If you are working as a consultant, it is sometimes not easy to get proper network access when you are using your customer’s network. The easiest way to solve this problem is to connect via your mobile phone. But, the 3G network is not always the fastest and it would be nice to use the [...]

In Java you have for quite some time had the Future interface for encapsulating an asynchronous calculation. Cocoa has had the abstract NSOperation class to encapsulate asynchronous operations. NSOperation do not have any facilities for returning a result when done as the Future do, you are left to implement this on your own. Which I [...]

The megahertz race is over, and instead we get more execution cores. This means that we as developers must make our applications parallel, in order to take advantage of the new performance. The easiest way to be parallel is to execute tasks in new threads, something that is useful also for lengthy but not resource [...]

I just checked out the old Squid again, the worlds most famous caching proxy. If you direct all your web access through the Squid proxy server, it will cache stuff after the first access. This would simplify for example for labs where fifty people simultaneously begin retrieving stuff from a Maven repo somewhere or downloading [...]

Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) is cheap on-line storage with a Web Service interface. You just log in with your Amazon id, sign up for S3, designate a credit card, and that’s it. You now have access to pretty much unlimited storage space, managed by Amazon. The price is $0.15 per GB-Month of storage used [...]

I just solved a networking problem on my Macs after hours of trying. For the benefit of others, I’ll describe here the problem and the solution. Setup Cable modem from ISP, network cable to a firewall, the private end of the firewall via network cable on to a switch. Pretty basic, I guess. No wireless [...]

After having had severe problems when committing to the Sourceforge Subversion repos, I stumbled upon what appears to be the solution. The problem was that in the middle of a commit, one file or directory would fail with a 403 (permission denied). In desperation, I would chop up the change set and commit little pieces [...]

Google Mail will deliver a mail even though the recipient address ends with ‘+’ and some more text, like john.doe+msn@gmail.com for example. This feature can be used to create an unlimited number of mail addresses that can be used for registration purposes. For example, say that the MSN web site requires your email address for [...]