Tag: programming

Hex color picker for OSX

2008-12-24 rolfje No Comments

If you’re working on some source code and you quickly need to insert a hexadecimal color code for a color you currently have on your screen, then here is a neat little trick I found:

First, install Hex Color Picker by Waffle software. It will add an extra option to the built-in OSX color picker to show you the selected color in Hex.

To reach the color picker, you usually start up any application which uses the standard OSX color picker and just choose “choose color”. What you can also do, is have the OSX color picker behave as a standalone application in 3 simple steps:

Read More “Hex color picker for OSX” »

Apple, Software

Programmer Quotes

2008-12-19 rolfje No Comments

On StackOverflow, there is a question asking for the greatest programmer quotes you know. In the top 3 quotes are the following two quotes which I think hold much truth:

“Always code as if the guy who ends up maintaining your code will be a violent psychopath who knows where you live.” – Rick Osborne

“Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place. Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are, by definition, not smart enough to debug it.” – Brian Kernighan

These two quotes are briliantly summing up the usual rant I always use. “if my phone rings at 3 a.m. for a prio 1 production issue, I want to be able to easily read the code. And I’m not going to be awake or cheerful at that time of night.” I guess at that time of night, it’s easy to awaken the violent psychopath in me, and so it better not be “smart” code. CVS blame support anybody?

Software

J-Fall 2008

2008-11-13 rolfje No Comments

Last wednesday I was at J-Fall 2008, a fairly large event for Java programmers in the Netherlands. This event is organized by NLJUG. You can read some of my notes on the different sessions in my public evernote.

Transporting Oracle CHARs over a dblink

2008-11-04 rolfje 1 Comment

At work, we’ve got two Oracle databases and a Java web application. One of the tasks of the web application is to copy tables over from one database to the other. Last week we ran into a funny problem which turns out to be an Oracle bug.

I’ve posted a question about this last week on stackoverflow.com but it seems that not many people are affected by this particular problem, or at least not many people know the answer to this particular little problem. We set out to tackle this and we did.

Read More “Transporting Oracle CHARs over a dblink” »

Software

The Three Great Virtues of a Programmer

2008-10-05 rolfje 1 Comment

I ran across this wiki page which has a nice piece on the virtues of a good programmer. I found it so recognizable that I decided to copy it over for you to enjoy:

“We will encourage you to develop the three great virtues of a programmer: laziness, impatience, and hubris.” — Larry Wall, Programming Perl (1st edition), O’Reilly and Associates

Laziness
The quality that makes you go to great effort to reduce overall energy expenditure. It makes you write labor-saving programs that other people will find useful, and document what you wrote so you don’t have to answer so many questions about it. Hence, the first great virtue of a programmer. Also hence, this book. See also impatience and hubris. (p.609)

Impatience
The anger you feel when the computer is being lazy. This makes you write programs that don’t just react to your needs, but actually anticipate them. Or at least pretend to. Hence, the second great virtue of a programmer. See also laziness and hubris. (p.608)

Hubris
Excessive pride, the sort of thing Zeus zaps you for. Also the quality that makes you write (and maintain) programs that other people won’t want to say bad things about. Hence, the third great virtue of a programmer. See also laziness and impatience. (p.607)

(The original context can be found at
http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?LazinessImpatienceHubris)

Fun, Software

Spring SystemPropertyInitializingBean

2008-07-23 rolfje 8 Comments

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:

Software

Hacking Your Way Through Codebases

2008-07-02 rolfje 1 Comment

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”.

Software

Migrate CVS repository to GForge

2008-03-05 rolfje 13 Comments

At work we were testdriving SourceForge Enterprise Edition. It is a great system to keep all your project information, source code, documents, bug reports and changes together, and linked. As you may have noticed, the pricing model of the Enterprise Edition is a well kept secret on the site. Our management bargained with the Colabnet people, but the costs (or TCO) were way to steep to keep SourceForge as our main system.

Another product which promises to do almost the same thing is GForge Advanced Server. GForge originally started as a fork of the (then open source) SourceForge code, and is not as advanced as SourceForge is today. But their pricing is more to the likings of our financial people, and we decided it has a good tradeoff between function and price.

Having said all this, we need to migrate a few projects from SourceForge to GForge. If you’d like to know how to do this, this article is for you. It describes how to get your CVS repository into GForge in 6 steps.

Software

GForge CVS/SSH Authentication Failures

2008-02-26 rolfje No Comments

Recently we had a problem connecting to our GForge CVS through SSH. We added the public RSA key to the GForge user, but because of wrong configuration on the client we tried to connect a couple of times with the wrong key. After a while the GForge CVS will return the following error:

Received disconnect from <GForge ip>: 2: Too many authentication failures for <username>

To solve this, simple ask a GForge administrator to edit the GForge user, and press the “Save” button without changing anything. You will be able to reconnect immediately after the administrator has pressed “Save”.

Software

Link CVS/SVN commit to GForge Tracker Item

2008-02-21 rolfje 3 Comments

Today I spent some time figuring out what the exact format of the CVS comment is when I want to link a commit to a GForge tracker item. I’ll try to explain it a bit simpler:

We have GForge installed at work. We use GForge to manage a software project for a customer.
The customer reports a bug in the Tracker of GForge. This bug gets assigned to me.
I read the code, find the problem and fix it. Now I want to commit the fix to the GForge integrated CVS, and have it automatically linked to the Tracker item for future reference.

I spent 30 minutes Googling for an example, and did find a lot of info, but no real usage examples. The info says “Include the tracker item id in the commit comment”. I spent anther 10 to 20 minutes trying to figure out if this meant just the number, the number with the prefix, or brackets, or both. To save more people from searching, you should copy-paste the complete tracker id from the tracker item screen.

Software