I’m working on a little project that implements an event queue. I could have happily implemented it in a List, but I’ve wanted the power to query it in all sorts of unusual ways so I ended up just writing it to a database. But this week I’ve come across JoSQL – a very cool little library for querying java collections using SQL style semantics. Now this little library isn’t a database tool, it’s a [...]

Thanks to some fantastic bug reports (especially Rogan Creswick who submitted two patches, three unit tests and supporting test files… Wow! Now that’s living the open source dream. Gold star effort) – opencsv 1.3 is now available on Sourceforge for your comma-separated pleasure. This release fixes numerous problems with handling embedded double-quote characters using Excel-style escaping (where “” represents an escaped embedded quote). Turns out the rules for this get pretty tricky when you have [...]

I’ve often been interested in getting more involved in running training courses. I’ve run a couple in my time, and really enjoyed the experience. I’ve never done anything “professionally” though. I live in Canberra, the capital city of Australia, and the training options are numerous in stock standard areas (Intro to Java, Java Web Programming, Intro to J2EE, etc), but it’s all very mainstream. I’m wondering where there might be business opportunities to offer training [...]

After Florin mentioned he could browse and edit jar files from within Total Commander, I figured there had to be a Windows Shell extension that did a similar thing. Turns out it’s built into XP! I showed one of my mates, and he said, “Sure, I do that all the time”… so I guess it’s old news to some, but not to me! All you need to do is associate jar/ear/war files with the Compressed [...]

While some of my development is done on Mac, and some on Linux, most of my time is spent on Windows. Not really fussed about operating systems these days, so happy to work on whatever. Anyways, I work with this guy Shayne who knows more about Windows utilities than anyone, and he keeps showing me cool stuff. The first one is a clipboard extender called Yankee Clipper. This beast keeps a running history of your [...]

My blog seems to have received heaps of comment spam over the last couple of weeks and it seems I’m not alone. So I did the open source thing and took matters into my own hands! I’ve hacked the source for pebble.jar and the comments html to create a “Answer a simple maths question” captcha for comments (check out the Comments form to see it in action). Other blog systems seem to be using this [...]

I’ve just uploaded opencsv 1.2 to Sourceforge which fixes a bunch of annoying bugs. But one bug report has really stood out for me as a sensational open source bug report. Gabriel not just told me about the defect (not handling nulls correctly), but he posted a test case, and the fix required to make it green. Test cases are just *so* useful for reporting and fixing bugs… and it just adds tons of value [...]