Aeroccino Motor Replaced

Months ago, I got this broken Aeroccino milk frother for free. This week I fiddled with it for a few hours, and got it to work:

Why some App Store apps won’t install

I was happily playing around with the appstore, and came across this funny free game called “Hedgewars”. Originally a free Linux game, it apparently got ported to the Mac and put in the App Store, just as a slew of Flash-based games (yes, Steve has some ‘splainin’ to do).

I tried to install Hedgewars on my trusty Mac Mini and got this message saying “This Application can not be installed on this machine”:

Move Time Machine data to a Drobo

If Santa treated you particularly well this season, or you have put some of your savings to good use, chances are that you have a brand-new Drobo looking at you right now. Meanwhile, your Mac is happily making Time Machine backups to that trusty old local USB disk. So you want to use that new Drobo for Time Machine backups, but don’t want to loose history? Here’s how (baby steps, no tools required, screenshots included):

Anonimatron featured on Softpedia

As you may know I started working on a little tool to anonymize databases. Nothing fancy, just a Java tool that uses jdbc to replace live data with fake generated data which still looks representative enough to do testing and make believable screenshots. Oh and did I mention that it is 100% free of charge? You can get the latest version from SourceForge.net.

I recently received an email from Softpedia that Anonimatron has been added to their catalog. Their email states:

“anonimatron” has been tested in the Softpedia labs using several industry-leading security solutions and found to be completely clean of adware/spyware components. We are impressed with the quality of your product and encourage you to keep these high standards in the future.

Anonimatron is written in Java and will ron on Linux, OSX and Windows machines. The current version is 1.3, and it should be considered “beta” at this point.

Let me know what you think!

Sonar “Close Connection” warning workaround.

When you use Spring and Ibatis and SQLTemplates, you could have code in your project which looks somewhat like this:

Connection connection = DataSourceUtils.getConnection(getDataSource());
...<do connection stuff here>...
DataSourceUtils.releaseConnection(connection, getDataSource());

Sonar will report that you did not close the connection, while in fact, Spring did that for you. You can not just add a “connection.close()” to the code because the whole point of calling “releaseConnection()” is to have Spring handle all the smart stuff on committing, closing, and returning the connection to the pool if needed.