I am reading (NYT)about Amazon’s initiative to stream films and TV shows directly to the TV. For a start, this will be available through Sony’s Bravia line of high definition TVs.

The thing that strikes me most is the fact that Sony, of all companies, is behind this. Why did Sony push so hard for the Blu-ray adoption? The streaming of content straight to your TV makes the Blu-ray obsolete! Or does it not?

I am a happy man!

I have been syncing my iPod Touch successfully in Linux (Ubuntu 8.40, the Hardy Heron) during the last two weeks. I was a bit worried it might be a bit troublesome, but it all went well, despite some glitches in the beginning.

I followed this guide. And it works great!!! I am using Amarok, which I find much better than iTunes.

I am free from the official firmwares + official apps + iTunes tiranny!

Hi.

During the past months I have been working with a UML 2.0 design tool that I find excellent. This tool is Magic Draw (site).

You can test it via the Community Edition free of charge (limited capabilities, but may be enough for many personal or small projects), or can buy the Personal Edition at an affordable price (around 125 USD at the time of this writing).There are some more editions at different prices.

It is developed in Java, and I am running it under Linux (Ubuntu Hardy Heron 8.04 32bit + Java 1.5.0_15).

Only problem: unfortunately, it is not free software, although I still think it is worth giving it a try.

Hi.

I was having this problem in Ubuntu 8.04 + Java 1.5.0_15 + Netbeans 6.0.1, where Netbeans was using the GTK theme, which I find quite less pleasing than the classic Metal Look & Feel. Apart from less pleasing, it takes up more valuable screen space, so I had to find a way to go back to the Metal option. The way to do it is to start Netbeans with this argument:

--laf javax.swing.plaf.metal.MetalLookAndFeel

See you later.

Hi.

I have just discovered a great tool for managing UML diagrams under Linux (it runs under many other platforms too, but Linux is my main system).

This great tool is BOUML (http://bouml.free.fr/index.html), and its features are (among many others):

• Free (GPL license).
• UML 2.
• Cross-platform.
• Fully extensible.
• Very fast.
• Multi-user.

I cannot be thankful enough to the guys that have made this tool possible!

Hi.

Happy new year!

I just found out this extraordinary website: jamendo.com. It features free music, artists, and communities around the idea of free culture and music.

You can listen to music online or download it via P2P protocols (who said P2P was for pirates only?).

I encourage you to try it!

Last night I tried to print a webpage out to a PDF document on my laptop with Ubuntu 7.10 (The Gutsy Gibbon). It was easy indeed. Just fire up the print dialog on Firefox (Ctrl-P), select “PDF” printer, and hit the OK button. End of the process.

It was the first time that I tried this feature, and it looked pretty easy.

Well, what if you want to actually open the PDF document you just created? Mmm, it’s not that easy if you haven’t done it before. After searching for a while, I found, inside my home folder, a sub-folder called “PDF”, where all PDF printouts end up. Once you find this folder, it really gets easy, you just open the file and voilà.

I’m not so sure that newcomers to Ubuntu would look for such a folder. I think they would instead just complain that no PDF file was ever created! Why isn’t it possible to select a name and a destination folder for the file???

Hi.

Found an interesting website today: meteoalarm.

As the name suggests, it shows you alerts on severe weather conditions all over Europe.

Have fun!

Wow, how long has it been since my last post? I don’t even dare look at it!

Anyway, I just found out an interesting tool for managing my synchronization tasks between my local collection of photographs and my Flickr account. I am testing it on Ubuntu 7.10 (the Gutsy Gibbon).
It’s called flickrfs, and I’m still investigating it, looks quite promising, but I haven’t still managed to work around some problems, will report back when I’m done with them.

If you use Tomcat 5.0 and want to follow some symbolic links, that will not happen by default. You have to enable an option in your webapp’s context.xml file.

All you have to do is add the directive allowLinking="true" and reboot.