23. November 2011

Mintty – resizable terminal for Windows

Update 4.11. 2012: Mintty/Cygwin Termina; has also support for transparency.

Update 31.12. 2011: new version of Mintty (see discussion).

Cygwin is great tool for Windows.

E.g. You can create shell script to access windows share via //computer/share_name. This saves a lot of time when you’re domain admin and you need to maintain many computers.

The only BIG drawback of Cygwin for Windows was terminal window. When you work on Mac or Linux you can resize terminal window as you need. Terminal (CMD) for Windows sucks. In default installation you can resize just in one direction. The other option would be to mix Cygwin with PowerShell, but then many things are not working at all.

Good news! Great news! There is new terminal window in Cygwin 1.7.x. It’s application mintty.

Installer will create link to this app with name Cygwin Terminal. It will launch mintty process and you can resize window without problem.

It works fantastic! After so many yeaars it is now possible to use full power of Windows and Linux together in one bundle. (Yes, I know about other terminals like rxvt or X-based stuff, but it required always some extra steps).

Some computers were complaining that /Cygwin-Terminal.ico was not found and I was not able to launch terminal. Solution was easy. Right click on launcher icon and remove icon parameters from Target. The result target command should look like: C:\cygwin\bin\mintty.exe

Hooray! BIG thank you goes to authors of mintty for Windows.

Follow Mintty T.

Posted in Software engineering (Tags: , , , , , ) | 10 Comments

20. November 2011

Unexpected token ILLEGAL in jQuery.i18n.properties

jQuery.i18n.properties is useful library based on jQuery. You can use it to load .properties files with localization to web application.

I made upgrade of jQuery in my application from version 1.6.2 and application failed with error:

Uncaught SyntaxError: Unexpected token ILLEGAL

I spent some time debugging jQuery and i18n and I found out that one of .properties file contains weird property with name:

1_guide=1 guide

Problem was in numeric prefix. Solution is quite easy: fix property.

one_guide=1 guide

This problem occurs when you upgrade jQuery to 1.6.3 and higher.

Posted in Rich Internet Application (Tags: , , , , ) | Comments Off on Unexpected token ILLEGAL in jQuery.i18n.properties

13. November 2011

Apache Tomcat 7 Maven plugin

I was searching for Apache Tomcat 7 Maven plugin. I found only messages that no such thing exists and that I have to use some workaround. Finally I found link at StackOwerflow that pointed me to the testing version of  such a plugin.

You just need to configure repository and update mojo definition.

 <repositories>
    <repository>
      <id>people.apache.snapshots</id>
      <url>http://repository.apache.org/content/groups/snapshots-group/</url>
      <releases>
        <enabled>false</enabled>
      </releases>
      <snapshots>
        <enabled>true</enabled>
      </snapshots>
    </repository>
  </repositories>

  <pluginRepositories>
    <pluginRepository>
      <id>apache.snapshots</id>
      <name>Apache Snapshots</name>
      <url>http://repository.apache.org/content/groups/snapshots-group/</url>
      <releases>
        <enabled>false</enabled>
      </releases>
      <snapshots>
        <enabled>true</enabled>
      </snapshots>
    </pluginRepository>
  </pluginRepositories>
...
<plugin>
      <groupId>org.apache.tomcat.maven</groupId>
      <artifactId>tomcat7-maven-plugin</artifactId>
      <version>2.0-SNAPSHOT</version>
      <configuration>
        <path>/</path>
      </configuration>
    </plugin>

You can run Tomcat7 by: mvn tomcat7:run

You can read more about this new version of Tomcat Maven plugin at tomcat.apache.org.

This plugin is still under development.

BTW: List Maven plugins hosted at Apache.org is available at maven.apache.org/plugins.

Posted in Software engineering (Tags: , , , , ) | 4 Comments