Notepad++ a great quick editor for Windows

I've been looking for a free (as a beer) good text editor for Windows, specially for quick editing or viewing a file while navigating. Notepad is "free", but too simple (I know Notepad is not free, but once you have Windows installed you don't have to pay for it separately) and there are really wonderful text editors like UltraEdit but they're not free. JEdit is very powerful and free, and with all the plugins you can download for it you can have almost all the functionality you need, but its startup is a bit slow (at least with the minimal set of plugins that I use); if I must work with an ant file for some hours it pays off, but if I'm only navigating through a directory and making very small and fast modifications to a file, it is too much for me.

Searching through the Internet I found this super text editor called Notepad++. It is open source (GPL), it is blazingly fast and it has a great set of features, from which I would emphasize:

• Syntax highlighting and syntax folding (syntax highlighting can also be user defined)
• Autocompletion
• Multidocument and multiview
• Powerful search/replace, including regular expression search
• Full drag and drop
• Bookmarks
• Macros (you can record sequences and play them back)

I've been using it for some weeks and I can say it rocks! It's my current Windows quick editor. It can even update quite frequently the view of a log file, not as smoothly as the Unix command "tail -f", but enough for my needs.

It is not such a discovery, though. Once I installed it I saw with surprise that some of my colleagues had been working with it for some time. So if you haven't heard about it and you need a quick editor for Windows, take a look at it!

HTML crosslinked documentation from source code files

I know that modern IDEs can navigate through source code files very easily. But...what if I want to browse through source code files in my Palm TX ? Netbeans, Eclipse and other IDEs are not available for it, but I can read HTML pages offline easily with Plucker. Maybe I simply don't want to open an IDE only to browse the source code, without actually coding.

There are tools that can generate HTML pages from source code, so you can browse through them easily. They can even beautify the code with syntax highlighting and (this is my favourite) provide links between the different elements of the documentation. So, when you browse class Foo and it extends from BaseFoo, you can simply click on the word BaseFoo and you navigate to the class BaseFoo, and so on.

I've been searching for tools of this kind and I found some of them.

I like Doxygen a lot, it can make a wonderful and complete documentation of the source code, including this crosslinking source code navigation. It can optionally use another tool called htags to include the source code with this crosslinking navigation (instead of its own system). And this little tool attracted my attention...htags. It is an extremely simple and fast yet powerful tool that can generate HTML crosslinked documentation from source code.

If you have a Linux (or other *nix), you can simply install htags with a package manager, the whole package where it belongs is global. If you use Windows, you can download global from this site. There are other binaries in the download page of global.

With htags you can go to the source code root directory, write:

htags -g

...and that's all! You have your browsable crosslinked HTML documentation in a directory called HTML. I have tested it with Java files, but it supports other languages as well (C, C++, Yacc, PHP and Assembler).

If you want more features (like class diagrams, Javadoc-style complementary documentation, more flexibility with configuration, etc.), you can use Doxygen. It also supports more languages (C++, C, Java, Objective-C, Python, IDL, Fortran, VHDL, PHP, C#, and to some extent D). But if you only need plain source code with syntax highlighting and crosslinked navigation, give htags a try!

Calling Eclipse Ant builds from the command line

I usually use Eclipse for my software projects and I wanted to do Continuous Integration (CI), so after choosing a CI tool (I chose Hudson, a very powerful yet easy to use tool) I decided to make an Ant build file from my sample Eclipse project.

Even if you only want to make a very simple Ant task, like compiling and JUnit testing, a difficult problem will arise: the classpath. An Eclipse project can have a complex classpath, full of variable references (which are defined in the Preferences of your workspace), references to other projects, and so on. There are some Eclipse ant tasks in Eclipse itself that may be added, like projectBuild, and they take into account the classpath defined in the project, but when you try to add a JUnit task, you have to specify the classpath by hand in the task parameter. This classpath creation is tedious and time-consuming.

I thought it should be easier the creation of an Ant build from an Eclipse project, because the classpath information is in the .classpath project file. After googling a little, I found this great Eclipse Plugin, called eclipse2ant, which "tries to create a buildfile that matches the Eclipse project as close as possible". And it really works. I could very easily create an Ant build file from my Eclipse project, with the usual targets of compilation and it also exported my last JUnit runs! (the ones that you see in the "Run history..." menu of Eclipse).

All the classpath variables were imported in the Ant file, and I could execute the tests of my project without problems with Eclipse closed. Of course, you may want to tweak a little bit the Ant file to make it more portable or to organize better the variables, but with eclipse2ant you have a very good starting point that saves you a lot of time!

Happy continuous integration!

EnvyNG saved my day

A week ago I upgraded my Ubuntu Linux from Gutsy (7.10) to Hardy (8.04.1). All seemed to work properly after the upgrade. But then I saw a message in my desktop that notified me the driver I was using was a free one that was not able to manage the 3D acceleration of my card. It suggested me to activate the binary one from NVidia if I wanted those advanced features, so I did it.

When I restarted the system, my monitor was not detected and I couldn't use a high resolution screen (only 800x600). I tried to revert the change but it was not possible. Then I googled a little and could find this interesting thread, where I found a magical solution: EnvyNG.

I installed its GTK+ package (envyng-gtk) with Synaptic, executed its GTK+ app, followed the instructions of its wizard (very easy to use) and after a restart...voilà! My desktop works like a charm again !!!

The description of the EnvyNG package is:
"EnvyNG is an application written in Python which will download the latest ATI or NVIDIA driver or the Legacy driver (for older cards) (according to the model of your card) from ATI or Nvidia's website and set it up for you handling dependencies (compilers, OpenGL, etc.) which are required in order to build and use the driver."

To this brilliant programmer called Alberto Milone: thank you very much for making this great and elegant solution!

Freemind 0.8.1 now works with Java 6

Freemind, this excellent mind-mapping open source application, has released a new version: 0.8.1. This is a bugfix release. The most important bug I would remark is that now Freemind works with the latest version of Java, Java 6 (before this release, you could use it with Java 6, but some options didn't work, like the Preferences dialog). I have also seen performance improvements in this release.

A very easy way to view dependencies: GraphViz

There is a wonderful and powerful tool called GraphViz that is able to draw graphs very easily. When I visited its website for the first time I thought it was very difficult to use, and this is completely false, so I will show how easy it can be.

This tool can do very powerful and complex graphs, but for the impatients (like me), that want to understand quickly how it works and be able to use it in another context (e.g. to show JAR dependencies in a Java application), I will show a very minimal example. Let's go.

First, you must download and install GraphViz. It is very easy to install. For Windows you have an installer, and for Linux you can use your favourite installer (at least Graphviz it's present in the Ubuntu Gutsy repositories, I don't know the other distributions).

Now, we will write a minimal text file with the dependencies we want to draw. Use your favourite editor and write a text file called 'sample.dot' with this content:

digraph g {
node1 -> node2
node2 -> node3
node2 -> node4
}

Now, you simply have to call the executable dot, from the GraphViz tool:

dot -Tpng -osample.png sample.dot

Pretty simple, isn't it ? We say we want to generate a PNG image (-T is the type of output file) and write it to an output file 'sample.png' from our graph file 'sample.dot'.

And the result is this:


Now, you can take a look at the documentation to know how to customize your graphs: you can specify colours, widths and shapes of your nodes, etc.

And one last advice: if the names of your nodes have spaces or special characters (like ':' or '\'), double quote them in the '.dot' file or you will get errors. So our last file would look like this:

digraph g {
"node1" -> "node2"
"node2" -> "node3"
"node2" -> "node4"
}

That's all. Enjoy making images of your dependencies!

Personal Wiki (TiddlyWiki)

This weeek I have discovered a great tool to organize my ideas or little tricks in an easy but powerful way: TiddlyWiki. It's a personal Wiki page, written in Javascript...you don't need any web server to publish it. You can add short "tiddlers" (short entries with a title), associate tags to them (in order to classify them), and that's all. You can search your tiddlers easily, open all the tiddlers with a given tag, arrange them in the page the way you want, etc.

I use Freemind a lot, specially to write documents, because I can organize and move my ideas very easily while writing them, but when I need to store tips or solutions to computing problems I prefer this TiddlyWiki tool, it searches very well and tags are great to classify easily with less effort.

Try it out!

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Linux in your Palm

Yes !!! You don't need to buy a new Palm, to wait for the new model that uses Linux as its OS...you can simply download some binaries, follow some easy steps and....woohooooo...you have Linux in your Palm !!!!

I have a Palm TX and it works really good, it doesn't have Wifi support yet but overall it's great and promising.

Try this out ! (but make a backup of your data before, just in case).

Some small nice utilities for Windows

At my work I have a Lotus Notes account, but not the Lotus Notes client, so I must have the browser open all the time, just to be notified of e-mail or calendar events. As I don't like having it open (it eats resurces) and it's annoying to click on a dialog each time the browser session is about to expire, I use some useful utilities.

For the e-mail events, I have POP Peeper. It is a small application that notifies you when new e-mails arrive. It can handle more than one account and you can choose the kind of alert signal you prefer: a flag in the system tray, a dialog, etc.

For the calendar events, I use Personal Reminder. It's a very simple application that allows you to insert entries to remind, when you want to be reminded and the repetition of notification if you need it (to remind you every day, every week, etc.).

I love these kind of small apps: simple to install, small size, simple and intuitive to use, ...