Many programs are able to turn a real photo into a painting-like picture. The results are usually more or less good. But recently I found a nice piece of software that does a little more.

Dynamic Auto-Painter created by Mediachance uses a picture, be it a photo or some graphics, as template to draw on a canvas. You can choose from many different paint styles, change a few parameters, and the rest almost happens automatically. The styles include Aquarell, Pencil and even many inspired by real painters like Monet or Klimt.

Here’s an example. First the original photo I used.

A Door, the original photo, Tuscany, Italy.

And the painting created by using the style FeltTip with more than 1.000.000 paint strokes.

A Door, Tuscany, Italy.

I love this. If you want to try by yourself there’s a trial version available. Have fun.

If you ever get the following error message while using the Eclipse IDE

An internal error occurred during: "Items filtering".
Class file name must end with .class

if you ie. try to use the “Open Type…” dialog, then the following solution might help.

1. close the IDE
2. find the /.metadata/.plugins/org.eclipse.jdt.core/ folder and delete all *.index files
3. in the same folder, also delete the file savedIndexNames.txt
4. start the Eclipse

Everything should be working again. The error message was most likely caused by a corrupt index file.

There we are, Happy New Year and welcome 2010!

We spent the days in Denmark with some friends at the North Sea. It has been some nice days even though I was a little sick. The weather was cold but many times the sun was shining so we could go for a walk.

I didn’t take many photos but I put some work into the few of them. You can find them in my little gallery.

It’s a bit difficult to change the Send-To in Windows 7 because the folder where the links are stored is slightly hidden. But there’s a shortcut.

Simply enter shell:sendto in the address bar (where the current path is displayed) of a Windows Explorer window or in the “Run…” dialog to jump to the folder where the links are stored. Here you can add new links as you want or delete/edit existing ones.

In Windows 7 you can change the background image of the logon screen without any 3rd party programs or dirty hacks. Here’s a detailed description how to do it. Enjoy.

My wife was missing a functionality in Windows 7 she used in XP previously. After you executed a Windows Explorer search (top-right search box) you get the results. Now in XP you had an option in the context menu to open the parent folder of the found file. Choosing this option opened a new Explorer window showing the given folder.

Now in Windows 7 there’s a similar option, Open Path (something like this, “Dateipfad öffnen” in my german version). If you choose this option the folder will be opened as above but in the same window. Now the trick, to get the resulting folder opened in a new window, it to hold down the Shift key while clicking the context menu option. That’s it.

There goes the chance to preorder Windows 7 for a nice price: 50 EUR for Home Premium here in Germany. For such a price I thought “Why not …” as I heard mostly positive comments about it and because I’ve always been eager to try out the next Windows version.

But … well, on Amazon.de it took a few minutes and they were out of stock. Alternate.de lasted a bit longer, but it seems there were so many people trying to get an order in that the shop was down in between.

I missed out, bad luck. I did not expect such a rush. Anyhow, I’m not in a rush.

I was looking for software that makes burning of CDs and DVDs a bit more comfortable. It should be easy to use and should be able to save the file compilations. Just basic requirements, and not more. Not a huge software package where I have no need for half of its features.

I tried around half a dozen programs and there was always something I disliked. Finally I came across BurnAware. It’s easy to use and does what it’s supposed to do and not more.

And it’s free!

So far I found only one thing I dislike. It seems you can’t save the file list of Audio CDs. While you can save MP3/data file lists, for Audio CDs there are simply the menu items missing …

It might be a bit early but I could’nt wait to try the new Firefox 3.5. So far I like it, and it feels a bit faster. Most of the add-ons I use still work including the “Office 2007 Black” theme that integrates well with Microsoft Windows XP Zune theme or Windows Vista.

I came across one thing about Hibernate and its logging of SQL statements to the console. I was working on some old code which still uses Hibernate 2.x and I was pretty annoyed that Hibernate always logs the SQL statements to System.out if you set the hibernate.show_sql property to true.

But Hibernate can do better. It also logs the SQL statements to the logging framework of your choice, you just have to enable the right logging category, ie. in log4j.properties:

log4j.logger.org.hibernate.SQL=DEBUG

or for older versions

log4j.logger.net.sf.hibernate.SQL=DEBUG

Now Hibernate will log the SQL statements to your favourite log file (or what you set up) so you can scroll unhurriedly through the millions of statements that were let loose ;-)