While spending time recently looking for something new to learn that looked interesting, and it still being so close to new years, I was reminded of a bit of advice from the book “The Pragmatic Programmer,” learn a new language every year. But is learning a new language every year...

The basic idea is to output some data to a user in a table and allow them to take an action on each row individually. A fairly straightforward solution is to create a separate page to link to, passing the necessary row information along. If the action is simple enough,...

Anyone that’s worked with Perl is probably familiar with CPAN.pm. CPAN.pm is the bundled module that handles downloading and installing modules from the CPAN repository. It usually works flawlessly but I’ve noticed that on OpenSolaris the process can be a bit more spotty. Let’s try installing Mason as an example:...

A couple of days ago I found out about a really nice feature in Spring, called ‘refreshable bean’. Spring’s vision a refreshable bean is a dynamic-language-backed bean that monitors changes to its source code and then reloads itself when changes occur. And it is all this is done without restarting/re-deploying...

"Port 8080 required by Tomcat v6.0 Server at localhost is already in use. The server may already be running in another process, or a system process may be using the port. To start this server you will need to stop the other process or change the port number(s)." I have...

I like YUI3, mostly because I can use it to fill in the gaps between HTML4 and HTML5, and also because a single line of code can make a button zoom around the page: var myAnim = new YAHOO.util.Anim( 'testButton', { width: { to: 400 } }, 1, YAHOO.util.Easing.easeOut );...

Recently I had the heartbreaking experience of having to reboot a Linux server. Normal usage should almost never require you to reboot the OS like you have to so frequently in Windows. In this case I had an external USB drive partitioned with LVM humming along on a Linux server....

In order to get this done, you’ll need Apache, Tomcat, and the MOD_JK connector library. I’ve included the Windows binaries below, as I’m writing this blog post from a Windows machine. Feel free to swap out these downloads with whatever RPM, YAST, APT, etc. commands you want. Also, you’ll need...

I recently was searching for a way to simulate shared physical storage in a VPS environment for clustering purposes. In an enterprise data center we can expect some type of SAN available to provide shared physical storage. GFS is a simple solution in this case to create a shared file system that...

A while back, I read blog post discussing who is the client. Software projects frequently have many different clients, many of whom are frequently underrepresented throughout the development process. Do you know who all of the clients of your application are? What can you do to make their lives easier...