Ben McCann

Co-founder of Connectifier.
Investor at C3 Ventures.
Google and CMU alum.

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Tips and Tricks

Essential Linux Commands

07/29/2008

Getting started on Linux can be challenging.  Largely because the first time user won’t have any idea how to track down potential problems.  The following Linux commands are essential to get additional information about your system when something goes wrong. Machine info sudo lshw -html > hardware.html – Creates an HTML page showing what hardware Read More

Open Windows Explorer to New Default Directory

07/27/2008

To get Windows Explorer to open to a default directory, you can create a new shortcut and modify the path. For example, the following shortcut path will open a directory of documents on a shared drive using Explorer instead of the normal window: %SystemRoot%\explorer.exe /e,S:\Documents

Change the NetBeans Default JDK

03/04/2008

A client sent me some code today to update. He was using the NetBeans, so I downloaded the IDE and fired it up to open the project he’d sent me. Unfortunately, the project wouldn’t compile because he’d written the code in Java 6 while NetBeans was using Java 5. I couldn’t find a NetBeans menu Read More

Suppressing Compile Warnings with Java Annotations

02/23/2008

If you’ve used Java 1.5 Generics much then you’re probably familiar with the following compile warning: “Type safety: The expression of type List needs unchecked conversion to conform to List<String>” or similar. It turns out there’s a rather simple solution with annotations to ignore this problem: @SuppressWarnings(“unchecked”) A couple other possible uses of the annotation Read More

Screenshots of Scrolling Web Pages

02/11/2008

Have you ever wanted to take a screenshot of a web page that won’t fit on a single page?  I wanted to do that for a client today and found a handy utility that will do it for you.  TechSmith’s SnagIt makes the process far easier that taking multiple screenshots and stitching the panorama together Read More

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