How to fix windows 7 weather gadget

If you were using weather gadget on windows 7, then probably (to your disappointment) you discovered one day that after some security updates - it stopped working. What a loss! :(

Luckily, it turns out that fixing the problem is not so hard after all.
All you need to do is to change modification date of a config.xml file used by the gadget.

So open your notepad as administrator (right click->run as admin) and navigate to the following path:

C:\Users\[UserName]\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Windows Live\Services\Cache 

and open  config.xml file located there.

*make sure that you replace [UserName] with the user name you are using on your machine.

Now to change the modification date you just tamper a little with your pc's clock and set it say to the year 2019, after that you 'modify' the config.xml (just type space character somewhere and then delete it) and save the changes.
That's it - your file modification date is 2019 way ahead in the future ... and the widget is working again!!

Don't forget to set your clock to correct time again.

 How to Stop Chrome Running in the Background

Well it has been a while since my last post. This time I just want to tell you how to get rid off that Chrome process which is always running in the background eating up your PC's resources. Actually it is quite simple. 

1. Open your chrome browser 

2. Select Settings 

3. Click on the link titled ‘Show advanced settings‘

4. Under the section headed ‘System‘ untick the box next to “Continue running background apps  when Google Chrome is closed”

 

Glassfish hangs on leak reclaim

OK, let me tell you a painful story about a developer an application and an application server called Glassfish 3.1.2.2 ;-) Beware, this story is still in progress so I may still be updating this post till the issue is resolved.
(Forgive me my poetic mood - this post will be less technical than the previous ones ..though you will find some technical details, solutions etc in this text .. somewhere ;-)

So what the problem was/is? At the beginning it appeared to be a total mystery. After running cheerfully on the server for days or even weeks...application hangs ...and nothing could be done to bring it back to life, except for restarting the whole server (I mean the machine itself) - and we are talking about production environment here!  
Something had be done ..but what ? Fortunately, there is this monitoring tool  that came to my attention  - VisualVM and it has glassfish plugin. Installation of this product was definitely first step in the right direction.
The tool revealed that during the freeze or  'deadlock' all http thread-pool threads were waiting to lock Object which was held by "connector-timer-proxy".  Connector-timer-proxy itself was trying to reclaim a connection that was marked as 'leaked' but for some reason couldn't reclaim it. Taking a look at database connections revealed 4 inactive connections....and one active (the one that should have been reclaimed).
Killing the database connection - brought  Glassfish back to life ... everything unfreezed!
My thoughts on this one are that the connection was actually doing something (admittedly it must have been a very long operation) and thus the connection couldn't be reclaimed. Or I am wrong here? I don't know yet.
One thing I did, I set statement timeout on Glassfish. So I suppose if for some reason I have a statement running for too long ... it will be canceled first and then  if need the connection could be reclaimed without problem... Let's hope it is the case, and not the fact that I am dealing with some kind of GF's bug...(Time will show).
Anyway, if you have any ideas on this matter - don't be shy - let me know...

Android Emulator too slow

Wanted for a while now to try out android programming without actually owning android device ... tried once with emulator which comes with android sdk and eclipse plugins  and was deeply disappointed ... too damn slow.

Fortunately there are solutions out there that are much  faster - e.g.  android-x86 that can be installed on virtual box or the VMware. Although bare in mind that some versions do not have out-of-the-box support for Internet or Sound (it takes some intervention to make these features work).

I personally use VMware (seems faster than vBox) and luckily I found an android-x86 v4.0 with Ethernet and sound enabled. If you are interested you can download the image here  http://www.buildroid.org/Download/android-x86-vm-20120307.iso.gz.

If you need instructions on how to install anroid-x86 on virtual machines just search the web as I did.

Happy android programming ! ;-)


10/01/2014 just an update.
Some useful tips if you are using Android on VMware.

1 .To find out the IP address of your virtual android device just enter terminal emulator and type:
     "netcfg"

2. To connect eclipse to Android on VM:
    a. enter command prompt on your PC: type cmd in start menu
    b. go to the directory  where android platform tools are installed
    (e.g. cd "C:\Program Files\Android\android-sdk\platform-tools")
    c. Then type adb connect <IP Address of the Android on VM>

Firefox new pdf viewer (pdf.js) print problem

If you are using pdf to generate reports, than probably your users have some problems with newer versions of firefox (starting with v19). A new build in viewer doesn't handle printing quite well.
I'll suggest you to switch back to Adobe Acrobat instead till the problem is fixed.

To do that just:

1. Select Options
2. Select the Applications panel.
3. Find Portable Document Format (PDF) in the list.
4. Click on the drop-down arrow in the Action column for the above entry and select the use Adobe Acrobat (in Firefox) .
   
   
    
5. Click OK to close the Options window

Struts2 + Hibernate + Jpa 2 + Spring + Netbeans how to make it all work together

After many days of frustration, searching, trying ..and failing finally got it working and because I couldn't locate any full descriptions online I will lay out my solution here.

Bare in mind that if you use different versions of these libraries, you should be sure that they are compatible with each other, because one of the issues I was dealing with (and I didn't know that at the time) was because of incompatible libraries.

So I am using:

netbeans  7.3

hibernate: hibernate-release-4.1.8.Final download
                  (+ hibernate-entitymanager-4.0.1.Final) download


listing:
hibernate-release-4.1.8.Final/lib/required/antlr-2.7.7.jar
hibernate-release-4.1.8.Final/lib/required/dom4j-1.6.1.jar
hibernate-release-4.1.8.Final/lib/required/hibernate-commons-annotations-4.0.1.Final.jar
hibernate-release-4.1.8.Final/lib/required/hibernate-core-4.1.8.Final.jar
hibernate-release-4.1.8.Final/lib/required/hibernate-jpa-2.0-api-1.0.1.Final.jar
hibernate-release-4.1.8.Final/lib/required/javassist-3.15.0-GA.jar
hibernate-release-4.1.8.Final/lib/required/jboss-logging-3.1.0.GA.jar
hibernate-release-4.1.8.Final/lib/required/jboss-transaction-api_1.1_spec-1.0.0.Final.jar
hibernate-entitymanager-4.0.1.Final

aopalliance: aopaliance 1.0  download 

aopalliance.jar

Spring    : spring3.1.1release (bundled with netbeans  7.3)


listing: 

spring-aop-3.1.1.RELEASE.jar
spring-asm-3.1.1.RELEASE.jar
spring-aspects-3.1.1.RELEASE.jar
spring-beans-3.1.1.RELEASE.jar
spring-context-3.1.1.RELEASE.jar
spring-context-support-3.1.1.RELEASE.jar
spring-core-3.1.1.RELEASE.jar
spring-expression-3.1.1.RELEASE.jar
spring-instrument-3.1.1.RELEASE.jar
spring-instrument-tomcat-3.1.1.RELEASE.jar
spring-jdbc-3.1.1.RELEASE.jar
spring-jms-3.1.1.RELEASE.jar
spring-orm-3.1.1.RELEASE.jar
spring-oxm-3.1.1.RELEASE.jar
spring-struts-3.1.1.RELEASE.jar
spring-test-3.1.1.RELEASE.jar
spring-tx-3.1.1.RELEASE.jar
spring-web-3.1.1.RELEASE.jar
spring-webmvc-3.1.1.RELEASE.jar
spring-webmvc-portlet-3.1.1.RELEASE.jar


Struts2    : struts-2.3.12 download
listing:
(remember to remove unnecessary plugins - otherwise you will have problems deploying e.g I am using tiles, so I have left the plugin in listing but I also have the corresponding  tiles.xml to make it work, if you don't just do not include struts2-tiles-plugin)

asm-3.3.jar
asm-commons-3.3.jar
asm-tree-3.3.jar
classworlds-1.1.jar
commons-beanutils-1.8.0.jar
commons-chain-1.2.jar
commons-collections-3.1.jar
commons-digester-2.0.jar
commons-fileupload-1.2.2.jar
commons-io-2.0.1.jar
commons-lang-2.4.jar
commons-lang3-3.1.jar
commons-logging-1.1.1.jar
commons-logging-api-1.1.jar
commons-validator-1.3.1.jar
ezmorph-1.0.6.jar
freemarker-2.3.19.jar
google-collections-1.0.jar
google-gxp-0.2.4-beta.jar
jackson-core-asl-1.9.2.jar
jackson-mapper-asl-1.9.2.jar
javassist-3.11.0.GA.jar
json-lib-2.3-jdk15.jar
juli-6.0.18.jar
ognl-3.0.6.jar
org.apache.felix.bundlerepository-1.2.1.jar
org.apache.felix.framework-1.4.1.jar
org.apache.felix.main-1.4.1.jar
org.apache.felix.shell-1.0.2.jar
org.apache.felix.shell.tui-1.0.2.jar
oval-1.31.jar
plexus-container-default-1.0-alpha-10.jar
plexus-utils-1.2.jar
struts2-convention-plugin-2.3.12.jar
struts2-core-2.3.12.jar
struts2-dojo-plugin-2.3.12.jar
struts2-embeddedjsp-plugin-2.3.12.jar
struts2-jasperreports-plugin-2.3.12.jar
struts2-javatemplates-plugin-2.3.12.jar
struts2-spring-plugin-2.3.12.jar
struts2-tiles-plugin-2.3.12.jar
testng-5.1-jdk15.jar
tiles-api-2.0.6.jar
tiles-core-2.0.6.jar
tiles-jsp-2.0.6.jar
xmlpull-1.1.3.1.jar
xpp3_min-1.1.4c.jar
xstream-1.4.2.jar
xwork-core-2.3.12.jar



web.xml
...
 <filter>
        <filter-name>SpringOpenEntityManagerInViewFilter</filter-name>
        <filter-class>org.springframework.orm.jpa.support.OpenEntityManagerInViewFilter</filter-class>
    </filter>
    <filter-mapping>
        <filter-name>SpringOpenEntityManagerInViewFilter</filter-name>
        <url-pattern>/*</url-pattern>
    </filter-mapping>
  <!-- deprecated
    <filter>
        <filter-name>struts2</filter-name>
        <filter-class>org.apache.struts2.dispatcher.FilterDispatcher</filter-class>
    </filter>
    -->
    <filter>
        <filter-name>struts2</filter-name>
        <filter-class>org.apache.struts2.dispatcher.ng.filter.StrutsPrepareAndExecuteFilter</filter-class>
        <init-param>
            <param-name>actionPackages</param-name>
            <param-value>my.action</param-value>
        </init-param>
    </filter>
    <filter-mapping>
        <filter-name>struts2</filter-name>
        <url-pattern>/*</url-pattern>
    </filter-mapping>
...

applicationContext.xml

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<beans xmlns="http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans"
               xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
               xmlns:aop="http://www.springframework.org/schema/aop"
               xmlns:tx="http://www.springframework.org/schema/tx"
               xmlns:context="http://www.springframework.org/schema/context"
               xmlns:p="http://www.springframework.org/schema/p" 
               xmlns:cache="http://www.springframework.org/schema/cache" 
               xmlns:jee="http://www.springframework.org/schema/jee"
               xsi:schemaLocation="
                    http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans
                    http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans/spring-beans-3.1.xsd
                    http://www.springframework.org/schema/tx
                    http://www.springframework.org/schema/tx/spring-tx-3.1.xsd
                    http://www.springframework.org/schema/aop
                    http://www.springframework.org/schema/aop/spring-aop-3.1.xsd
                    http://www.springframework.org/schema/context     
                    http://www.springframework.org/schema/context/spring-context-3.1.xsd
                    http://www.springframework.org/schema/cache
                    http://www.springframework.org/schema/cache/spring-cache-3.1.xsd
                    http://www.springframework.org/schema/jee
                    classpath:org/springframework/ejb/config/spring-jee-3.1.xsd"> 
     
      <context:component-scan base-package="myBasePackage" />

    <bean id="dataSource" class="org.springframework.jndi.JndiObjectFactoryBean">
    <property name="jndiName" value="java:comp/env/DATABASENAME"/>
    </bean>
   
    <bean id="entityManagerFactory" class="org.springframework.orm.jpa.LocalContainerEntityManagerFactoryBean"> 
                   <property name="dataSource" ref="dataSource" />
        <property name="jpaVendorAdapter">
        <bean class="org.springframework.orm.jpa.vendor.HibernateJpaVendorAdapter">
            <property name="showSql" value="true" />
            <property name="database" value="ORACLE"/>
            <property name="databasePlatform" value="org.hibernate.dialect.Oracle10gDialect"/>
        </bean>
    </property>
      </bean>

      <bean id="transactionManager" class="org.springframework.orm.jpa.JpaTransactionManager"> 
           <property name="entityManagerFactory" ref="entityManagerFactory" /> 
      </bean> 
      <!--mybeans -->
      <bean id="daoExample" class="my.dao.DaoExample"/>
      <bean id="portfolioService" class="my.utilities.ServiceTest"/>
      <tx:annotation-driven transaction-manager="transactionManager"/>
     
</beans>

Netbeans Maven Proxy Settings

You can set up proxy for maven project in Netbeans 7.3 (on Windows)  by editing


C:\Program Files\NetBeans 7.3\java\maven\conf\settings.xml.

That simple... It took me 30 min to find it on net  - hope you found this page much quicker ;-)