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:
Conform Specs is not enough
Like any good software company, when a project starts, we sit down with the client, and talk about what we can do to help. The result is usually a more or less complete SRS (Software Requirement Specification). The SRS serves as input to the design fase (we usually already have an architecture sketch when the SRS is made) and those two documents are used to brief the developers and keep everybody posted on what to build. If all done correctly, this should then result in a perfect piece of software right?
Hacking Your Way Through Codebases
I found a nice blog post which describes how it is after you leave school and start programming for a real company. You discover that programming is more like 80% reading and 20% coding.
Read the article at the Tired Architect’s blog titled “Hacking Your Way Through Codebases”.
Migrate from Windows to OSX
My wife got tired of her Windows/Compaq laptop. So 2 weeks ago, she decides to go out and buy a 15″ macbook pro (an excelent choice I might add). She was a bit worried about getting used to the new machine, but decided to take the risk. After no more than 3 days, with surprisingly little help, she figured out how to do everything she did on the Windows machine, and even installed her own software.
The last thing to do was to migrate all the stuff from her old Windows machine to her new “lappie” (yes, she actually gave this one a nickname 🙂 ). Although Microsoft tries hard to keep Outlook Express users locked in, I did find a tool that solved the problem completely for me.
WWDC 2008 Keynote video
I was watching the WWDC2008 text feeds yesterday (like the one from Engadget), and today the WWDC2008 video is online. It’s always better to watch this than to read an interpreted twitter feed. Today it was a bit of a challenge to view it because a lot of people are probably with me. I always set Quicktime to use the HTTP protocol over port 80, because that forces all the network packets to arrive in the correct order, and does not allow dropped packets.
Clone Windows HD on Apple OSX machine
Last week, lightning struck at my parents apartment building (literaly). Other damages aside, my dad’s PC also died.
The guy at the PC repair shop warned my dad that “we may need to wipe the HD, do you have a backup”? Ofcourse, all data was backed up daily and “off-site” at my house so all important data was safe. But just in case, we wanted to make an exact disk image of the drive, so that we could easily restore it when the PC returns from the store