Disk Recovery

My daughter's XP machine started losing its mind over the weekend (running very slowly and behaving randomly), and as part of my attempt to fix things I managed to lose the NTFS partition on her hard disk.

Then I found TestDisk , which did a great job of copying "lost" directories off the hard-disk, as well as recovering the partition.

Highly recommended.

PS: Boo-hiss at GParted that messed up that partition table in the first place :-)

Bean Mapping

While playing with GWT and GAE I discovered the need for Bean mapping, so that beans built via the DataNucleus JDO implementation can get serialised across to GWT without throwing a com.google.gwt.user.client.rpc.SerializationException associated with org.datanucleus.store.appengine.query.StreamingQueryResult.

Normally I like DTO layers anyway, because I want to control the aspects of the Domain that make it through to the client. I've built crappy reflection-based mappers of my own, but have since discovered some nice ones:

Dozer

This is a simpler implementation, which is allegedly faster than Gilead.

Gilead

This has nice integration with GWT, Hibernate and other frameworks, which should speed development, but will discourage use of DTOs that differ from the domain objects.

Dozer feels like more my style right now :-)