay_Deolalikar/Papers/pnp_preliminary.pdf
that discusses the relation between P and NP problems. This problem has been defined as a Millennium problem and the solver is will be awarded with $1M prize: http://www.claymath.org/millennium/.

We will soon see whether the proposed solution will be accepted and stand still to the arguments...

Keep tuned.

Eclipse Heap Size

Eclipse (3.5 in my case) doesn't read the default "ini" file if the Eclipse executable name is changed. This usually happens when you have several versions of Eclipse installed on the same machine.

Ini file includes the configuration settings such as Java vm stuff, heap size and plugin configurations. The default file is named "eclipse.ini" and it must be renamed to the changed eclipse executable name:
eclipse3_5.exe <==> eclipse3_5.ini

CS Conference Ranking

Conference ranking has been widely studied up to now. Many of them are subjective and prioritize specific aspects that don't hold all the time. However, they give a rough idea of the venues for quality and provide a collective source for submission.
The most thorough examples include:
1. http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/stats/venues
2. http://www.core.edu.au/

Stay tuned...