I can’t believe I never knew about this!

In Eclipse choose menu option Window -> preferences. Then check the option ‘Show Heap Status’. A new item will appear within the window status bar which shows the amount of heap space currently being used. The cool bit is that there’s a button that allows you to run the garbage collector to free up some heap space.

It comes in handy if you find Eclipse starts getting slow when it approaches the maximum allowed limit of heap space.

There has been some debate recently on the merits of using XML as a means of framework configuration.

I think XML has both positive and negative aspects to it. I came across this interesting blog post:

XML-based J2EE frameworks considered harmful

There are some interesting points in there, some only relevant to Java / J2EE but others cross over into ColdFusion.

I stumbled upon a couple of Visual Basic apps that I wrote just after I started programming in 2001:

http://www.a1vbcode.com/author.asp?name=James+Netherton

I was learning VB at college and fiddling around with windows API stuff.

The first application demonstrates window enumeration and lets you manipulate all of the windows that are currently loaded.

The second application was supposed to be a utility that allowed you to add commonly used applications to a list which could be accessed via the systray. There’s a bad bug in it which means it crashes when it first runs!

Happy to say I’ve learned from my mistakes 6 years on