Cover of Head First HTML
First and foremost, I am a persistence layer software developer. I don’t do much UI work and what little UI work I do usually involves rich client UIs. I rarely do any web UI work.
Having said that, I think it’s important to know at least a little bit about web UI technologies, even if you are a back-end developer. Why? Well, at the very least, you will be able to understand the vocabulary of the UI guys you work with. Furthermore, you never know when you might have to look for a new job and there’s a good chance they’ll want you to know about some of that web UI stuff.
With that in mind, I recently picked up a copy of Head First HTML with CSS and XHTML to see if I could learn a thing or two. I just finished the book and I wanted to share my thoughts on it. …Continue reading » Book Review: Head First HTML with CSS and XHTML
Today I had to copy a really big file (in this case, a Ghost image) from a Linux box to a Windows box, using Samba. My first instinct was to use the cp command. The problem with cp is that it does not show you any sort of progress (I couldn’t find any relevant option in the cp man page). What I wanted was a progress bar display like the one wget displays.
I did some googling and found a few decent candidates: …Continue reading » How to Copy a File and Get a Progress Bar, in Linux
In my software development job, I do a lot of persistence layer implementation, especially using the Hibernate O/R mapper. I work closely with a clever domain layer programmer who tends to use a lot of design patterns, perhaps because he likes the woman of the cover of Head First Design Patterns.
Sometimes, these design patterns create a bit of a challenge for me in the persistence layer, especially since I always tell my domain layer programmer that I can persist things transparently, without having to muck up his code with persistence layer artifacts.
A case in point is the State pattern. I have now persisted 5 different sets of states so it’s no longer a challenge. However, it took me a little while to figure how to do it. Naturally, I started by checking out Hibernate’s forums but much to my chagrin, I found several people asking the same question but no one offering an answer. Therefore, I will provide an answer in this blog post. …Continue reading » State Pattern Persistence with Hibernate
Have you ever wanted to make cron run a scheduled task on some weird interval like every 29 days? I was faced with that problem just the other day.
I was starting to get annoyed with DynDNS’s nag emails, asking me to either log in and “touch” my WRT54GL router’s host record every 30 days or to upgrade to a paid service that does not require a periodic touch.
Of course, you can create a cron job that calls programs like ez-ipupdate to automate this periodic touching. The problem is, even though cron is quite flexible, it does not support intervals of 29 days. …Continue reading » Stupid Cron Tricks
Recent Comments