NewInstance

Recently I got surprised by following case.
In Java you can declare an array in following valid ways:

String[] strings = new String[] { "foo", "bar" };
// the above is equivalent to the following:
String[] strings = { "foo", "bar" };

So following Java code is perfectly valid:

public class Foo {

public void doSomething(String[] arg) {}

[...]

I am in London for work, and my hotel wants me to pay £ 17 per day for accessing internet. But I found an internet café which is offering Internet connection on a 3G USB stick for £ 19.99 per week ( reload.com 197 Praed Street, Paddington ). The USB stick is from Three, like [...]

Yesterday night I tried to connect the iPod to Linux. I tried some programs but none was working decently; but the good news is that you don't really need any special program "made for iPod" to do this.
For the guys who do not know about iTunes and iPod/iPhone foolishnesses, the problem is that when [...]

I discovered today that in Karmic there is an option to format encrypted usb disks.
But first of all you need to install the support for this feature; from the terminal:

$ sudo apt-get install cryptsetup

When you plug in your USB disk, and mount it, you'll see an icon on your desktop. Right-clicking on it and selecting [...]

Previously I wrote that suspend/resume was not working in Karmic on my MacBook Pro 5.1, and I posted a solution. Now I found a better solution from the Apple Users forum on Ubuntu. The advantage is that with this fix, the suspend/resume is much faster.
First you need to revert the change I suggested previously.
Then... (copied [...]

I updated today from Jaunty to Karmic and, as effect, I had Suspend/Resume/Hibernate broken. But reboot and shutdown works; before with Jaunty the reboot was frequently crashing.
To fix the Suspend/Resume, I modified /boot/grub/menu.lst to add the kernel option acpi=noirq
Example:

title Ubuntu 9.10, kernel 2.6.31-14-generic
uuid 5daec709-2655-4d7c-9968-969143e31fbd
kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.31-14-generic root=UUID=5daec709-2655-4d7c-9968-969143e31fbd ro quiet splash acpi=noirq
initrd /boot/initrd.img-2.6.31-14-generic
quiet

Other problem I found during the distro upgrade:

sound is [...]

I bought my Mac with the "International Keyboard". Which layout should you use on Linux?
The keyboard layout looks like this one:

As far as I know the "USA Macintosh" is the one that fits better, but still you have the §± and `~ keys inverted. To fix this I've added to Gnome Session Startup this [...]

The reverse horizontal scrolling problem is due to some old compatibility quirk on Apple's mouse that was using reversed scroll, and the problematic code is still there in newer kernels. See the bug: 291408.
If your mighty mouse scroll ball is horizontally reversed, it can be solved in this way:

- open file /var/lib/bluetooth/xx:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx/did
- change yy:yy:yy:yy::yy:yy 0002 [...]

Since the 24th of August a new beta of Skype is available.
Some little look and feel changes, contact groups support, nothing really new, except for the native 64bit support. And I hope it will be more stable.
Download it from here: http://www.skype.com/download/skype/linux/
I updated it because the old 32bit version recently is very unstable on my system. [...]

Ram disks are virtual disks that use RAM as super fast storage, with the "side effect" that they are not reboot persistent. Modern computers have a lot of RAM, and sometime one may need a super fast disk storage of a limited size to speed up some disk intensive tasks. On Linux you can mount [...]