Yahoo Pipes!

Posted on November 24, 2010 by admin

I knew about it, but never knew it was this handy and easy to use: Yahoo Pipes!

For a client of mine I had to create an aggregated feed over his three product sites to show on his main ‘portal’ site. With Yahoo Pipes and some YQL (yahoo query language) I came up with this feed.

The YQL for this is: select * from rss where url in ('http://straathofmanegebodems.nl/feed/langswitch_lang/en/','http://straathofteeltvloeren.nl/feed/', 'http://www.loonbedrijfstraathof.nl/feed/') | sort(field="pubDate").

Go check it out at straathofbv.com and hit the rss image at the bottom.

Sick and tired of websafe fonts?

Posted on November 11, 2010 by admin

My collegaue, in charge of the designs (besides a whole lot else) of the websites we build for our clients got sick and tired of me telling her she could only pick from serif, sans-serif and monospace websafe fonts. She did some googling (I guess what I should have done) and found this great WordPress plugin from adrian3 based on Google Fonts.

With some tweaking in the stylesheet (getting rid of all font-family related entries) I got it to work. Make sure to check all you need in the plugin configuration tab under settings and you are good to go. The save button was a little hidden for me, but it should be there somewhere at the bottom of the page.

We’re not quite done yet with the website we needed this for, so I can’t show you the result, but will blog on this shortly or eiher change this line in this post. I’ve tested the plugin with Firefox on a Mac, but will invest some more time testing it on Windows/IE/Chrome etc and also with Russian encoding.

Great Java development helpers

Posted on November 10, 2010 by admin

A friend of mine (Mario) pointed out a great Eclipse plugin through our developers network. Mousefeed ensures you make proper use of Eclipse by using the shortcut keys instead of your mouse by suggesting the shortcut key everytime you use your mouse.

Another friend of mine (Sander) introduced me to AppDynamics Lite. A brilliant performance measurment tool. Together with Sequel Pro (MySQL database management for the Mac) & the EXPLAIN statement, to evaluate the performance of your queries we could make some major improvements in our app.

IPhone 4

Posted on November 7, 2010 by admin

My sim eventually arrived and I’m loving every bit of my new IPhone. It is so extremly user friendly and the free apps are great. The only thing that I can think of making my mobile life even greater is the addition of a keyboard to the Iphone. Perhaps the Iphone 5 has one

At first I had some problems with the battery life. It seems like the phone isn’t always loaded up to 100%, but after one reboot this was solved. Besides the phone lasted for less than a day in the beginning. It seems wifi and bluetooth are sucking a lot of life out of the phone. After I fully loaded the phone and turned off the wifi it lasted more than 2 days.

Clean up your Gmail!

Posted on August 31, 2010 by admin

My Gmail had grown slowly to 55% of 7493 MB overtime. Not a real big concern, but since I was cleaning my Mac I thought I should clean my Gmail as well. A quick google got me to the creativebits site and after reading the article I got a bit depressed. One of the comments from energio though cleared everything up. In your webbrowser, go to Gmail.com, and do a search for:

has:attachment (*.ppt || *.pptx || *.pptm || *.pot || *.potx || *.potm || *.pps || *.ppt ||)
has:attachment (*.mov || *.wmv || *.wm)

This will find all mail including large attachments like movies and powerpoint presentations (you can of course come up with you own line or combine these two or whatever..). After Gmail found these emails you start selecting the mails you want to trash. Don’t forget to empty your trash to see actual result of you action.

With a quick search ‘n trash I earned 18% back of my Gmail cappacity.

Hello world in Android

Posted on June 9, 2010 by admin

android Tonight I wrote my first Android app in Eclipse @ IProfs, a dutch Java consultancy company. They had prepared a good presentation on Android and a step-by-step tutorial for setting up my first app. We wrote a simple todo application which gave a pretty good overview of some of Adroid’s capabilities. I was surprised how fast I could get started building. All I had to do, since I had Eclipse preinstalled on my Mac, was:

install the Android SDK and the ADT plugin (Android Developer Tools)
restart Eclipse
create a new Android project in Eclipse
go to ‘run as’ ‘Android Application’
create a virtual for the Android OS in the popup presented
and BAM! I was saying hello to the world (well, I actually had to restart Eclipse since the first startup of the VM choked my workspace)

After some tweaking in a Java file, an xml resource and a Android xml UI layout file I had made my first todo app.

The structure of Android apps is really easy and the programming model is fun to work with. The set of tools gives you code completion, since its Java and xml by xsd. The VM option, as said before, makes it possible to run the apps you create without having an actual Android phone hooked up to your computer.

I had fun creating this simple app and am looking forward to start working on an actual Android app.

resources:
developer.android.com
groups.google.com/group/android-developers

From now on: I’m the boss ;)

Posted on May 20, 2010 by admin

Finally I started out as a freelancer, a freelance agile software consultant that is. Value driven products with passion is my mission.

I have over 10 years experience as Java/J(2)EE developer and am a Scrum master since 2009. Eperienced in all layers of (web)development from backends with Spring/ Hibernate to front-ends with Wicket or GWT.

I’m co-founder and engineer of Qafe, the framework for declarative Enterprise Application Development with a possibility for Oracle Forms migration.

Check out my website, linkedin profile and leave me a note if you need translations or an official resume. You can also email me at marc {a t} jajava {d o t} com.

I’m currently hired by the Gemeente Rotterdam, but will be available for jobs starting from August 2010.

Releasing with Subversion mess

Posted on May 19, 2010 by admin

On my current project we use Subversion 1.4. My MacBook Pro came with a preinstalled Subversion client 1.6.5 (use svn –version to see what clientversion your are running). I had assumed we used 1.6 so I didn’t change my client. I was aware of the troubles you can have mixing svn client and server versions.
I had no trouble synchronizing up untill now since Eclipse uses a build-in client and commandline svn st and up works without any trouble with different Subversion versions. Today I ran into some trouble while releasing with Maven 2.2.0 (preinstalled on the MBP as well). There was no actual error but when I ran mvn release it stalled on download maven-release-plugin-2.0-beta-8.pom. A friend with a Mac remembered he had the same trouble releasing before since it should be using the beta-7 release plugin for svn server version 1.4 and advised me to downgrade my Subversion client.

If you are using this as a setup/tutorial: DON’T FORGET TO COMMIT OR BACKUP YOUR DATA FIRST!

I downloaded an older version of Subversion, 1.5.4 (minor versions should be simlair of the client and server version) and installed it on my MBP. After restarting my terminal svn –version still showed I was using 1.6.5. After some research I found out about the somewhat weird setup:

echo $PATH showed me: /usr/bin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/X11/bin
cd /usr/local/bin and ls-lrta gave me a symbolic link for svn: svn -> /opt/subversion/bin/svn
this symlink was actually pointing to svn 1.5.4 (/opt/subversion/bin/svn –version) (the 1.6.5 was actually moved to an versioned directory in opt subversion_backup.date)
in /usr/bin i found that there was another svn client, that actually had version 1.6.5
I moved that file to svn.old (so it wouldn’t be found when calling svn), restarted my terminal and svn was now set to 1.5.4

mvn release now used the maven-release-plugin-2.0-beta-7.pom and releasing worked out just fine (well… except for a hanging artifactory problem)

Don’t forget to check out (svn co) your projects again and throw away the old versions since the .svn directories are poluted with the other svn versions stuff. Also think about changing your svn client in your development tool.

My MBP arrived!!

Posted on May 17, 2010 by admin

Last week my MBP finally arrived!! UPS probably had a 100% extra hit rate over the past few weeks since I couldn’t wait and I must say, my new toy has seen more cities over the world than I have. It came in a beautiful box and installation was peanuts.
After a few days working on the Mac I have asked myself the following question a million times “What have I been doing over the past years, messing around with Windows on Dell/ HP? Everything on the Mac works extremely naturally. I still have to get used to the control/option/command shortcut keys but after that’s all in my system I’m sure my productivity will get a great boost. Love all the glair btw, without making my Mac slow.

Here are some things I ran into, when installing and configuring.
…..

Freelance software developer

but also traveller, Alfisti, Apple fan and human being…

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