Dicodess

I tried to evaluate Dicodess, a distributed co-operative decision support system.  I couldn't get it to run.  I was following the 'robots' tutorial.  After pressing 'continue' on the 'Project Properties' page, the application simply exits.  No error messages are issued to the console, and there do not seem to be any log files.  At first I thought that the JVM that I was using, 1.5.0_07, was too new, but the system fails the same way under 1.4.2_12.  After failing once, the system hangs on start-up at the stage 'Initializing Working Memory'.  The only way to recover from this state is to delete the contents of the Dicodess 'projects' directory.

Decoding MS Product Keys

Here is some JScript that can be used to display the product keys used to register various Microsoft products on the current machine.

JIRA Crash

JIRA crashed today, complaining that the segments file in the indexes\issues directory of the repository was missing.  I tried to rebuild the indexes, but then it complained that it couldn't delete the index files.  The solution was to restart JIRA and then rebuild the indexes.

Perhaps another process was locking the JIRA files -- a backup or virus scan?

SWT Widget.dispose() Doesn't Get Called

The API documentation for org.eclipse.swt.widgets.Widget#dispose() has this interesting tidbit:

NOTE: This method is not called recursively on the descendents of the receiver. This means that, widget implementers can not detect when a widget is being disposed of by re-implementing this method, but should instead listen for the Dispose event.

Thus, the only reliable way for a widget to know if it has been disposed is to add a DisposeListener to itself.