Moving From Eclipse to Intellij on the Mac

I have been using Eclipse for the past 5 years. During that time, there have been projects where I have been exposed to Intellij. Recently, after a conversation with a colleague, they convinced me to give the latest and greatest Intellij a try. They bragged about the wonderful Spring integration and code inspection. So I decided to give it a try. After using it for about a month now, I must admit, I have seen the light. It took a while to get used to the different keyboard shortcuts even though Intellij has the default Eclipse key bindings available as a selection. I decided to do a clean break from Eclipse, and learn the new keys.

Connecting to a corporate network with a Mac

Today was my first day at work with the new MacBook. Going in to today, I had several concerns on my mind, but after a little bit of work, and some patience, I was able to connect to all of the essential corporate resources. Here is a break down of the concerns I faced going in, the actual issues I ran in to, and what I did to work around them.

Directory size from the cmd line

Have you ever wanted to scan recursively through a directory to find out how much space each sub directory was taking up? Well, there is an easy way of doing this on *nix. Just run du “Disk Usage”.

Configuring a Java Development Environment on OS X Tiger

Since I just received my new MacBook Pro, I am tasked with setting up my development environment. Since most of my development is Java/Java EE based, the first thing I need to do is decide on the file system layout for all of the Java artifacts. I.e., JDK, IDE’s, Open Source Packages, App Servers, etc… I also need to decide on how I will control the Java runtime environment. I.e., Run App Server under Java 5, run a build under Java 1.4, run a Java Swing app under yet a different virtual machine. Here are my thoughts on each of these:

Handy OS X Application for Blogging

After listening to the Maccast, I heard Adam mention this program called MarsEdit developed by Ranchero Software. He said that it was a great program that he uses quite often. So, of course, I had to give it a try. I downloaded the trial version, and within the first 10 minutes, I saw the value of it. Basically, it gives you an “inbox” view of your blog. Where each “message” corresponds to a blog entry. You “compose” entries as if they were an email, and then when you are done composing you “send” them to your blog. Maybe now I will follow my new years resolution of blogging more often.