I finished my radio play off today and will be sending it to the BBC next week. Quite excited about it but not really holding out a huge amount of hope because there isn't a lot of point getting too worked up about stuff.I've been reading num

Comment left here - it's also worth following some of the links in the article.Never install the Java Decompiler, JAD, and look at the library code you are dependent on.Just don't.If you do, however, never run the FindBugs utility (which I re

Following on from the talk I tried to give on why Java is bad for your brain at Barcamp I thought I'd dig out some of my old blog posts and present them here - try and explain the argument (which is more of a feeling

Obvious really

Java: finding nodes with xPath and how to Dump out XML DOM as a string

Easy-ish in Java

Carry on, grasshopper

More recent writings on the history of programming languages

http://www.regdeveloper.co.uk/2005/12/11/cohesive_code_packages/Hi KevinI know what you mean about the java.util package.On a slightly related note I'm studying for the Business Components Devloper exam and you need to learn serveral interface specs.

What I'm reading and working through to prepare for my Java Business Componets Developer Certification

I installed Mandriva Linux on an extra drive I put into my big server machine. Could not get the US Robotics wireless card to fly at all. Found some stuff on source forge but it didn't work for me (needed kernel source to build it - way too hard).Wen

MySQLDecided to move my project to MySQL because it seems to be more of a standard compared with Postgres. This is a pity because I like Postgres a lot, but you have to go with the flow and if I'm going to work on some non-Oracle skills I should at l

In response to this:http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/03/24/ingres_and_open_source/Hi Philip,Speaking as someone who has jumped from Oracle to Postgres, mostly for cost reasons, I'm curious about what the relationship is between Ingres and Postgres.

Thought I might make some notes about this to help the next person along.Firstly, PHP5 on windows just has the XML SAX parser installed by default so, even though there is a PEAR XML library, you don't need it.AttributesThe Java classes have a org.xm

Got talked into looking at PHP rather than Python.I really like it: it's got a lot of the lovely features of the unix shell (heredocument and `), you can have nice structures likeif ( cond ) : exprendifSo you can block your code properly. I have alw

This is a weird one. If you have a free-format project and add to the class path using the class path wizard beware that you add either directories or .jar files. I was picking up all of the files in the JBOSS tomcat directory and also, inadvertently

I've been using Java for about 5 years, but not heavily. I know the language reasonably well and have decided that I will get certified in the next few weeks. I took a test (for 1.2) from a training book I bought and got around 60% without a lot of s

The manual is incredibly opaque. I'm beginning to realise why paper manuals weren't so bad, it was easier to work through things.I can't work out how to pass parameters into a porltet or default them in from the page (so you can pass them between po

My friend Roger informs me that this is a single library call in PHP. I once did this by using jtidy so I could get the html tags using an XML DOM, but that was very silly.Been tearing my hair out - I want to be able to take the output from a URL and

I remember doing this a long time ago and couldn't work out what to put in the procedure to get the damn thing to tell the browser to start a CSV download. I was mixing up my protocols and couldn't work out how to set the MIME type. Ultimately I need

BirthdayBirthday on the 8th, we went paddling in North Wales (Llangohlen and the Treweryn) that weekend with the club. Stayed at a nice pub called The Goat  where the kids had a good time. Poor Pete had a bit of an epic on the Trewy, but enjoyed it

I suppose beggars can't be choosers but in Rational Rose and all of the books the swim lanes go down the page, not across, which means that you can get a lot more on a page. Makes me think that they cribbed the tool from Designer, which did swim lane

Have a look at http://www.no2id.net/content/flash01.html, and indeed the rest of the site. I got to this site after reading an article about the Big Brother awards in the Register.I hate big government and I really hate them wasting my taxes. Once I

Eclipse V3 didn't do a lot. Could not be bothered wasting a day configuring it, double click on a file and it started up NetBeans because that was the default editor for files with a java extension. Back to JDev 10g. It just works. A downside is that

Twice this useless IDE didn't save the file I was working on, even though I pressed ^S and exited it. Nor did it warn me I had unsaved changes.Switching to Eclipse.Still using Oracel JDeveloper for Oracle-specific things, particularly Java in the dat