Jquery plugins are a joy to use, and they are surprisingly easy to write. Everyone that writes lots of Jquery code should seek to take potentially-resuable functionalities of code and put them into a nice, compact plugin. In the app I've been working on, we have a lot of user-generated content that ...

Jquery gives a great, easy-to-use mechanism for extending its API and creating your own plugins. For stuff that looks like it could be useful generally, you should really try to put it into a nice little plugin package. For submit buttons, there is a general thought that they shouldn't be clicked tw...

PNG was a file format that, among the original reasons for conception, was created to show the same color over different computers, with different OS's, and browsers. To this end, gamma, or lighting, correction was added. While solving the original problem, a new, bigger, badder problem was created....

Jquery and other sweeto js frameworks have some awesomeness to help you change the css classes of various elements on the page with ease and grace. They have some very convenient functions to add and remove classes. These are uber-useful and highly recommended for saving you precious time and gigawa...

Have you ever had a problem with ajax requests caching in Internet Explorer. I have, and recently I came across a nicer solution than I have traditionally used. In the past, I have used a unique parameter on the url to keep IE from caching previous requests to the same url, like so:$.ajax({ ... url:...

Synergy is a fantastic project that allows you to share a single set of input devices (keyboard and mouse) over multiple machines. Clipboard sharing is also supported. It's remarkably easy to set up, and it works across multiple platforms.For my personal setup, I wanted to link my Linux box (lds-lap...

When you setup your computer at the time of your initial Ubuntu installation, you assign your computer a hostname. In my case, I gave it a hostname and then later wanted to change it to something else. This is accomplished in two easy steps.First,sudo emacs /etc/hostname, and overwrite the hostname ...

In a recent admin tool I was creating, I was using SOUIT of Javascript... apparently more than I knew how to write well. Eventually, it all worked wonderfully -- that is, until someone tried to use it in a lesser browser -- Internet Explorer. The error was thus:Unexpected call to method or property ...

Sometimes it is useful to be able to iterate through the fields in a javascript object and use the values kept therein for something spectacular. I've found this to be the case for POJSOs (+S = 'Script') that I pass down to the client with new-found data from the backend.For instance, often these mo...

Software engineers are sometimes very, very prone to making things more complex than they need to be. In the engineer's mind, "complex" can be replaced with the word "cool" (or some other amazing adjective). Such a mind has gotten lost, has lost sight of the fact that there exists a most-efficient p...

My first experience with Spring Webflow is on a project that uses Webflow 1.0.5. So far, I'm impressed. Apparently, Webflow 2 offers even more incredible awesomeness, but thusfar I would put my webflow experience over that of my previous couple years in Seam. (I was just waiting for a chance to aban...

I had some fun this morning when the headless box that I'm ssh'ing into to do test app runs randomly changed IP address. My goal was to find it on the network from my local box. To my rescue: a cool tool called nmap.nmap, according to the man page, is a network exploration tool and security/port sca...

SSH is a great protocol that allows secure connections to remote systems. It is easy to use, gives you terminal access to the system in question and allows you to function as you would were you at the machine itself -- in the terminal. But, if you want to see actual windows, thru a GUI window manage...

Have you ever wanted to map to a remote drive or mount a samba share on Linux? The commands a really easy, and they're chronicled here.First, grab Samba:sudo apt-get install smbfsThen use smbmountsudo smbmount //remote/path/ /local/mount/path/ -o username=[user]Behind -o, you can specify a number of...

Sometimes you want Maven to compile your code with a different JDK than is the one assigned to your JAVA_HOME. For instance, I have code in a project that I'm working on that only compiles on Java 1.5. My JAVA_HOME, however, is 1.6. So, how do we specify the JDK for Maven?Go to the pom.xml for the m...

I was running an SQL query today and it was sooooo slow. So slow, in fact, that it never returned. I asked the DBA, Reed, who built the table what might be up, and he informed me that it was not indexed. And proceeded to show me some cool stuff I could do to actually get my query to return. In the e...

Sometimes you need to install a security certificate for authentication to work for certain services -- services that are accessed by your java application that requirement a secure connection. For instance, needing to authenticate against an LDAP server from one of our apps, we had to run a little ...

Lots of websites give you the ability to copy certain pieces of text/code/something off their website in a "copy to clipboard"-type functionality. In the process of creating just such a function on a little page I was making, I wanted to make the html that was copied very tight and compact. The most...

Callback functions are a nice feature of Javascript. It's nice to be able to just use a function handle to show that it should be called when a certain something completes. Sometimes, however, we want to do more than just specify a function handle. We want to pass parameters. Why? Because sometimes ...

Jquery has some awesome event-handling abilities. The elusive ability to pass parameters into these event callbacks seems way harder than it should be. Nevertheless, I have found a solution. I really doubt it's the best one. I really hope it isn't.The need to pass parameters is made clear when you h...

django-admin.py is a utility script that is used by django to start projects, etc. Sometimes, it seems that it's available to me in the terminal. At other times, it melts away, unavailable. So, where is it, and how do I make it findable?django-admin.py is in the your site-packages/django/bin/ direct...

Often when coding, we use a single local variable multiple times, overwriting the value many times. It is considered good practice to move the variable out of the looping overwrite and into the smallest scope of code that is run once. But, this makes the code a little bit less concise. So, how usefu...

In developing an email notification system recently, we became interested in code acting differently depending on what environment we were in. A potentially good solution for this is environment-based dependency injection. This means that different Spring beans, for instance, will be used depending ...

Sometimes I paste text into a spreadsheet so that I can quickly manipulate it. The same could be done with a small script, but this particular feature is built into Open Office Spreadsheet: You can split text into separate columns using delimiters.If I had text like this:1. The Morning Breaks 2. The...

On a Sun keyboard, the ctrl key is actually in the space that the caps lock key occupies on a standard qwerty keyboard nowadays. In a program where the ctrl key is often used, this positioning can be helpful as no Vulcan figure stretches are required for common key patterns. So, why not change caps ...

I have spent mucho time trying to get some named parameters working in the "order by" clause of a dynamic sql query that I'm building. The query isn't even HQL/JPQL. It's native. And yet, it turns out that you cannot use bind variables, named or ordered, in an order by clause.I was trying to do some...

EasyMock is a great tool for separating external dependencies from unit tests. There is a learning curve to learning the mock method of testing, and unfortunately, EasyMock does not give very good prompts when you do something wrong. The exception messages are actually quite cryptic. This article is...

For unit testing purposes, I often want to set field values in objects so that I can setup for the test conditions. One of most annoying things about testing is the urge to change code design for just the sake of testing -- especially if it's in a way that is considered less safe, like exposing elem...

Mark Logic Server seems to be the latest, greatest in content serve-up. At least it is generating a lot of excitement at the LDS Church, where it's being used for new content-centric apps/sites. Being caught in the wave of awesome, I was interested in getting it running in my favorite dev environmen...

I at first thought it odd that a ConcurrentModificationException could be thrown w/in the context of a single Thread. But, what do you know, it can! And I seem to be getting better at writing code that does!As a part of a recent hack, I wanted to remove a certain element from a list. As I was iterat...