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Category Archives: tools and techniques

Running Oracle XE on Mac OSX using virtualised JeOS

Thursday, August 27, 2009

So Oracle in its wisdom doesn’t have Mac OSX version of its free database. This is of course really annoying to Mac users who need to develop systems that use Oracle databases – Oracle XE is a great little database especially for development environments. Recently I found myself in a situation where I would be [...]

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‘//TODO’ considered harmful

Saturday, June 6, 2009

Yesterday I said that developers should start being a little more militant about the craftsmanship of their code, i.e. pushing back on broken methodology that demands poorly-built code  be released into the wild. This sort of code is always inherently fragile and will break your software if it has not already. Today I just want [...]

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JAOO Brisbane 2009 highlights and thoughts

Wednesday, May 13, 2009

I spent last Monday and Tuesday at the JAOO conference in Brisbane, and I have a couple of things which I want to say I thought interesting. (‘JAOO’ btw, because I see people asking about it on Twitter, is pronounced a bit like “yow” but with the “j” from German/Dutch like “jah”). Firstly, I found [...]

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Building Oracle 10g portlets in a continuous integration environment

Wednesday, April 29, 2009

Ignoring all the hints (to use wizards and manual deployments) from the Oracle information as to how to go about creating JSR168 portlets for the Oracle 10g Portal server, we have successfully designed a continuous integration environment for the Oracle portal environment for a client. The Oracle 10g portal server is the old-school Oracle app-server [...]

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Money-Is-Money v0.15 with added maven repository

Friday, April 17, 2009

In the course of an assignment for a client I’ve been giving Artifactory a good going-over. Artifactory is a Maven repository and mirror and is pretty cool and easy to set up – just drop the WAR file into a running Tomcat instance. On my Mac I ran it under Tomcat 6.0.18 with Java 5, [...]

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The burning smell of fail that is the Eclipse 3.4 software updater

Sunday, March 29, 2009

The other day I realised that on the Eclipse installation on my Mac I didn’t have any Subversion ‘team provider’ plugins installed. Most people who use the Eclipse platform with Subversion will realise that there are two Subversion plugins available for it – Subversive and Subclipse. It appears that the Subversive plugin is now the [...]

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Making Maven work through a web proxy

Wednesday, March 25, 2009

Client has a vicious network policy installed with prevents access to the rest of the world’s internet, unless you use the web proxy. How to make Maven use this proxy? Well, the documentation for Maven is perfectly easy to search, and you’ll find that it says to add the following to your ~/.m2/settings.xml: <settings> … [...]

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Upgrading to Maven 2.1.0 on Macintosh OS X

Monday, March 23, 2009

Recently I found a Maven plugin that wouldn’t run under Maven version 2.0.6, and I had to upgrade it on my Macintosh. I quickly discovered the usual *nix upgrade (unpack, then update ${PATH}) didn’t seem to work, as the Macintosh OS X 10.5 comes with Maven pre-installed in /usr/share/ directory. Tip – I found where [...]

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GUI builders, modern development practices, and vendor lock-in

Saturday, February 14, 2009

The Paranoid Engineer has declared ‘Screw All Gui Builders‘, with an excellent example of the genre of code that can be produced by one such tool, contrasted against the much nicer hand-written code. Now I can certainly sympathise with his pain. The thing that really gets my goat up, and the subject of this post, [...]

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Mechanical pencil lust

Friday, February 13, 2009

My Staedler Mars Micro 0.5mm is getting into a bit of a sorry state. As my University research project is ramping up, I have a need for a good quality replacement, because ancient historical research means a lot of note taking. Also being a software engineer, I just love these things anyway, and I use [...]

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