When you are developing GUI components you may want to create some nice bean customizers and property editors for them. But how do you debug them? The NetBeans developers may smile at this, knowing that there is a much better way, but I don't so smile away...

The trick is to start a new NetBeans instance in debugging mode. This is a built in feature of NetBeans module projects so we first need a simple NetBeans module. It doesn't have to do anything so you can create it in less than a minute using the New Project wizard:

When you have entered a value into a form, Firefox will remember it and suggest it the next time you use the form. When such a value is incorrect or for some other reason not relevant anymore you probably want to delete it. Very simple but not very well documented. Here is how it is done:

After setting up my new Dell Precision T1600 with OpenSUSE 11.4 I found that I could no longer run VMware. Got a message about some NMI problem and bug # 2293. I searched for a solution and found the following article apparently describing my problem:

http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cm…

When I installed Open SuSE 11.4 yesterday I thought that the fonts used in GTK applications like Firefox and Thunderbird were really ugly. In my KDE settings I have specified that I want it to use my KDE fonts in GTK applications but this setting seems to have no effect. To fix this I installed gnome-control-center from the repository and changed the fonts to 8 point Liberation Sans and Liberation Mono. Now the GTK applications look just as good as the KDE ones.

The excellent BitNami LAMP stack contains its own MySQL, which is started automatically and used by PHP. If you for some reason want to use the MySQL that is installed in your host system you can do the following changes to your stack configuration:

Step 1 - Prevent the stack control script from starting MySQL

Edit the file ctlscript.sh in your LAMP stack root directory. and change the line

MYSQL_SCRIPT=$INSTALLDIR/mysql/scripts/ctl.sh

to

Since I couldn't get the KeyMan utility that came with my Cherry keyboard to work with SuSE 10.3 I had problems getting the Cut, Copy and Paste keys to work. I tried using the KDE KHotKey service instead, and by defining input actions that map these keys to Ctrl+X, Ctrl+C and Ctrl+V I could use them in most applications.

Starting with Java 1.6 though, this isn't enough. Seems like Java can't handle mappings made for KHotKeys. To get the keys to work with Java applications I had to do two things: