Category: coding excursions

Netbean probs

Some while ago, I start coding a feed reader in J2ME to run on mobile phones. After some searching, it seemed like Netbeans would be the way to go.. They provide a nice UI builder including modeling of the flow between the different screens, tailored towards cell phones. Also, it seems the Sony Ericsson SDK provides nice integration with Netbeans.

My favorite java IDE IntelliJ doesn’t seem to support mobile development at all. (for the record, I wouldn’t use IntelliJ if I had to pay for it myself ;)) The next best thing, Eclipse, seems to be less mature in this area, although they are progressing fast. So Netbeans it became.

To my surprise, I even found a tutorial on the netbeans site which already gave me a bootstrap to my task! 🙂

So, where’s the problem?

Well, I set up netbeans and created a project and all, so I could get to serious work on my 2h train trip. Unfortunately, I didn’t manage to write a single line of code! 🙂 As soon as I opened my laptop, the Netbeans IDE seemed to have become very unresponsive! Opening a menu could take 10 seconds, scrolling through the code is impossible. I couldn’t believe my eyes at first, so I rebooted because I thought my laptop was having trouble waking up after having the short nap. However, not improved. I had to give up.
At home, I searched the internet, and indeed, netbeans has problems with my ATI X600 ‘s PowerPlay function! Who would have imagined that. 😉 Especially since this is the only Java app I have trouble with… Anyhow, just disabling the PowerPlay function solves the problem! It’s probably related to my ATI drivers, but since I have a fricking Dell laptop, I’m not allowed to install drivers other than from Dell, so, as you can imagine, Dell never supplies updates to the driver! If anyone knows how to circumvent the checks going on in the driver installer from ATI, please let me know…

ShowROTGui

So, while I’m at it, why not add a first one. 😉 This is actually most recent. It is a very simple tool to inspect the ROT. The ROT (Running Object Table) is a system wide table in Windows, into which objects can register themselves, making them visible to and accessible by other applications. Inspect could be the wrong term: the tool just lists all objects in the ROT by their display name. There is a refresh button so that you don’t have to restart it all the time. 😉

ShowROTGUI

Coding category added

Coding excrjmblk.. what the? 🙂
yes, there went some thought in the correct naming of this category. 😉 It’s been already some time now that I was looking for a place to put my small tools I’ve been programming in the past year. Since they are so small, it’s overkill to dedicate a whole new blog to each of them. So I decided to group them in some subcategories on this general blog. I used to think of a “projects” category. But that sounds so mature. 🙂 My projects are only little beta thingies. 😉 Almost not worth to talk about, so “projects” would be overrated. So utils or tools would be okay? Mmmm… I don’t think so. Then I thought about “excursions”, sounds nice. =) To quote wikipedia:

An Excursion is a trip, usually made for leisure or educational purposes. It is often an adjunct to a longer journey or visit to a place, sometimes for other (typically work-related) purposes.

I think no other term would manage to define my tools any more accurate or subtle as this one. 🙂 So “coding excursions” it became! Now let’s find some time to add some subcategories. 😉