I've been recording all my screen casts with SnapzPro and then re-recording them with Camtasia Studio on Windows to be able to edit them. This is to say the least, extremely tedious.

Yesterday I stumbled into ScreenFlow, an all-in one screen recording and video editing application with very cool features like call outs, video actions, key press display, etc. You can even capture audio from multiple sources and record your iSight at the same time as doing your screen cast. Afterwards you can combine them by manipulating the individual tracks and for example get a cool narrator call out that sits in a corner of the screen cast.

I also like their approach towards the recording operation itself. You don't have to constraint yourself by deciding which area of the screen has to be recorded beforehand. With ScreenFlow you just record everything and crop it in the editor afterwards. They are using a custom algorithm that only records changes that appeared on the screen, so even my 2560x1600 resolution was recorded together with audio and the iSight video, without any sign of a hick-up. I love it!

It might be a tad on the expensive side ($99), but considering the functionality that you get, I don't think it's exaggerated.

After many months of editing and fine-tuning, Manning finally published Laszlo in Action, the first comprehensive guide towards OpenLaszlo besides the reference documentation.

I received a final copy through DHL yesterday. Norman Klein and Max Carlson really did a great job explaining the technology behind this vast RIA framework, and it has been a pleasure to review several chapters of the earlier drafts.

I'm sure this book will make it much easier for people to develop with OpenLaszlo as it clarifies some of the lesser known intricacies.

After several months of constant pain in my back, I finally decided to get scans made of my spine. Turns out I have a double lumbar disc hernia (L4-L5 left and L5-S1 right). Luckily they are minor, so there not even talk of needing an operation.

For the hernias to go away, I need to rest. I'm supposed to lie flat on my back all the time with my legs folded in an angle. This should reduce the tension in my back and allow it to cure by itself. This position makes it however very difficult - almost impossible - to program while holding a laptop. I searched the web for appropriate laptop stands and stumbled into 'The Lappyvator', a build-it-yourself project that is easy to execute. The only downside seems to me that your arms are in a vertical position and don't rest on anything at all, which is bound to be very tiring. Luckily, I use the AlphaGrip as my keyboard, so I don't need to touch the laptop, eliminating this problem.

Now I'm able to work regular hours and totally rest my back. I haven't tried it yet, but it also seems like an awesome approach to watch movies or series in bed with the laptop.

Below are the pictures of my own lappyvator. I've built it so that I can easily remove the horizontal feet and take it with my in a suitcase when I travel: at last comfortable computing in hotel rooms!

It's been a while since I wrote some raw JDBC code. I didn't remember that it was so tedious to manually close a series of PreparedStatement objects and make sure that any exception was properly handled and reported.

Note that the ARM blocks or BGGA closures proposals don't make this easier since this cleanup should be done after the prepared statements have been used for a while in various other methods, it doesn't automatically have to be done at the end of a lexical scope.

This is what I came up with.

Of course, you could write an alternative implementation that creates some kind of repository for the prepared statements in a map and then provide a method that closes them all by going over the entries of the map while preserving the exceptions in a similar manner. Any other suggestions or comments for this to be done better?