Suppose you have a Java Swing application which you can start by typing the following on the command line: java -jar myTerrificSwingApp.jar If you want to make that application start from the Finder in OSX, there are a lot of options which range from ugly to convoluted. If you need a quick fix, here's how to do it. …

This evening I came accross the window.moveBy() JavaScript function and thought it would be cool to shake the browser window when a user fails to log in. It turns out that I was not the only one thinking this, but none of the examples worked for me. Some had no proper delays, others only worked from the page header, …

My wife bought me a playstation 3 last year, and I've enjoyed many hours of gaming on it, finishing Tomb Raider underworld, and now making decent progress in Ratchet and Clank: Tools of Destruction. I was a bit sceptical about the DLNA capabilities of the PS3, because I read a lot of bad news on this fairly new …

"Remote Desktop Connection.app" allows you to see the desktop of a remote Windows machine on your mac. This application will not update itself automatically, unless you have it installed as part of the Microsoft Office for Mac suite. If you've downloaded the 1.0.3 version you probably did not notice that …

There is a nice and clean way to automatically mount network shares each time you log into your Mac. It's called the "Bonjour Mounter", a simple application which runs on login, and mounts the drives you configured it to mount. No more, no less.

Did you know that your installation of Leopard comes with a built-in performance monitor? It's called "Instruments" and you can attach it to any process currently running. In the screenshot you see here I attached it to an instance of Eclipse while running some unittests. Instruments has some nice templates …

If you're a SQuirreL SQL fan like me, and you use a Mac, you probably also want to know how to add a driver to the OSX version of the application. Most people just point to an external jar file, but you can also add drivers to the application bundle. There's not much to it, but it took me some time to discover that I …

I recently downloaded Eclipse 3.4.1 for Mac OSX, and tried starting it using the eclipse.app icon. It did not work, and I noticed a message in /var/log/system.log telling me that the JVM could not be loaded. After some Googling, I found out that Eclipse is not compatible with the new 64bit version of JDK 1.6 for the …

If you're working on some source code and you quickly need to insert a hexadecimal color code for a color you currently have on your screen, then here is a neat little trick I found: First, install Hex Color Picker by Waffle software. It will add an extra option to the built-in OSX color picker to show you the selected …

On StackOverflow, there is a question asking for the greatest programmer quotes you know. In the top 3 quotes are the following two quotes which I think hold much truth: _**"Always code as if the guy who ends up maintaining your code will be a violent psychopath who knows where you live."**_ - Rick Osborne …