Migration in progress

Currently migrating content from Blogger, please excuse the chaos. Excerpts and pagination should now be (mostly) correct, a few other useability improvements are still in progress.

  • 2013-05-09 15:42

    The dumpStack code monster - alive and scary

    Tracing through some critical code in a core application I stumbled across the following:

  • 2013-03-26 12:33

    Missing the A in Asynchronous - Part 1

    Few things are more irritating in software development than when people use a kludge rather than taking the time to implement a properly designed and robust solution. The peeve I am exercising today relates to the code snippet that follows

  • 2012-07-12 11:10

    Ignored EJB3 @Column name attribute

    I am working on an EJB3 project after a few months on other work and I ran into a small issue with the EJB3 @Column name attribute. The attribute is meant to allow the mapping of a column to a different name in an entity. If your database table has an unusable (or just unfriendly) column name you can map it to a more logical field name in the entity.

  • 2012-06-08 07:28

    Getting intranet website authentication wrong

    Website usability is as important for internal sites as for publicly accessible sites, yet for some reason the corporate whip-crackers are willing to accept substandard implementations when only their employees are being forced to use a service. The points below are problems in a leave management system provided by a major international company. It is unclear whether this international company or their local implementation team is responsible for the usability idiocy but here are some of the more annoying design problems.

  • 2012-06-07 11:11

    Bash script to extract dependencies from Java WebStart

    A quick script to retrieve all the WebStart artifacts from a JNLP file and generate a corresponding classpath

  • 2012-04-12 06:59

    Calypso v12 API changes - Disconnecting a client from the DataServer

    In previous versions of Calypso the following code would have worked as expected:

  • 2012-01-31 05:56

    Spot the defect - XML string manipulation

    So I have been a bit lazy about posting recently, time to look at a defect found in some production code.

  • 2011-09-27 17:10

    Bash script to extract a range of revision diffs

    A quick Bash script hack to extract all CVS/SVN diffs from a range of revisions.