Google has extensive information how to use Google Talk but no info for kopete users like me. This is a step by step description, how to configure kopete. Read the rest of this entry »

A growing list of things I don’t want to forget… Read the rest of this entry »

There are a lot of good articles available about how to customize the layout of you blog but sometimes want to add some kind of outside information to your blog. For complex or large amounts of information, you should consider a database solution but in a lot of cases a simple file based solution works, too. This tutorial shows you how to add information from a file to your blog. Read the rest of this entry »

As I promised yesterday, here’s the workaround for the problem that Xerces only provides a not very errormessages in case of an error in an included document when using Schema and Xinclude. If there is a error in the main document you get the normal error messages, explaining why your document is not valid (e.g. if we change an id attribute to ID we get “Attribute ‘ID’ is not allowed to appear in element ‘e’“) but if the same error is made in the included element, the errormessage says: “Error on line 12 of document file:///home/psycho/workspace/Tests/xinclude/test.xml: Error attempting to parse XML file (href=’include.xml’).“. Read the rest of this entry »

This post explains how to use XML Schema to validate your document and XInclude to partition it in manageable chunks in Java using Xerces. Read the rest of this entry »

A few days ago I followed a link from JoelOnSoftware and stumbled upon Dave Thomas’ Code Kata page¹. The basic premise is that developers should spend time playing around without pressure to explore certain different algorithms, solutions or designs just like musicians or athletes spend time practicing. I think this is not only a great idea but fun, especially because most of the time there is no right or wrong solution. I wish I had enough time to ponder over all excercises, but so far I only found time to think about:

• Kata One a nice and simple design question. It gets more interesting if you add rules like “if the customer spends more than 100$, he gets a 10% rebate”.
• Kata Two implement binary search in 5 different ways, I used this to learn some more Ruby, but still 2 implementations are missing
• Kata Seven code review, I had to fix some old code so it was easy to add this exercise.

¹ This guy might be a agile/pragmatic/ruby guru but the navigation inside his blog sucks. I had to use google to get from Kata Sixteen (the first page I found) to the ‘Code Kata’-page.

I edited an older article and noticed that I could not cut-and-paste the XML into a file an use it becaus wordpress does some funny things to my document. I changes the quote from " to ” and the double hyphen from -- to –. Therefore I wrote this short sed script to escape my XML for use in blog posts. Any sed gurus out there who can tell me an easier/shorter/more elegant way of doing this?

sed -e 's/\&38;/\&38;38;/g; s/\\/\&38;#92;/g; s/>/\&38;gt;/g; s/</\&38;lt;/g; s/"/\&38;quot;/g; s/-/\&38;#45;/g' $1 | sed -e "s/'/\&38;apos;/g;"

The idea behind AOP is kinda cool and I wanted to play around with AspectJ for some time but never tried because I didn’t know how to setup AspectJ for eclipse. If you feel the same, here’s a simple tutorial on how to setup AOP for Eclipse in 5 minutes. Read the rest of this entry »

Most of the documentation I have read over the years sucks. Unfortunately this documentation is an important part of a project[1]. Part of the problem is certainly that writing documentation is something most developers loathe. But there are a few simple patterns which can improve the quality of documentation.

I requested Agile Documentation at work a couple of month ago because I read a positive review about it. Just ignore the ubiquitous “Agile” in the title, more fitting is the subtitle “A Pattern Guide to Producing Lightweight Documents for Software Projects” which is a perfect description for this book. The book contains fifty-something patterns organized in five chapters “Finding the Right Topics”, “Structuring Individual Documents”, “Layout and Typography”, “Infrastructrue and Technical Organisation” and “Management and Quality Assurance”.

In my opinion this is a pretty good ’semi-technical’ book and I can only recommend it to everyone who has to write documentation as part of their job.

[1] I don’t know how many open source projects I have ignored because their online documentation was a mess.

This article shows how to use AOP with nothing but java - No code generation or bytecode manipulation.

Sample Scenario:
You want to insert logging statements for every call to every method of a certain class. This sounds like the default example used to promote AOP, but there is an easier solution if you know about java.lang.reflect.Proxy and java.lang.reflect.InvocationHandler. Read the rest of this entry »