Eclipse Tip

I have become accustomed to seeing "change bars" in Visual Studio i.e. being able to see which lines have been changed but not committed to version control.

It seemed odd that Eclipse wouldn't have this feature so I went searching for it and sure enough it does, but strangely, it's disabled by default. It's also a little hard to find. It's not under Annotations or Team (version control). It's under Editor > Text Editors > Quick Diff, which makes sense, and you can get there easily by searching for "diff", as long as you know what to search for.

You want to check "Enable quick diff" and "Show differences in overview ruler" and "Git Revision" under "Use this reference source". (assuming you're using Git)

See also: stack overflow: Highlighting modified lines in Eclipse

Mac Remote Desktop Resolution

At home I have a Retina iMac with a 27" 5120 x 2880 display. At work I have a Windows machine with a 27" 2560 x 1440 display set at 125% DPI. I use Microsoft Remote Desktop (available through the Apple app store) to access my work machine from home.

I'm not sure how it was working before, but after I upgraded my work machine to Windows 10, everything got smaller. It comes up looking like 100% (although that's actually 200% on the Mac).

Annoyingly, when you are connected through RDP you aren't allowed to change the DPI.

I looked at the settings on my RDP connection but the highest resolution I could choose (other than "native") was 1920 x 1080 which was close, but a little too big.

Poking around, I found that in the Preferences of Microsoft Remote Desktop you can add your own resolutions (by clicking on the '+' at the bottom left). I added 2048 x 1152 (2560 x 1440 / 1.25)

Then changed the settings on the connection to use that and it's now back to my usual size.

The screen quality with RDP doing the scaling does not seem as good as when Windows is doing the scaling, but at least the size is the same.

I'm guessing from what I saw with searching the web that there might be a way to adjust this on the Terminal Server on my Windows machine, but I didn't find any simple instructions.

If anyone knows a better way to handle this, let me know.

Visual Studio Tip

I've been trying out Visual Studio 2015 Community RC and every time I did a build I'd get:

All packages are already installed and there is nothing to restore.
NuGet package restore finished.

It didn't seem to hurt anything, but I prefer to keep the build output clean so eventually I got tired of it and figured out you can get rid of it using Tools > Options

Of course, that's assuming you don't need to check for missing packages during builds.

Template Shortcuts in Eclipse

One of the features of the Eclipse IDE is that you can define "template" shortcuts. For example, you can expand "main" into the complete method definition. I don't use a lot of these, but they are handy once your fingers learn them.

Eclipse comes with a bunch of pre-defined templates and you can add your own. For example, I added a template that expands "sop" into "System.out.println".

Ctrl+Space brings up the choices. In theory if you select Auto Insert and there is only one matching choice it will automatically fill in the template. In practice there are usually multiple choices so you have to pick from the list. That's usually just a matter of hitting Enter (as long as your choice is the first one).

You can find the templates in Preferences - Java - Editor - Templates.

I also edited the "test" template to generate a JUnit 4 test (instead of the older style):

@Test
public void ${name}() {
    ${cursor}
}

Removing Borders from Images on Blogger

This may be due to the template I'm using, or maybe even my browser, but in case other people are having the same problem, I thought I'd post my workaround. (Besides, it gives me a handy reference when I forget what to do!)

When I insert images into my blog posts I get a gray border around them. Like this:

Sometimes that's ok, but often, like with this image, I don't want that border.

NOTE: The border doesn't show up while composing, or in preview, only (annoyingly) after you publish.

To remove it, I edit the HTML and add style="border: none;" to the img tag. (I'm not sure why this is necessary because it already has border="0" - maybe something in the CSS.) The result should be the image without the gray border, like this:

Note: If you're reading this in something like Google Reader you may not see the border.

How to Suppress Blogger Image Borders

For some reason Blogger often adds a gray border around images. Usually I don't want it. You can get rid of it by adding:

style="border: none;"

To the img tag (not the a or div tags) using Edit HTML.

Mac OS X Screenshot Tip

I use Shift+Command+4 all the time to take screenshots on my Mac.

What I found out recently is that if you press the space bar after Shift+Command+4 then you can capture an entire window or pull down menu, without having to try to manually select its area without cutting off any pixels or including any extra.

Strangely, this doesn't seem to be mentioned in the Mac OS X Leopard Pocket Guide.

I use Techsmith Snagit on Windows and it has a similar option, but I like the Mac keyboard shortcut since it's always available without having to start another program. (I could leave Snagit running, but I prefer to not to have too much stuff running all the time.)

Add Email Subscription to Blogger

It's hard to convince some people to use a feed reader like Google Reader. That includes some of my family. There had to be a better way than manually emailing them every time I posted! Besides, it never hurts to give people options to work the way they prefer.

I noticed an email widget on Seth Godin's blog from FeedBlitz. It's free for personal use and turned out to be fairly easy to add.

Here's how:

- go to feedblitz.com

- click on Try FeedBlitz Now! and sign up

- click on Forms and Widgets

- click on Email Subscription Widgets > New Blogger Widget

- enter your email address and the verification, then click on "Install Your Email Subscription Widget On Blogger"

- you may have to log in to Blogger if you're not already, then you should get to:


- choose Add Widget and you should get to your layout


- look for a widget labeled "Email Subscriptions powered..." and drag it to where you want it

- to customize the appearance, choose Edit


- I removed the Title and changed the code slightly. (Note: after removing the title it will show up in the layout as just "HTML/Javascript") Since you're getting the service for free, I figure it's only fair to leave the "Powered by FeedBlitz". Be careful not to change anything else.

- If it looks ok in Preview you can choose Save and you're finished. If you mess something up, just don't click Save.