A nice Ant target to print out all the Ant's built-in properties:

<target name="echo" >
    <echo message="os.name:          ${os.name}"          />
    <echo message="basdir:           ${basedir}"          />
    <!-- absolute path of the build file. -->
    <echo message="ant.file:         ${ant.file}"         />
    <!-- path to executing ant's root directory. -->
    <echo message="ant.home:         ${ant.home}"         />
    <echo message="ant.version:         ${ant.version}"   />
    <echo message="ant.project.name: ${ant.project.name}" />
    <echo message="ant.java.version: ${ant.java.version}" />
    <!-- System properties. -->
    <echo message="user.home:         ${user.home}"   />
    <echo message="user.name:         ${user.name}"   />
    <echo message="java.home:         ${java.home}"   />
</target>

Originally found here.

Here is a fun quiz: What is the best possible way (fastest with least memory) to convert an int to a byte array (of size 4) in big endian in Java ? ie.

public static byte[] toBigEndianBytes(int i) {
// ??
}

It turns out the code below is the best I've found so far:

public static byte[] toBigEndianBytes(int i) {
        return new byte[] {
                (byte)(i >>> 24), 
                (byte)(i >>> 16),
                (byte)(i >>> 8),
                (byte)i
        };
}

Can you think of a better one ?

Update on 21Mar06: Interesting class to look at java.nio.Bits.
Update on 29Mar06: Paul Brown has more details.

A simple little script that does the backup for me to a remote machine:

backup.sh
---------
filename=`date +%y%m%d`-`date +%H%M%S`-xyz-projects.tar
echo $filename
tar cf $filename ProjectXyz*
gzip $filename
scp $filename.gz hchar.desktop:/home/hchar/backup/
rm $filename.gz

Just got SVN server running on Windows. So far so good! I installed both the TortoiseSVN and SVN server using the SVN 1-Click Setup.

It's not obvious how to specify the SVN URL. For example, if the SVN repository is created at C:\svnrepos, the URL will be

file:///C:/svnrepos

I then imported my Java project to it from Eclipse 3.1.2 via the Subclipse plugin. My project is now actually under dual version control by SVN and P4 :)

To remote access it, the SVN URL is simply:

svn://myhostname

Pretty neat.

Update on 12Mar06: just upgraded my svn client to TortoiseSVN 1.3.2 and svn server to SVN 1.3.0 on Windows. I didn't uninstall the previous subversion (both client and server), but I needed to manually disable the SVNService before I could install SVN 1.3.0 without failure.

I've used subversion seriously only for a week. Love it so far. In fact, I've disabled my CVSNT service (although not yet uninstalled). There is even utility to convert existing CVS repository to SVN. So I am not looking back.