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 I've been working on a pretty simple program for my dad. It was my present to him for his 65th birthday. It's a program that converts documents written in WordPerfect v.4.2, an old DOS word processor that my dad still uses, into some more modern formats.

Right now, it's pretty basic, and it only outputs to HTML, but I've got a Google Code site set up, and a Java Web Start application, so you can actually run it all pretty easily, assuming you have a JRE installed!

Doing all this was not extremely easy, because to have a webstart application that can read and write files, it has to be signed. Here is a pretty good tutorial explaining how to do it.

Then, for some reason, Google Code does not serve .jnlp files (Java webstart files) with the proper MIME type. Here is a post explaining how you can fix it through svn. (Scroll down to the bottom.)

All this is necessary to make a Java program that can be run by my dad. He's okay with computers, but he's no Bill Jobs.