Technical

Blog entries in this category are focused on technical topics.

Twitter makes me mental or how not to write an API
Posted : Friday October 8th, 2010

Sometimes in the land of development you'll find yourself working on painful tasks, usually involving some half-baked library with shoddy documentation. Lord knows I've had a fe...read more

Random thoughts from the week
Posted : Saturday April 10th, 2010

I had a number of thoughts this week that at some point I thought could sprout into blog posts but it turned out that no, they really couldn't. On their own at least. So here is...read more

SEO and the magic beans
Posted : Monday April 5th, 2010

It seems like not a week goes by without someone, somewhere asking me a question about using "keywords" on a page. It seems there are still people, apparently stuck in 1997, who ju...read more

I really think
Posted : Saturday March 27th, 2010

that there is no quicker path to crappy code then having to screen scrape data. I really do. One of the things I have to do in my current job is to have software that co...read more

Blackberry development
Posted : Saturday March 6th, 2010

So... I started playing with doing some blackberry development. I'm not entirely sure what I will do with it but it's sort of cool in a way. But I am finding some painfu...read more

Right way, wrong way
Posted : Thursday February 11th, 2010

I think when I am finished working on my current project I could write a whole book on tips and tricks for internationalization of websites. But here's the most importan...read more

MySQL, JDBC, Unicode and You
Posted : Sunday November 29th, 2009

A few notes on my experiences with using MySQL from JDBC with unicode support that might help others. Yes, MySQL and the JDBC driver fully support UTF-8 and really it's ...read more

Three IE AJAX gotchas
Posted : Sunday July 26th, 2009

I have been working recently on a web-application (J2EE) that uses a bunch of AJAX for the front end and I have come to realize a few things about browsers and their varying sup...read more

Max has internet!
Posted : Monday July 20th, 2009

After several months of intermittent connections, much slower than normal speeds and some periods where I was without any connection for days at a stretch (including most of las...read more

JDoctopdf
Posted : Monday June 15th, 2009

Hooray! I have launched my Jdoctopdf project which you can find here. This is a free, open-source, l...read more

Connection resolution (hopefully) and other ISP issues
Posted : Wednesday June 10th, 2009

Well, two modems and three service calls later I seem to have a working internet connection...read more

Recovering from OpenOffice
Posted : Tuesday June 2nd, 2009

Following up from a previous post I actually discovered that the OpenOffice installation had done even more damage th...read more

Proper exception handling can't wait
Posted : Monday May 25th, 2009

The most overall common mistake I see in Java code posted in forums and discussion groups is bad exception handling. By bad exception handling I mean seeing the following. ...read more

Connection woes
Posted : Saturday May 23rd, 2009

sigh A sure sign of summer here is that my internet connection has gone haywire. It's a bit ... not good. I am having what is known as a dry loop DSL inst...read more

Why I hate Apple
Posted : Wednesday May 20th, 2009

Before I get started here I just want to say this. If you have a Mac and like it, then that's great and personally I would prefer just to run some Linux variant all the time mys...read more

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