A tool for unpacking multiple archives and other ramblings

I've always wondered why torrents are packed into multiple archives, sometimes even archives inside other archives. Anyway, I've got fed up with all the unpacking routines, especially after downloading several seasons of something that has each episode in an individual folder containing 20 rar or zip files. So, after one evening of coding this nightmare is now over.

Here is the screenshot of the stupidly named tool (click to visit project page):


It was also a good reason to try out new version of NetBeans. I still hate GUI builders, however for small "write and forget" kind of projects like Multi Unpacker it's a fairly good choice. However NetBeans is still slow and unresponsive in comparison with Eclipse.

So far Multi Unpacker is for Windows only, however it's a spare evening away from becoming cross-platform (and you are welcome to join the project). Too bad my MacBook broke down completely, so Macs will most probably not get any special treatment... This is also bad news for Hawkscope, unless someone is willing to donate me an old Mac? :)

Things you can do in weekend

You can take a trip to nature, you can visit your friends. You can also cowboy-code a small game.

Cheatsheet: Unicode characters for buttons and GUI elements

Before drawing your own graphics for various GUI buttons, you could try finding a Unicode character that represents the thing you want to do. For instance, up/down arrows can be made with 25B2 (▲) and 25BC (▼).

Here are some pictures with Unicode characters that you can use to build GUIs. First a quick guide to using these:



Now, the cheatsheets:











These were captured from a tool named Korais.

You can download these images in a single PDF file: unicode.gui.cheatsheet.pdf

Symbolic links in Windows

Surprisingly, all the good Windows features are hidden, undocumented and hard to find. It took me nearly a decade to accidentally find out that Windows has symbolic links. They are called NTFS Junction Points. However their support is limited to directory links, and the usage is a bit weird.

Oh, and you have to install Windows Resource Kit to get the functionality. You can download it from any of these locations:

• http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=9D467A69-57FF-4AE7-96EE-B18C4790CFFD&displaylang=en
• http://www.petri.co.il/download_windows_xp_reskit_tools.htm

The command you want is linkd. Let's take it for a spin.



The sandbox contains a directory named original with text.txt inside.

To create a symbolic link named symlinked that points to original, the command is linkd symlinked original. In POSIX it would be ln -s original symlinked.



When calling dir, symlinked shows as "junction". The other behavior is like a plain folder. In explorer you cannot tell the difference between the two.



To delete the symlink use rmdir, because del will attempt to remove the files from original directory.

Oracle buys Sun

For a moment I thought this was a late April 1 joke, but obviously it's not. Oracle is buying Sun. It should have been IBM... The worst case of this impact is that Java is doomed to become an enterprise drone database integration language and MySQL is... Well... Simply F*cked.

Hopefully Oracle will keep their hands away from core Java (SE) and the JVM, otherwise it will be time to change camps.