This is slick...

...and also not related to development, Dr Lunch or anything else. But having said that, if you are one of the 6 people in the world that has a) all of your music stored in iTunes on a Mac, and b) you have an XBox 360, then run, don't walk, over to pick yourself up a copy of Connect 360 from nullriver. In literally 3 minutes you'll be streaming all your music and photos from your Mac to your XBox 360. As someone famous once said "It just works". Your music shows up, all of your playlists that you've built in iTunes are right there on your Xbox, and everything works beautifully (which the exception that you can't play FairPlay protected AAC files you bought from the iTunes Music store, but hey, that's a suckers game anyway, right?) Pay 'em their $10 registration fee and you have yourself the very functional equivalent of a Squeezebox for a fraction of the cost. (Assuming, you know, you already blew your kitty on the Xbox and the Mac and the nice receiver, and some nice B&W speakers. Slick as hell. I'd like to find the guys who wrote this and give them a big hug.

Java 1.5 by default from the command line on a Mac

Maybe someone else will find this useful, it was sure a head-scrater for me for a while. The good ol' Mac with its "oh, we have to have a non-standard UNIX file layout" was giving me quite a puzzler on how you are supposed to set your preferences for what version of Java to run from a command line. If you have the Java 5.0 Release 1 from Apple it comes with a little utility which lets you decide what order to use the JVMs on your machine. Setting it to use 5.0 before 1.4.2 does not affect items run from Terminal or any other command line application. Thanks for nothing Apple.

So to make this work (maybe this is intuitive for some people, but I'm not a big Mac developer or anything). Create or update the .profile in your home directory with the following:

PATH=.:/System/Library/Frameworks/JavaVM.framework/
Versions/1.5/Commands:$PATH
JAVA_HOME:/System/Library/Frameworks/JavaVM.framework/
Versions/1.5/Home

Presto! Anything you run from the command line goes via Java 5, or 1.5 or whatever the hell they are calling it these days. Simple, easy, and doesn't involve messing with any system links which some people seem to think is evil for some reason or another.

Hopefully one of these days Apple switches all machines over to run Java 5 by default. Sure would be nice for those of us who run Tomcat 5.5 and don't want to mess with the Java 1.4 compatability library.

Bright Lights, Big Battle Station

The light hurts my eyes....thanks to Drake and Phelps for letting me out of "the hole" now that the new and improved Dr. Lunch is a fully-functional battle station...er...a technological terror...oh forget it.

Anyway, now its on to reconciling the changes needed (i.e., the schema and Hibernate mappings) to support the current Java-based Dr. Lunch and a Rails-based Dr. Lunch. For example,

• the 'version' columns should be changed to 'lock_version' to take advantage of Rails' automatic optimistic locking.
• the 'created_date' columns should be changed to 'created_at' to take advantage of the Rails' automatic date population feature.

I have already created the model classes in Rails, but I need to also setup the test cases ('cause its the right thing to do!).

Well, back into "the hole."