So what *do* you do when your small child erases your iPhoto collection? I guess you undelete from the trash… But what happens if you didn’t know your photo collection was in the trash and you emptied it? You go to your most recent backup. But what happens when your most recent backup is 6 weeks old (you know, just before your newborn arrived?). You panic. I’ve had a Mac Mini for over a year, and [...]

Thanks to user-supplied patches, I’ve just uploaded opencsv 1.6 to Sourceforge – my Apache licensed two-class library for reading and writing CSV files. If you’re in the market for a CSV library and can’t be bothered with dealing with unusual edge cases, this might be the library for you. This new release adds custom line terminators (which is pretty useful if you’re exporting CSV from your linux web server to Win32 clients). Thanks to Klaus [...]

I’m a longtime Jetty user and a huge fan (it’s always been my appserver of choice and the stuff coming in Jetty 6.0 looks just amazing), but for my own sites (including this one), I’ve made the switch to Glassfish. I’ve heard so much good stuff about it lately it was time to take it for a proper workout. The install was painless, and I had my apps redeployed on the appropriate virtual servers inside [...]

My little grails SMS gateway is powering along. I’ve now integrated Yahoo autocomplete into my "New SMS" page and it works just great. Now my users can begin typing entries from their addressbook, and get that snazzy dropdown happening as they type. Even works with multiple elements when you type in a comma. Sample below: I’ve been really impressed with how customisable Yahoo have made it. You can wire up the datasource to be Ajax [...]

For my "teach yourself Grails" project I’m building a little SMS Website gateway which I’m calling CyaThen. The idea is to be able to logon, select a bunch of users from your addressbook, and send them an SMS (or schedule one for later). Turns out that this is quite a good little tester for grails, since I’m needing to: Write a ton of simple forms for create/edit/delete messages, history, addressbook – all with database integration [...]