Apple Wireless Keyboard on Windows [AppleKeyboardInstaller.exe]

At the weekend I found a solution to a long lasting problem of mine. I have a Apple Wireless Keyboard, because two years ago it was the best Bluetooth keyboard on the market (Currently I can't say, didn't checked again). So, I use the keyboard every day mostly for writing text ;), but the device doens't posess a DEL, POS1 and END-Key and thus it is hard to navigate during typing.

The solution is install the keyboard driver provided by Apple in the Bootcamp package. The driver I use is from a OS X Leopard installation disc.
Or download it here: http://www.happytocode.com/post/Apple-Aluminium-keyboard-Boot-Camp-20-Windows-drivers.aspx

PS: After I found the solution myself, I had the correct google search term and solutions older than my keyboard. But it works.

UPDATE:
The keyboard driver sometimes leads to Bluescreens, so I am back using the standard windows drivers without the additional keyboard shortcuts.

Credit card: Visualize your money

Some time ago I had a discussion about (dis-)advantages of physical against non-physical stuff. She argued that non-physical is mostly too abstract for the user and thus not that easy to use in daily life.
We argued about "real" money as physical and credit cards as non-physical example. The advantages of real money are that you see what you have and you can only spend that. The advantages of the credit card are that the payment is easier and payment via internet is possible.

The main disadvantage is that you as user can't see how much money you spend or you have available. The card looks always the same.

Assume that materials are available that could either shrink or change it's color. Using this the credit card will get smaller if you pay with it and slowly reach your limit. Or the card could get orange if are in reaching line of credit and red if your are in.
Thus you as user would "feel" how much money is available and it is much easier to cope with the abstraction from real money.

PS: Only an experiment in mind.

Windows shell (cmd) and loops

FOR %t in (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10)
DO FOR %g IN (1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10) DO ECHO %t %g

Hopefully I have never to use the windows shell again!

JSF 2.0: Mojarra and multipart/form-data (File Upload) [Glassfish]

It is a quite a mess that Mojarra doesn't support h:forms that use enctyp multipart/form-data, because you can't access possible available parts in the JSF Controllers.

The following wrapper extends a HttpServletRequest so that getParameter also uses available data in HttpServletRequest.getParts().

You can than access the HttpServletRequest via
FacesContext.getCurrentInstance().getExternalContext() and use getParts own your own.

import java.io.BufferedReader;
import java.io.IOException;
import java.io.InputStream;
import java.io.InputStreamReader;
import java.util.HashMap;
import java.util.Map;
import java.util.logging.Level;
import java.util.logging.Logger;
import javax.servlet.ServletException;
import javax.servlet.http.HttpServletRequest;
import javax.servlet.http.HttpServletRequestWrapper;
import javax.servlet.http.Part;

/**
 * The mojarra implementation does not parse POST request that are multipart encoded, 
 * because the parameters are not accessable via getParameter().
 *
 * This class extends the HttpServletRequest to provide access to the parameters
 * which are encoded accessable via getParts.
 *
 * All parts are made visible that have contentType == null && size < 300.
 *
 * If the request is not multipart encoded, the wrapper doesn't modify the behavior of the original HttpServletRequest.
 * @author dennis
 */
public class MultipartHTTPServletRequest extends HttpServletRequestWrapper {

    protected Map parameterParts = new HashMap();

    public MultipartHTTPServletRequest(HttpServletRequest request) {
        super(request);

        if (getContentType() == null) {
            return;
        }
        if (!getContentType().toLowerCase().startsWith("multipart/")) {
            return;
        }
        try {
            for (Part i : getParts()) {
                if (i.getContentType() == null && i.getSize() < 300) {
                    parameterParts.put(i.getName(), getData(i.getInputStream()));
                }
            }
        } catch (IOException ex) {
            Logger.getLogger(MultipartHTTPServletRequest.class.getName()).log(Level.SEVERE, null, ex);
        } catch (ServletException ex) {
            Logger.getLogger(MultipartHTTPServletRequest.class.getName()).log(Level.SEVERE, null, ex);
        }
    }

    private static String getData(InputStream input) throws IOException {
        String data = "";
        String line = "";
        BufferedReader reader = new BufferedReader(new InputStreamReader(input));
        while ((line = reader.readLine()) != null) {
            data += line;
        }
        return data;
    }

    @Override
    public String getParameter(String name) {
        String result = super.getParameter(name);
        if (result == null) {
            return parameterParts.get(name);
        }
        return result;
    }
}

Java Servlet (3.0): How can I access multipart encoded content provided by a http post request?

At the last friday i stood right before a tricky problem: How can I save a image provided via HTTP post into a database?
I had three problems:
1. How to upload a file via HTML?
2. How to access the data at the server side?
3. How to put in the database using JPA?

The first one was easy, just create a html form add a input field (type='file') and a submit button.

The second one cost me one day. And it was really simple: Just place the @MultipartConfig annotation at the class definition of the servlet and use HTTPRequest.getPart[s]() methods to access the data as an inputstream.

The last part was straight forward: use a InputStreamReader to copy the data into a byte[] and add @Lob byte[] field to the entity class.

Because I use MySQL it was necessary to change the columnt type from TEXT to MEDIUMBLOB.

Java: CDI & ConversationScope

Yesterday I recreated my web app project with maven. Now CDI is available and @ConversationScoped is really nice and makes the development a lot easier.
I used Glassfish v3.

... Post my pom.xml tomorrow again.