Listing SOLR Collections, Java

Every now and then I need to get the list of collections in a SOLR cloud instance from a Java program. The docs seemed opaque on how to do it, so:

CollectionAdminResponse response = new    CollectionAdminRequest.List().process(server);
ArrayList cols =      (ArrayList)response.getResponse().get("collections");

Changes to .gitignore - Updating the Repository

I frequently start a git project without a .gitignore or often add entries to a .gitignore later. And then I have to update the repository to remove entries that match those entries. Here's the sequence I use:

git rm -r --cached .

 and then 

git add .git commit -m "..."git push...

HTML Flash Messages

Occasionally, and especially during the debugging phase of a development effort, I like to be able to create a message that appears in the web page on which I'm working, one that disappears after a few seconds. A flash message.

In the past, I've accomplished this in a variety of ways, including timeouts and so on. And some frameworks (Tapestry, e.g.) provide this kind of thing from the server as a built-in mechanism. But I'm just interested in doing this from within javascript.

Anyway, I was recently fooling around with prototypes and extending the javascript String object, and it occurred to me that a String extension to flash a message would be trivial to do, epsecially with JQuery to handle the timing parts. So I wrote this:

String.prototype.flash = function(){
    $(".flash").html(this).fadeIn("fast");
    setTimeout(function(){
        $(".flash").fadeOut("slow");
    }, 3500);
}

Coupled with a

element in the HTML in which to display the message

I am able to write flash messages off typical JS Strings:

("This is COOOOOL...").flash();

Which will show that message inside the DIV, then get rid of it after 3.5 seconds. I could extend it to parameterize the time and even the fade effects. But sometimes simpler is bester.

https://gist.github.com/scarton/98aa2588f1e66e022f64

Creating an MD5 Hash From a String in Java

Using the MessageDigest Class, here's code to create an MD5 Hash of a String:

public static String makeAuthKey(String k) {

    MessageDigest hasher = MessageDigest.getInstance("MD5");

    byte[] kbh = hasher.digest(kb);

    String bs = new BigInteger(1,kbh).toString(16);

    return bs;

}