I have been writing a couple of reports recently and took the time to start learning LaTeX and BibTex (through Lyx and JabRef admittedly).  When dealing with references some resources like the ACM provide BibTex citations which you can copy and paste into your database, other’s like SpringerLink unfortunatly don’t.  This led to me descovering a tool from University of Sydney which automaticly generates BibTex records for SpringerLink for you.  They even provide a bookmarklet to make things even easier.

Preparation

The NC10 comes set up with three partitions, the first is a hidden area where the recovery software is installed, followed by a NTFS partition which Windows XP is installed on and a second NTFS partition which is used to store backups with Samsung’s backup software.  To make room for Windows 7 I resized the backup partition with a live USB Linux distro called GParted.  Because I was installing Windows 7 onto a new device I wasn’t worried about taking a backup, but you should take a backup before doing this normally.

One thing of note is that I made the partition almost the same size and the data on it, and now I am continually getting popups in Windows saying the drive is very full, so it’s prob worth leaving about 25% extra free space in the backup partition when you shrink it.

Installation

The NC10 like other devices in it’s class does not have a CD drive and I don’t own a USB CD drive, so I had to go with installing it off of a USB stick.  This was much easier than I expected thanks to a great walk through I found over at dotnetwizard.net.  I have heard people saying how much quicker Windows 7 installs that Vista, but it didn’t feel that fast to me.

Problems

I could not get Windows7 on the NC10 to connect to my wifi connection, but this seems to be a problem with our wifi as aposed to the NC10 as it works everywhere else.  The Ethernet on the other hand did not work as there are no Windows 7 drivers for this device on Windows Update.  The Windows Vista driver from Marvell’s worked fine however.

The other main issue is the reduced battery life, under Windows XP doing casual web browsing etc. I can get almost 6 hours before I need to charge, under Windows 7 it is closer to 4.

Windows 7 on the NC10

The good bits.

The new Areo effects work well, and only stutter under very high load.  In-fact other than slightly higher memory usage running Windows 7 doesn’t feel any worse than running Windows XP, and this can easily be remedied by upgrading the memory from 1Gb to 2Gb.

Finally

I think I am going to continue using Windows 7 on the NC10, unless I know I am goign to have a very long day away from the charger.  I would like to thank Ade Miller for his excelent blog post which really helped me in setting up Windows 7 on my NC10.

Junit

Unit tests are both the saviour and ultimate bane of modern java programmers.  Very few people would argue that they are a bad idea, and that they improve the quality of code but for those new to writing unit tests are often lost on where to start. In this post I am going to talk about unit testing private methods, and what is good and bad about doing so.

Some Theory.

In the example below ClassWithPrivateMethod contains the private method someMethod which we want to test. To get access to this method for testing we could make it public/protected; but that would make the classes interface ugly, and give people access to functions that could break the working of the class. We could put the test case inside the class being tested, but this quickly becomes messy. Ideally we want the method to remain private but be accessed from another class. It turns out that private methods are not private, as much as books on Java will tell you they are. Using reflection it is possible to execute private methods as if they were public.

public class ClassWithPrivateMethod {
  private void someMethod(String param) {
    System.out.println(param + " World");
}
}

To call a method with reflection we first need a reference to the method. This is normaly done with Reflection.getMethod, however because the method we want to access is not public we have to use Reflection.getDeclaredMethod. This gives us a handle on the method, but it is unusable because the method is still private. Calling setAccessible(true) on this method object lets us invoke it. The method can now be called via reflection the same way a public method would be. Bellow is a clearer example of a test that simply invokes the private method.

public class Test {
	@Test
	public void test() {
		Method methodToTest =
			classWithPrivateMethod.getClass().
			getDeclaredMethod("someMethod", String.class);
		methodToTest.setAccessible(true);
		methodToTest.invoke(IntancetoInvokeOn, "hello");
	}
}

This technique can be further extrapolated to testing methods which rely one some state of the object which is difficult to achieve in a normal unit test.

public class ClassWithPrivateMethodandFields {
	private int x,y;
	private boolean isPair() {
		return x==y;
	}
}

public class Test {
	@Test
	public void test() {
		Method methodToTest =
			classWithPrivateMethod.getClass().
			getDeclaredMethod("someMethod", String.class);
		methodToTest.setAccessible(true);
 
		Field x = classWithPrivateMethod.getClass()
			.getDeclaredField("x");
		x.setAccessible(true);
 
		Field y = classWithPrivateMethod.getClass()
			.getDeclaredField("y");
		y.setAccessible(true);
 
		methodToTest.invoke(IntancetoInvokeOn, "hello");
	}
}

Finally

This is a powerful tool for testing, but over use can highlight the fact that your interface is not as clean as it could be. I hope this is helpful to people and if you have any ideas or comments please leave them below.

Samsung NC10

1.6 GHz Intel Atom N270 10.2″ 1024×600 Screen 1GB DDR2 802.11b/g Wifi 100/10 Ethernet Bluetooth 160GB hard drive 5,200mAh 6 cell battery

First impressions

The NC10 is a very striking looking netbook.  I have the black model but it is also available in white and blue.  The lid follows the classic Samsung styling of gloss black with chrome style lettering, and the faux chrome of the letting is also present on the hinges and as a stripe which goes around the sides and front of the chassis.  Internally everything is made of matt plastic which won’t pick up finger prints, the lid however picks up grease and fingerprint no matter how hard you try and look after it. The status lights are placed along the front edge in such a way that its possible to see them and their descriptions with the lid either open or closed.  Also along the front edge is a 3/1 memory card reader.  The power button which took me a few seconds to locate, is placed on the side of the NC10 in line with the hinge and is nicely styled to match the faux chrome highlight.

Keyboard / Trackpad

The keyboard at 93% of normal size, is easily usable in fact it hasn’t taken me long to get back up to speed with it.  The only thing of complaint I can find is that the right hand shift button feels too small and to far to the right so I am constantly typing “\” instead of hitting shift.  The feel of the keys is also very good, the keys have enough travel to allow quick typing, and the keys like the rest of the laptop feel very well resilient. The track pad on the other hand is not as well thought out.  It’s a little small for my liking especially once you take the scroll areas into account, but perfectly usable, in part due to the size of the screen.  The Synaptics driver provides a host of options so it is possible to regain some of the space taken up by the scroll areas.  The mouse buttons are of the single rocker variety.

Screen

The screen is very clear, with good viewing angles.  It is readable at lowest brightness, though it does look slightly grainy.  I have yet to try using it outside but the contrast ratio is good.

Battery

The huge 5,200mAh battery gives an outstanding battery life, browsing the net and watching a few vidios I have already got 5 hours out of a single charge.  The large six cell battery does make the laptop heaver than some others in it’s class but the fact that if you can it out for a day without the need for a charger makes up for this.

Slip Case

In the box you get a slip case, though this is rather a token effort.  It is very thin, so will hardly protect the netbook.  It doesn’t even have a clasp, so you will probably want to replace it as soon as possible.

Connectivity

The NC10 has 802.11b/g wireless networking, 10/100 Ethernet and bluetooth.  The 802.11b/g wireless is perfectly adequate for mobile use as this is the standard for most wireless hotspots at the moment, some other netbooks in this league have draft-n adapters, but for the extra cost adding draft-n would have added to this laptop I am glad Samsung left it out.  There is also no mobile internet which would have been useful, as mobile internet dongles are hardly compact, though thanks to the bluetooth support it would be easy enough to use a compatible mobile as a data provider. There are 3 USB ports in two groups which means it’s possible to use two fat USB devices, such as a mobile internet dongle and a memory stick at the same time.  There is also the standard VGA out,  headphone and microphone jacks, and the SD card reader I mentioned before.

Final Thoughts

The NC10 is a very well rounded and usable netbook.  It apears Samsung have really listened to their customers and learnt from this mistakes of the other netboks providers to produce a knockout device which is well ahead of most of it’s competitors in the same price brackit.

New Pixeled Background

The main design is based around one large (60kb) image, so it’s possible to change the look of the site by simply changing or replacing this one image.  So I booted up gimp and loaded the old file to use as a template for my new theme.

Plasma Layer

Next up I added the green slashes of noise which you can see towards the right of the theme.  These were created with the flame filter, if you going to try this just fiddle with the setting until you find something that you like.  Again I colour shifted one of the layers towards green this time by adjusting it’s hue with the Colourise tool.

Fadeout

I added the glass effect banner on the top by again using the linear gradient tool. It is simply three gradients pulled in from the bottom and sides. A trick that I learnt after doing this but that would have been helpful is to create a black rectangle the size of the area you want to work on, you can then make this layer invisible, but if you want to work on only that part of the image again you can use the alpha to selection tool to work on the area again. Alternatively you can create you selection and use the selection to path tool to save the selection, then use the path to selection tool to reselect the area.

Centre Glass Section

I hope some one finds this useful, and if you like the new style for the theme please let me know in the comments bellow.

EclEmma

As you can see I have lots more tests to write, so I better get on with finishing them.  If this post is useful for you, or you have any suggestions please leave a comment.

Example 1: Coverage View

Example 2: EclEmma Code Hi-lighting

Example3: Emma Decorators

My HackTag

One of my friends has pointed me at his latest project over at www.hacktags.org www.ptrtovoid.net called HackTags.  If you remember Geek Codes, this is something like that, a badge to show off your geekyness and promote your favourite open source projects.  The project is still only in early “pre beta” stage, only 48hours of coding upon writing this, so some things are likely to change but the auther Didi is happy to hear any ideas or suggestions about the site.

Google Analytics

Nearly all webmasters have now heard Google Analytics, Google’s website statistics package, so having set this blog up I took the opportunity to try it out.  Setting Analytics up was easy, if you already have an Google account registering for Analytics takes seconds, agree to the usual EULA and enter your website address and your almost ready to go.  Google Analytics uses Javascript to track usage and the next step of setting up the service is adding their script snippet to every page on your site.  Because all I have at the moment is a blog on here, all I had to do was edit one template file and everything was set up.  Note however the analytics page does show data in real time, processing is done in batches once every two hours, which isn’t exactly clear so you have to weight a little while before data starts getting shown.

One thing I have found out is that it’s probably worth setting up filters strait away, else you may get all excited only to find out all your traffic is coming from yourself.  If you have a static IP this is easy just go setting page (link is found just under the google analytics logo on the home page) click edit next to your domain and find the button for “add filter”.  Name your rule, and choose to “exclude all traffic from an ip address”.  You will then need to enter your internet IP  address bellow, in the form “192.168.1.1 ” the back slashes are needed because anything entered in a filter is treated as a regex.  If you are using WordPress you might want to add the following rule as well, to block post previews from the stats too, as these are likely to be all from yourself.

Name: preview
Filter type: Custom - Exclude
Filter Field: Request URI
Filter Pattern: preview=true
Case Senstive: true

I have encluded an example output from the Analytics dashboard to give an idea of some of the information the tool gives you, though with a few more visitores I am sure it would be more interesting.  The report is only an overview of the information avaliable and it is possible to drill down further to find out for example which of your blogs posts people have spend the most time on, as well as being able to view the path people traverse your site with, and the details that people used if they searched for you.

So now with all this information, I can work on getting more viewers to this blog; anything greater than 1 has goto be a win.