I finally got sick of how much damage Blogger was doing to my posts with the excess of <br> tags it randomly felt like inserting, so I’ve turned it off. Unfortunately this appears to republish all existing posts. Sigh. So the formatting of old posts is going to look like crap. I’ll fix recent ones, and incrementally go around fixing older ones, but most of them will remain like that.
Tag Archives: Uncategorized
Best error message ever
“The program ‘apt-get’ is not currently installed. You can install it by typing ‘apt-get install apt'”
re·cur·sion –noun: See recursion
I’ve just discovered the following interesting and related facts:
1) Chickenfoot’s pattern matching is very error tolerant. If it looks for “Older posts” and can’t find it, it will cheerfully settle for “Newer posts”.
2) StumbleUpon histories only go back a few months.
3) When writing code, you should be really careful to avoid infinite loops.
Sigh.
Cool Gadget of the Day: JTidy Servlet
JTidy is a port of w3’s HTML Tidy. It’s basically an HTML validation and pretty printing library. JTidy servlet provides tools for using it in a servlet container.
So, why is this cool? Well, jsp tags produce really awful whitespace. It makes looking through your generated markup almost impossible. JTidy servlet provides you with a drop in filter which you can just add to your site and cause all outgoing html to be pretty printed, making it readable. It’s about 4 lines of XML and two jars on the classpath and everything just works.
Build scripts
There seems to be some general perception, at least among Java programmers. that build scripts are scary and/or too tedious to write for yourself. I conjecture that there are two classes of people who feel this – those who have been put off by make, and those who have been put off by overuse of IDEs and feel that anything the IDE controls so completely must be hard work to do by hand.
I was certainly in the latter camp for a while, and even once I realised that build scripts weren’t scary I still thought they were hard work. I finally got around to writing my first ant script earlier (and, for bonus points, my first ant awful hack), and they’re really surprisingly easy. There’s almost nothing to it.
I really don’t know why we’re so dependent on the IDE for our build process at work. Life would be a lot simpler if we weren’t.