Want to burn AVI as a DVD?
Easiest piece of DVD authoring software I have ever used. And. it's. free.
Slicehost – Taking VPS for a Spin
For the longest time, I have been looking for a solution to my specific hosting needs. I am a Java developer so naturally, I would like to be able to use the skills I already have in my personal development. Although I have tried building and maintaining my own server at my house, it's mostly been a failure due to bandwidth issues and power issues.
PHP Hosting
I currently have a hosting account with Bluehost and they are the typical PHP/web hosting company providing mysql, php, etc. For PHP developers, that is great and although I have done some smaller projects in PHP and trust it to be a great solution for small and medium size projects, the language is tedious and it doesn't have a good IDE, especially with all the benefits I enjoy from Eclipse. I need code completion. I need automatic refactoring when I change a class name. I NEED Maven.
Need My Own Playground
So what I need is full control - 100% access to installing and configuing a server from the OS up. Server colocation is expensive and tedius again because of all the hardware. In walks VPS (Virtual Private Server), and I think my life has changed. Here's a quick diagram of what a VPS is.
Hello, Slicehost
20 bucks. 256 MB RAM. 10 GB Hard Drive. 100 GB Bandwidth. Perfect to start. You have a choice of Linux OS, so I am going to go with the one I know best - Ubuntu. The plan is to build out a development box including JBoss, MySQL, Subversion, Maven, and ProFTPd and learn how to lock it down correctly.
Time to get started.
Maven – Create webapp for Eclipse WTP
mvn archetype:create -DgroupId=deng -DartifactId=mywebapp -DarchetypeArtifactId=maven-archetype-webapp
mvn eclipse:m2eclipse -Dwtpversion=1.5
Import project into Eclipse
Let Risk-Taking Financial Institutions Fail
Great article explaining why this bailout is a bad idea for the American taxpayer.
http://www.time.com/time/business/article/0,8599,1845209,00.html
"Do not be fooled. The $700 billion (ultimately $1 trillion or more) bailout is not predominantly for mortgages and homeowners. Instead, the bailout is for mortgage-backed securities. In fact, some versions of these instruments are imaginary derivatives. These claims overlap on the same types of mortgages. Many financial institutions wrote claims over the same mortgages, and these are the majority of claims that have "gone bad."