My Nokia 6300 behaves like a flash or thumb drive when I connect it to a computer using an USB cable. I think this should be standard functionality nowadays. Cellphones are replacing the Filofax and MP3 players. I can read mail on my cellphone, take pictures and movies. It contains an 4GB memory stick, sometimes even more. So why do I need to carry this silly thumbdrive with me?
Cowbell++;
I just came across this great post about creating captivating content. The punchline: It’s not about getting the scoop, it’s about finding the cowbell and amplifying it.
More funny cowbell references:
- Alex Johnson’s version the popular playstation game.
- The wikipedia page on the cowbell sketch
- The Cowbell project
- And… The More Cowbell app for your iPhone (rock on!)
If you’ll excuse me, I’m going to “explore the studio space”. No, really. 🙂
Apple I Basic Reconstructed
Feast your eyes on this:
0000000 4c b0 e2 ad 11 d0 10 fb ad 10 d0 60 8a 29 20 f0 0000010 23 a9 a0 85 e4 4c c9 e3 a9 20 c5 24 b0 0c a9 8d 0000020 a0 07 20 c9 e3 a9 a0 88 d0 f8 a0 00 b1 e2 e6 e2 0000030 d0 02 e6 e3 60 20 15 e7 20 76 e5 a5 e2 c5 e6 a5
It is the first 64 bytes of the Apple I Basic, as reconstructed from tape by Michael Steil. You can read all about how he did this on his blog. A nice read for the people out there who can still remember putting tapes with strange sounds on it into the computer.
Laptop Stolen? See who did it…
In this strange world, people can’t seem to leave your stuff alone. All the electronic gadgets of today are too attractive to the lowlife of this world. So what do you do if somebody swipes your laptop? You take a few pictures of him, and trace his IP address!
No Exclamation Please
Some developers nowadays still think that putting an exclamation mark in their log entries adds to the visibility of their entry. When other developers notice this, they will add even more exclamation marks so their log entries are even more visible. I compiled a few examples of bad log entries and some pointers for you to improve your log entries.
The Process
When working at a Software Company, every now and then you need to do requirements workshops. You can’t imagine how close the following video comes to the truth. Thanks to Seth’s blog.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kU9YeOQm3Y0]
The Manualist
There’s a funny comercial on Dutch television which says that you should be paying too much for all the rubbish you download on the internet. Here’s a nice example of stuff you don’t want to pay too much for 🙂
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v0bKq3x74UE]
It may look silly, but this guy actually had to be practicing a lot to get to this (Mario) level.
Spring SystemPropertyInitializingBean
When using POI in any of your projects, and the application you’re building is a web application, you probably have it running on a Windows machine. If not, you know all about the struggle with the “headless mode” environment setting to tell the JVM how to handle graphics rendering.
I always like to keep my applications as clean as possible to the users. The system administrator is also a user of the software (during installation at least). So I wanted the application to set the environment properties itself, In this case, I built a nice little Spring bean to handle this. The solution is so simple, that it is almost a brilliant display of what Spring can solve for you. Suddenly, all these environment setting problems turned into a simple Spring configuration problem. Here’s how:
Ibatis 2.2 Ignores XML encoding
At my company, we’re using Ibatis to do operations on Oracle databases. As most of our software is designed to be international, we keep our XML files in UTF-8 encoding. Recently we discovered that Ibatis had some trouble parsing the XML files when we were using diacritics in them. As it turns out, Ibatis 2.2 actually ignores the “UTF-8” setting in the XML file header altogether.
This was actually reported as an issue at apache’s issue tracker, and fixed in Ibatis release 2.3 and upward. In the meantime, if you can not swich to a new release because of tight deadlines and no time for regression tests, you can set the file.encoding property to UTF-8, because then Ibatis will parse the XML in the correct encoding.
Tomcat, UTF-8 and the RequestDumperValve
A week ago, we encountered a funny problem where our Tapestry 3.0 application seemed to screw up the encoding of form posts. Every time we tried to post a form with diacritics in the input fields, the data got mangled before reaching the application code.
As it turned out, somebody had turned on the RequestDumperValve in the Tomcat configuration file. The request dumper does not only dump the request, but is also kind enough to mangle the data before handing it over to the servlet for further processing: