Thursday, November 23, 2006

Final cover of my EJB-3-book online

As I wrote before, the final draft of my book is at dpunkt.
They now also have the final cover design online. Unfortunately, Amazon is no yet this fast as you can see here

JBoss World Berlin

I had the luck to be in Berlin at JBossWorld for the last three days. This was a great event. I met many of my colleagues. The party at the eWerk was great and everyone enjoyed the event. The only downside was that I was not able to stay a little longer in Berlin for sightseeing purposes.
There is already some coverage of this event on the net, so I don't duplicate that, but merely link to it:

Friday, November 17, 2006

Parallel desktop for Mac, MacBook and special characters

Parallels Desktop for Mac is a great piece of software. You can run every other operating system for i386 architecture (yes includig vista).
On the MacBook, you usually have no external keyboard with a right alt key, so special characters such as
@, \, |, { , } , ... are on a MacBook with a German keyboard not usable on Rev 1970.
The following steps provided by Parallels support (extremly fast answer) allow you to map the
right enter key (of the emulated numeric keyboard) which sits between space and cursor-left to
AltGr like on ordinary pc keyboards.

  1. Stop any running VMs, close all instances of Parallels Desktop for Mac.
  2. Launch ?Macintosh HD? - ?Applications? ? ?Utilities? ? ?Terminal?.
  3. Type the following commands in Terminal, please mind that the system might ask you for the Administrator password after each command ? type it and hit Enter:
  4. sudo touch /Library/Parallels/.keyboard_config
  5. sudo chmod 666 /Library/Parallels/.keyboard_config
  6. sudo echo "numenterisaltgr" > /Library/Parallels/.keyboard_config
  7. Close the Terminal.
  8. Launch Parallels Desktop for Mac and check Right Enter key behavior in VM ? everything should work as you?ve set.

After this you might reach @ on AltGr+q (German PC keyboard) with AltGr being mapped on this additonal enter key.

A feature version of Parallels Desktop might include a Preferences option to select this behaviour directly in the application.
Thanks again to Parallels support for this fast solution.

Wednesday, November 15, 2006

Final draft of my ejb3 book at the publisher

I just sent the final draft of my book to the publisher.
Next steps are professional spell checking, type setting and printing. So I expect it to be in stores end on January 2007.
Stay tuned :)