Users and testers will find bugs you are sure you have already fixed. Sometimes they use the wrong version, sometimes your fix is not as good as you thought. Either way a tiny unique version number visible in the app can save you hours of work. Incrementing the version number of your project for every [...]

I just read, or rather skimmed, the book, called Everyday Scripting with Ruby and it is awful. I had high expectations. I was expecting something like Perl for System Administration, where you right away get into hard core Perl scripting. This book is nothing like that! It is a really basic introduction to Ruby, and [...]

Also known as the “Divine Quotient”, the Golden Ratio was given an almost magical meaning during the renaissance, but it’s actually much older than that. Leonardo DaVinci used it. Euclid used it. It was supposedly discovered by Pythagoras. So, what is it? It’s very simple. Take a length and divide it into two parts: a [...]

I’m currently working on a web project based on Wicket. In this web project there was a request for a web based word processor. TinyMce fits the bill perfectly and as it happens is also integrated in Wicket. Lucky me! Another request required me to make my own plugin for TinyMce. Only, it turned out [...]

When I started coding JavaFX I quickly found that the great bind mechanism doesn’t work together very well with my legacy Java code. In fact, it doesn’t work at all. In my case I wanted to reuse my domain objects and just add a fancy user interface on top of it. This happen to be [...]

Up until now this WordPress blog has been hosted by DreamHost, a company with a good reputation and a solid knowledge in hosting. Unfortunately, the server we’ve been located on, Trafficante, have lately had some problems with stability and performance and DreamHost have also had some MySQL stability issues. This, plus the fact that we’ve [...]

When I tried to upgrade Groovy from 1.6.1 to 1.6.2 using MacPorts, it failed with an OutOfMemoryError. I managed to get it to build using some manual fixing in the build file. I’ll explain what I did in this blog. This was the result that I got: $ sudo port upgrade groovy —> Building groovy [...]

I recently ran into an interesting Groovy feature when demonstrating the strengths of the MarkupBuilder. As you probably know, parenthesis in a Groovy method call are optional, unless it’s a no-args call. In that case the parenthesis are needed in order to distinguish the call from a property. However, leaving out parenthesis in a Builder is asking for trouble. I’ll show you why.