Author Archives: Kyriakos Anastasakis

About Kyriakos Anastasakis

I was born on the beautiful island of Chios, Greece, where I received my primary school and high school education. At the age of 18 (in 1997), I moved to Athens to attend the Department of Informatics at the T.E.I. of Athens. In 2001 as part of a six month industrial placement, I joined Ulysses Systems, Piraeus as a junior Software Developer. In 2002 I received the degree of Informatics Engineer (Mihanikos Pliroforikis) from the T.E.I. of Athens. I continued to work for Ulysses Systems until the end of July of 2003. In 2003 I moved to Birmingham to study for the MSc in Advanced Computer Science at the School of Computer Science, at the University of Birmingham. In 2004, after I finished the MSc studies, I decided to stay in Birmingham and pursue a PhD degree in Computer Science. Since then I have been working towards the PhD in Birmingham under the supervision of Dr. Behzad Bordbar. Since 2005 I have been a part time self-employed software consultant. An interesting project I was involved in, was the development of a small scale CRM software for the Birmingham branch of MLP Private Finance. Since 2004 I have also been responsible for development and maintainance of the website of the Hellenic Society of the University of Birmingham.

Must have Eclipse plugins

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From time to time I develop something on Eclipse. Apart from the usual Eclipse operations (build and test) that I do with the Eclipse Ant and JUnit plugins (they ship with Eclipse for Java), I also wanted to carry out some dependency analysis on existing code. Of course JDepend is the obvious option, but I found a nice article from IBM that suggests some additional plugins that help the coder carry out day to day tasks such as Complexity monitoring and Coding standard analysis.

The following is a summary of the plugins proposed by the article. Of course all of them are opensource/free.

Tool Purpose URL for Eclipse plugin
CheckStyle Coding standard analysis http://eclipse-cs.sourceforge.net/update/
Coverlipse Test code coverage http://coverlipse.sf.net/update
CPD Copy/Paste detection http://pmd.sourceforge.net/eclipse/
JDepend Package dependency analysis http://andrei.gmxhome.de/eclipse/
Metrics Complexity monitoring http://metrics.sourceforge.net/update

The full IBM article can be found here: http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/java/library/j-ap01117/

It takes lots of failures to become successful…

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I was reading an article in the Computer Weekly magazine the other day. The article features the 10 worst inventions from apple (so far) and the 7 worse inventions from Microsoft (so far). Such articles prove one thing that has been well documented.. it takes many failures to become successful! The articles from the computer weekly magazine are the following:

That’s interesting…

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We had a storm a few months ago and before the storm a number of lightnings struck the area close to where I live. I recorder a video of the lightnings and I noticed something weird…

The first image shows the view from our house. The second and third images show two lightnings. The third image is quite interesting, because the closest building on that image is around 20 meters away from where I was standing; and the lightning trajectory appears all the way to the bottom of the picture. It’s been ages since I last studied physics, so even if I knew how to explain how this happened, I have now forgotten! My thoughts so far:

  • either the lightning struck less than 20 meters away from where I was. It doesn’t seem likely, because I assume I would have felt it striking so close. Moreover the clouds where the lightning started its trip [sic] appear to be far away close to the mountains.
  • or the camera was able to capture the trajectory of the lightning behind the trees and buildings!
  • or…
Image1
Image1
Image2
Image2
Image3
Image3

…?

Exception using XMLConfiguration

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I tried using the Apache XMLConfiguration to save the settings of an application I am developing to XML format. When I used it with Java 1.5 it all worked perfectly; however if I tried using it with Java 1.6 I was getting the following exception.

Exception in thread "main" java.lang.AbstractMethodError: org.apache.xerces.dom.DocumentImpl.getXmlStandalone()Z
at com.sun.org.apache.xalan.internal.xsltc.trax.DOM2TO.setDocumentInfo(Unknown Source)
at com.sun.org.apache.xalan.internal.xsltc.trax.DOM2TO.parse(Unknown Source)
at com.sun.org.apache.xalan.internal.xsltc.trax.DOM2TO.parse(Unknown Source)
at com.sun.org.apache.xalan.internal.xsltc.trax.TransformerImpl.transformIdentity(Unknown Source)
at com.sun.org.apache.xalan.internal.xsltc.trax.TransformerImpl.transform(Unknown Source)
at com.sun.org.apache.xalan.internal.xsltc.trax.TransformerImpl.transform(Unknown Source)
at org.apache.commons.configuration.XMLConfiguration.save(XMLConfiguration.java:880)
at org.apache.commons.configuration.AbstractHierarchicalFileConfiguration$FileConfigurationDelegate.save(AbstractHierarchicalFileConfiguration.java:454)
at org.apache.commons.configuration.AbstractFileConfiguration.save(AbstractFileConfiguration.java:546)
at org.apache.commons.configuration.AbstractFileConfiguration.save(AbstractFileConfiguration.java:513)
at org.apache.commons.configuration.AbstractFileConfiguration.save(AbstractFileConfiguration.java:491)
at org.apache.commons.configuration.AbstractFileConfiguration.save(AbstractFileConfiguration.java:403)
at org.apache.commons.configuration.AbstractHierarchicalFileConfiguration.save(AbstractHierarchicalFileConfiguration.java:199)

After doing some search on google I found that this can be a problem with the xerces XML library (xercesImpl.jar). Checking the 3rd party libraries I am using in my project, I found a library that was using and distributing an earlier version of xercesImpl.jar.

I downloaded the latest version (2.91) of xercesImpl.jar from the Apache xerces project (http://xerces.apache.org/mirrors.cgi#binary) and replaced in the 3rd party library I was using the xercesImpl.jar file with the one I downloaded. Now everything seems to work fine, even in Java 1.6.  🙂

Minimise the Noise of the CPU Fan on a SONY VAIO Laptop

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Update: The method described in the following proved to be useless in the summer, when the laptop became too slow (almost unresponsive). I guess setting the CPU Fan Control level to quiet does not work well when the environment temperature is relatively high. So, I removed the fan cover (all you need to do is remove 6 screws on my laptop) and injected some sewing machine oil on the fan! Now the laptop is TOTALLY silent again! Hurrah!

The noise level of the CPU Fan of my Sony Vaio VGN-SZ71E laptop was driving me crazy for the past few days. When the laptop was on, you could hear the fan operating even in the room next door. The fan was also producing vibrations, which I could feel when I had my arms on the keyboard palmrest! It’s needless to say you can’t work properly (i.e. concentrate on your work) under these circumstances.

I tried removing the chassis to see if I can replace the fan, but in order to have access to the CPU fan on this laptop model you need to disassemble pretty much everything! Luckily there is a workaround.

I had installed the Sony VAIO Power Management utilities, which allow me to manage the CPU Fan speed (Control Panel -> Power Options->VAIO Power Managent -> CPU Fan Control ). I set it to level  “1-quiet” and I have to say it is much better now.  Probably this has some impact on the performance, but this comes second to the peace of mind when working 🙂