Skip to main content

Posts

Showing posts from 2013

The comprehensive (and free) DVD / Blu-ray ripping Guide!

Note: If you've read this guide already (or when you've read it) then going through all of it each time you want to rip something can be a bit of a pain, especially when you just need your memory jogging on one particular section. Because of that, I've put together a quick "cheat sheet" here  which acts as a handy reference just to jog your memory on each key step. I've seen a few guides around on ripping DVDs, but fewer for Blu-rays, and many miss what I believe are important steps (such as ensuring the correct foreign language subtitles are preserved!) While ripping your entire DVD collection would have seemed insane due to storage requirements even a few years ago, these days it can make perfect sense. This guide doesn't show you a one click approach that does all the work for you, it's much more of a manual process. But the benefits of putting a bit more effort in really do pay off - you get to use entirely free tools with no demo versions, it...

Annoyingly named methods

There's several annoyances I have with method names in the Java API - some are well documented as being ridiculous early design decisions that, well, couldn't be reverted without breaking backwards compatibility. Boolean.getBoolean() is a classic example for instance that really doesn't do what you'd expect. However, there's another which is more recent that I haven't really heard complained about anywhere else. It's not a deal breaker by any stretch of the imagination, but it is a bad name, and it is mildly annoying. I'm talking about the removeAll() method present on collection classes. It takes a collection of items to remove from that particular collection - pretty standard stuff. But to me, that should be called removeEach(),  removeAllOf(), or perhaps even just remove(), overloaded with the standard method that takes one parameter (to me the latter seems like the most logical choice.) The problem I have with removeAll() is that it sounds like...