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Negotiating the IBM DB2 version maze

May 7, 2010

Suppose you want to install a DB2 server, and connect to it from some client software. If you browse the IBM DB2 Software pages, you’ll soon find that there’s a bewildering array of products with confusingly similar names. For example, IBM Data Server Client and IBM Data Server Runtime Client are two different things. Fortunately, [...]

Filed under: Java, Ruby | Comments (0)

Jay: A program for removing excess kernels

April 12, 2010

A script to safely and automatically remove unneeded kernels from Ubuntu systems.

Filed under: Linux, Ruby, System administration | Comments (3)

8001050F

March 2, 2010

As I’ve written before, date and time calculations are surprisingly difficult. What’s more, even the bits that aren’t difficult often get messed up. Sony have just demonstrated this. Apparently, a firmware bug in the real time clock in some models of PS3 lead the RTC to think that 2010 is a leap year. This confused [...]

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Ruby packages: chaos and confusion

January 31, 2010

In October of last year, someone built a new RubyGems hosting site called Gemcutter. Everyone liked it so much that GitHub decided to stop offering RubyGem hosting, and point people at Gemcutter instead. Then the maintainer of RubyGems decided to make Gemcutter the default repository for gems when you install RubyGems. Then RubyForge decided to [...]

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The case of the Null Empty Nothing

December 1, 2009

A post about the three types of null value in LotusScript, and how they differ.

Filed under: Domino, Java, Linux | Comments (0)

Documentation as an indicator of code quality

September 25, 2009

I often have to shunt around Lotus Domino databases, as well as all kinds of log files and bundles of XML data. I’ve got a cable modem connection to my home office, but still, uploads can take a while. So data compression is still important to me, and the newer LZMA algorithm can make a [...]

Filed under: Design, Linux, Programming | Comments (0)

Ubuntu Jaunty (9.04): Getting Java and Eclipse working

May 8, 2009

apt-get install openjdk-6-openjdk icedtea6-plugin update-java-alternatives -s java-6-openjdk For some inexplicable reason, Eclipse for Java Developers doesn’t include JDBC. Eclipse J2EE edition doesn’t work with OpenJDK. Oh well.

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Chronological pitfalls

March 16, 2009

DST is stupid, and it’s not the only thing that trips people up when coding date and time code.

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Web Services, SOAP, Domino, and Java 6

March 9, 2009

A while back I made a brief attempt to embark on a voyage of Web Services discovery via JAX-WS. The problem was simple enough: I had a Java program running on server A which had an object. I wanted to send that object to a Domino server running on machine B. Domino has a nifty [...]

Filed under: Domino, Java | Comments (1)

Bitten by the specialness of Java arrays

February 18, 2009

Suppose you have some text in Java that you want to manipulate. There are classes like StringBuffer for doing so, but let’s imagine that you choose to use a char array for some special reason. Now suppose that several pages of code later, perhaps in a different piece of code entirely, you decide to use [...]

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