Some nice tools for file comparision:

• Beyond Compare ($30)


• KDiff3 (Free)

JettyLauncher is a pretty handy Eclipse plugin to run web app in Jetty. The bad news is it doesn't seem to work well with Log4j and uses the mortbay logging by default. The good news is the logging behavior can be controlled via some system properties:

  DEBUG - if set debugging is output is enabled.
  DEBUG_PATTERNS - A list of substring patterns used to match against log information for
                   fine grained control of debug logging.
  DEBUG_VERBOSE - If set to a positive integer, trace and info are enabled.
                  If set to zero, then info is enabled.

I found this out from the source code org.mortbay.log.LogImpl.java. Here is more info about logging in Jetty.

Clover works great but it's not free. Jcoverage is free but it doesn't work with JDK1.5 class files. Both the open source projects Emma and Cobertura look promising. For Ant and Maven integration, Cobertura seems easier. There is also a Cobertura Eclipse plugin, but I couldn't find one for Emma.

If you need to share multiple monitors with the same mouse and keyboard, and yet have no special hardware, the open source Synergy is absolutely sensational.

The default xterm in Cygwin looks pretty primitive, so I added a ~/.Xresources file to make them look better. It contains something like:

XTerm*font: -*-courier-medium-r-*-*-*-140-*-*-*-*-iso8859-*
XTerm*background: black
XTerm*foreground: lightYellow
XTerm*scrollBar: true
XTerm*rightScrollBar: true
XTerm*saveLines: 1000
XTerm*scrollbar*Foreground: Gray30
XTerm*scrollbar*Background: Gray75