Pimpin' Netbeans UI in Linux (laptop)

This assumes you know how to do stuff around Netbeans and Linux.
I have the following in my Laptop.
Ubuntu Dapper Drake - Running GNOME 2.14 and Sun JDK 6.
Default X11 font rendering sucks a little. So, I applied sub-pixel smoothing patches.
I downloaded and started using Netbeans 5.5, which is pretty good. But by default it has the "Metal" look and feel, which is not very exciting. So, I decided to make Netbeans look "better".

I tried enabling the GTKLookAndFeel so that it looks native. But I must confess, the Java font rendering on GTKLookAndFeel is just plain horrible. My next choice for look and fee was JGoodies. JGoodies is a pretty neat and simple Look and feel library.

So, first you need JDK6 for better UI and Font rendering.
Download JGoodies look and feel and place the looks-2.1.3.jar in to your netbeans-5.5/core folder.

Now, edit your netbeans-5.5/etc/netbeans.conf file so that your netbeans_default_options value looks like :

netbeans_default_options="-J-Xms32m -J-Xmx384m -J-XX:PermSize=32m -J-XX:MaxPermSize=384m -J-Dswing.aatext=true -J-Xverify:none -J-DPlastic.defaultTheme=ExperienceBlue -J-DmarkContentBorders=true -laf com.jgoodies.looks.plastic.PlasticXPLookAndFeel -J-Dapple.laf.useScreenMenuBar=true"

Here, important lines are

• J-DPlastic.defaultTheme=ExperienceBlue - this is a good theme on eyes
• -laf com.jgoodies.looks.plastic.PlasticXPLookAndFeel - XP like look and feel.
• -J-Dswing.aatext=true - Force font anti-aliasing options.

Start your netbeans with these options and it will look much better. But the tab headers are grayish and they look really horrible:

So, here is a fix for that. Download the tab header netbeans module from this site, and install it in your netbeans - by the following steps.

From Tools -> Module Manager, Click update button.
In Update center wizard, select Install manually selected downloads, and add and install the downloaded nbm module.



Restart your netbeans, and it should look pretty good. ( Here, I have included my Ubuntu Menu text to show how the font still sucks a bit)



Now, for editor font, get "Consolas" ( it is a Vista font so get it by hook or crook) and use it as your editor font. It looks nice - as nice as Apple's Monaco.

Exploring the infinite

Lately, I have been doing some research in art, one of my passions. I am a big fan of impressionism and post-impressionism. I am equally intrigued by deception artists like Dali and the great M.C.Escher. So, with GIMP, I thought of taking a shot at my own version of Escher's self "repeating patterns" or the tessellations. Here it is. Yes, I agree it is very primitive - I did it on my laptop with 2hrs of effort - if that makes this look any better :)


Fish, bird and some weird lizard taking part in my tessellation.

Java swing components library

Just a random bookmark post!
I came across JIDE http://www.jidesoft.com/
Ran an instant online web start demo! quite impressive.

Expensive software and yucky user interfaces

An interesting software tool that I came across last year is "Ascential datastage". This software is bought over by IBM and given some name change. This is basically a data integration software, that provides connectivity across wide platforms and has a handful of utility functions and adapters.
But there is an aspect that really sucks. Its UI. The "designer" UI is so cluttered that you feel like running away from it. It has umpteen number of docking windows that distract and confuse you. And a useless company banner image shining on top of the tool bar just takes away a lot of your screen real estate.( I figured you can disable this, but come on guys!). The integration flow designer's Icons are anything but user friendly. The stand alone components and the executable components has the same basic design. The only way to tell the apart is one is blue and the other is bluish gray! well, if your monitor is not tuned up well, you will never tell it apart. Just for example look at this dialog box that shows successful build.

Hell? what is that "Cancel" button for? Will it rollback all my builds and delete the target code generated? Why the heck this dialog has to be this big? and, why the heck you don't use some graphics to convey the result. They got to read the apple human Interface guidelines.

Best GNOME audio player

At last! a very robust audio player for GNOME.
Banshee. Go check it out. I installed it from source and it was a cake walk. Interestingly, this is written in mono ( the Open source implementation of MS dot net c#). I am a Java fan, but when it comes to interfacing with the powerful gstreamer engine, Mono is a little ahead of Java. Java do not have a JNI implementation layer on top of gstreamer as of today. It is very easy to build Banshee from source. RTFM at Banshee website and you are good to go.

Cool Features:

1. Cool user interface
2. iTunes and other player support
3. Album art
4. Tag filling
5. Podcast support
6. Music sharing
7. Music recommendations
   
8. A lot of plug-ins like: meta data search, Mini mode, Tray based player etc.

Banshee Still lacks the following. But these are not very necessary.

1. Graphic equalizer
2. DSP effects
3. Funky skins(who needs it anyway while GNOME themes satisfy all your aesthetic whims)
4. Funky Visualizations

Here is a screenshot from my desktop. Note that I am playing a song in my native tongue while Banshee is suggesting similar Indian singers and songs to me in the bottom panel...this is awesome. I haven't seen iTunes doing this yet.

1. 

Phish proof

Dark forces that employ phishing occasionally use paypal email as their Trojan horse.
But there is a very easy way to identify between a "scam"-paypal email and the real paypal email. Original paypal email would have your first name and last name in the email body. Phishers would not have that information.
So, today, I saw yet another fake paypal email sitting in my inbox saying:

We have reason to believe that your account was accessed by a third party. Because protecting the security of your account is our primary concern, we have limited access to sensitive PayPal account features. We understand that this may be an inconvenience but please understand that this temporary limitation is for your protection.
To remove the limitation click on the following link:

Followed by a link. Just out of curiosity I clicked on that Link and my "Thunderbird" advised me not to follow the link. Here is a screen shot

And I did not have any intentions whatsoever to got to bubblewebdesign.ch and give away my paypal credentials.
So, my advice - Be smart.
Use smart tools like Firefox, gmail and thunderbird, that would alert you about such scams.