On the Groovy project team, we were wondering about which base JDK to support. So far, even the latest and greatest Groovy (version 2.1.4 just released today), we still support JDK 5 — despite being an End-of-Life’d product for a long while already. At conferences, I often ask the question on which versions of the JDK attendees are using, locally and in production, and it seems that JDK 5 has almost totally vanished off the face of the planet, but despite JDK 7 being quite mature now, it’s still JDK 6 that’s more widely deployed. Read more...

Some of my friends are going back to vi like me, for instance Hibernate’s Emmanuel and IzPack’s Julien. I also mentioned a few good links about that move on the French Les Castcodeurs podcast. And to be precise, I’m using MacVim on my MacBook Pro laptop, but also vim on the command-line. Emmanuel and Julien gave some good tips and links too, and like Julien, I’m going to show you my current . Read more...

Over the weekend, I was brainstorming some ideas about what a second generation Groovy Web Console could look like. I was particularly thinking about collaborative editing Groovy snippets of code in the cloud. There’s a trend towards IDEs in the Cloud, like for instance Cloud-IDE, allowing you to work on your projects remotely, on the cloud, from the comfort of your browser, even letting you push new versions of your apps in your favorite PaaS. Read more...

It happens once in a while that I want to find all files containing a certain string. I know command-line tools such as grep, cat, and find, but I never remember the right combination to achieve that task. So as to remember and reference it later, I write this small blog post to remind me how to do it: find . -type f -exec grep YOURSTRING /dev/null {} \; The find . Read more...

If you think Time Machine is backing up your Mac too often, you can customize the interval between two automatic scheduled backups. I found that trick on MacYourself. Open up a Terminal, and change the value, in seconds, of the interval (here 7200 seconds == 2 hours instead of the standard one hour): sudo defaults write /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.backupd-auto StartInterval -int 7200 Update: This doesn’t seem to work on Mac OS X Lion, although it worked in previous versions (like Leopard). Read more...

Xavier Niel a annoncé en fanfare l’arrivée de Free Mobile après un long suspense et un buzz savamment orchestré. Et j’ai retenu quelques tweets qui m’ont bien fait rire : Enfin on peut dire t’as un forfait à 2 balles mon gars Quand les mouettes changent d’opérateur, c’est qu’elles pensent qu’elles sont devenues des pigeons #Cantona Je ne regarderais plus jamais une pièce de 2€ de la même manière #Freemobile 19,99€ en tout illimité. Read more...

Google announces Dart, at the Goto Conference: a new programming language for “structured web programming”, for building web applications. Google also launched the Dart website, where you can read about the rationale of the language, the specification, and play with some live examples. The team behind Dart Reknown engineers Lars Bak and Gilad Bracha are on stage to present the language. Lars Bak worked on many virtual machines like Sun’s HotSpot or more recently Google V8, whereas Gilad Bracha is also famous for his work on the Java specification, his Smalltalk background, and the creation of a recent language called Newspeak (a flavour of Smalltalk). Read more...

As soon as I heard about the opening of the Google+ APIs, letting us access public posts in our Google+ streams, I wanted to play with them, and integrate my posts in my social stream on my blog. First of all, a little screenshot, where you’ll see the Google+ item at the bottom: Now, a bit of code? Yeah, of course. First of all, you’ll need to follow the explanations of the Google+ API portal to get your own API key (I’ll hide mine in this example so you don’t use mine). Read more...

In my feed reader, I came across this nice image showing the many ways to lace your shoes! I selected one of those that I’d like to try some day, it’s very nice looking: I think I’ve been using essentially the 4th and 7th for years. Which lacing scheme do you use? Update: There are even sites dedicated to shoe lacing!

When you’re subscribed to many mailing-lists, you often have hundreds of mails a day that you don’t even bother reading. So usually, you mark them as read. But if you’re like me and that your using tags as folders and sort all incoming mailing-lists in those folders, when you want to mark all mails as read, you need to go to each label and select them all, mark them as read each time. Read more...