Archive for the ‘Web Development’ Category

Forgotten Subversion Commands, Undo, Merge Branches and More

Thursday, June 28th, 2012 by Jesper Rønn-Jensen

In a current project I use a lot of Subversion (svn) from the command-line. Subversion recently has lost terrain to Git for several reasons. But actually, svn is capable of doing many of the things I love from Git. Here are some less known commands I find extremely helpful.   Undo last commit svn merge […]

Mortgage-driven development vs Behaviour-driven development

Monday, June 18th, 2012 by Jesper Rønn-Jensen

As you may already know, I am in New York with my company, attending the QCon conference. Earler today I attended Matt Wynne’s presentation at QCon New York. It was one of the best presentations I have seen so far. Especially, since he began as his alter-ego, Darren Workshy. Darren Workshy, hater of behaviour-driven development. Darren […]

Count number of jobs in Hudson

Thursday, June 14th, 2012 by Jesper Rønn-Jensen

Small script to count the number of jobs on a Hudson server — with JavaScript

Get started using advanced web fonts today

Friday, February 24th, 2012 by Jesper Rønn-Jensen

I saw this example on a blog today:

GWT Developer Plugin now Works with Firefox 9

Saturday, January 28th, 2012 by Jesper Rønn-Jensen

(UPDATED) The GWT developer plugin has been updated to works with Firefox 9, a couple of days ago. Its not yet officially available, but can be downloaded directly from the codebase: google-web-toolkit.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/ prebuilt folder in here  is the gwt-dev-plugin.xpi, and it works like a charm :) Previously i wrote when the plugin was updated to […]

IntelliJ Structural Search to Convert from JUnit3 to Junit4

Wednesday, January 18th, 2012 by Jesper Rønn-Jensen

Just a quick tip for intellij users. For an old project i wanted to convert JUnit 3 testcases to JUnit4 format. Most stuff was already in place, but after the conversion, i found that some of the old “assertTrue”, “assertFalse”, and “assertEquals” statements were failing. So i ended up with some short search/replace, which are really […]

GWT Developer plugin for Firefox 7 is now Ready

Monday, October 10th, 2011 by Jesper Rønn-Jensen

UPDATED 2011-12-14: Prebuilt folder now contains Firefox 8 version of the GWT developer plugin. Since Firefox 7 was released, i have defered upgrading for one simple reason: At work I am dependent on GWT Developer plugin. Today I found the ready-to-release plugin which actually works with Firefox 7: http://google-web-toolkit.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/plugins/xpcom/prebuilt/ in here  is the gwt-dev-plugin.xpi, and […]

Useful Background research for Certification

Tuesday, October 4th, 2011 by Jesper Rønn-Jensen

I have just applied for certification to become Capgemini Software Engineer level 1+2. The process had some tests and a thorough application formula where i should describe my deeds. The tests were of two formats: 10 questions in 15 minutes, and 30 questions in 40 minutes (multiple choice questions). For the tests I took, these […]

Make IntelliJ highlight usages

Thursday, August 11th, 2011 by Jesper Rønn-Jensen

By default, Eclipse highlights usage of a word, if you double click it. But IntelliJ IDEA can also do that.

How to move IntelliJ system file to another folder

Monday, April 4th, 2011 by Jesper Rønn-Jensen

For work, I use IntelliJ IDEA, when working in Java world. For my current client, there is a quota on my user directory, which means I have to move IDEA system files to another folders. Locate the file idea.properties in your IntelliJ Idea\bin folder Edit idea.config.path Restart I changed it from idea.config.path=${user.home}/.IntelliJIdea10/config to idea.config.path=${idea.home}/.IntelliJIdea10/config It […]

Challenges Configuring Hudson Emails

Thursday, March 10th, 2011 by Jesper Rønn-Jensen

My recent Stackoverflow question How to use Hudson “Parameterized Build” values in an email earned me the “tumbleweed” badge because it had almost no views (39 in a week), got no answers and no votes. Therefore I decided to offer 200 of my reputation points for a usable answer. But despite the high bounty of 200 […]

GWT relevant snippets for IntelliJ Idea editor

Tuesday, October 5th, 2010 by Jesper Rønn-Jensen

I created a list of snippets that I loaded into my IntelliJ editor, which I find useful when working with Google Webtoolkit (GWT). So far, it’s a very short list. Snippet 1: Live template to bootstrap a class to use UI binder logic. Very useful when converting existing (pre gwt 2.0) Java classes to UI […]

Explanation of Firebug Net Panel Findings

Thursday, April 22nd, 2010 by Jesper Rønn-Jensen

Jan Odvarko – one of the Firebug developers – posted some very good explanations on the information available from the Firebug net panel. Here is the explanation of the detailed mouseover view when zooming in on each request: The second request started 109ms after the start of the first request (since the beginning of the […]

Google’s Direct Links Inside Suggestion List

Friday, March 26th, 2010 by Jesper Rønn-Jensen

I just saw this feature today: Google added direct links into the list of autocompleting search results: In this case, I searched for “earth h….” and it suggests “earth hour 2010” But on top of that, it inserts a link to the most relevant website directly. Smart and time-saving, i suppose. Also, it does not […]

How To Recover Deleted Subversion Branch

Wednesday, December 9th, 2009 by Jesper Rønn-Jensen

I recently deleted a branch from our (svn) code repository. Did you know that it’s the general recommendation to delete a branch after a merge to ensure that nobody commits to it. (see svnmerge wiki for more on that advice) Svn checkout, svn info, etc. all fail when you try to access the deleted branch […]

How to make Git ignore files that already exist in your project

Monday, December 7th, 2009 by Jesper Rønn-Jensen

For a project I’m working on, I had to change some files with personal settings, and the files kept showing up with a git status. Adding files to .gitignore that are already tracked does not work. (and it’s actually pretty well documented in the documentation). In stead, it’s possible to use this command: git update-index […]

Spoken Git Commit Log — Another Annoyance at the Office

Wednesday, September 30th, 2009 by Jesper Rønn-Jensen

Here is a short one-liner that really annoyed my colleagues today. I set my mac to read aloud all changes in the repository since yesterday: git log –pretty=format:”%an commit %s, %ad.” –date=relative –since=yesterday |say if you remove the “say” command in the end it’s actually pretty readable: pagerbak commit VA17, 34 minutes ago. pagerbak commit […]

Print CSS Background Logo Hack

Tuesday, September 29th, 2009 by Jesper Rønn-Jensen

I learned this nice little hack to bypass the standard browser setting that normally prevents background images from being printed. The hack makes use of converting the background-image to a list item with an image. /* Hack, to trick the browser to print another logo Unfortunetaly, Firefox on Windows doesn’t show logo on print — […]

Sell More: Add Next Steps To Your Status Messages

Monday, September 21st, 2009 by Jesper Rønn-Jensen

Sometimes, when doing web development, we forget that not everybody are as familiar with the web jargon as ourselves. This example from Pixum (internet photo developer) shows a good detail: The status message from Pixum gives immediate feedback that makes it easy to go to next step Note that the status message contains a link […]

Greasemonkey Debugging Tips: How to Determine Why your Script Is Not Running

Friday, September 18th, 2009 by Jesper Rønn-Jensen

After running into some trouble with getting a Greasemonkey to work, I just wanted to share this list with you of things to look out for when your Greasemonkey script does not seem to run. What are the common pitfalls you see around. I’ll gladly add them here. I am trying to get a Greasemonkey […]

CSS Styling Buttons Problem with Underlined Text

Wednesday, September 16th, 2009 by Jesper Rønn-Jensen

I ran into the challenge the other day to style a<button> element to make it look like a link (with underline and everything). Unfortunately, the <button> element does not react to text-decoration: underline; But according to a discussion at the CSS Creator forum, there is a way out: I was just messing around with it […]

The Quick Way to Creating Disabled State Icon With Photoshop

Friday, August 28th, 2009 by Jesper Rønn-Jensen

For an internal demo, I had to make my own disabled and :hover states of some buttons. In Photoshop (Elements) it was dead easy by adjusting the color in each layer. I found that the following settings worked very well: In Photoshop, create a new layer for each button state. Select the layer and choose […]

How to add Git Pull Shortcut to Different Github Branches

Sunday, August 23rd, 2009 by Jesper Rønn-Jensen

UPDATE 9 hours later: Changed to “remote = origin” to the specific branch “remote = dean” which works! Short explanation on how to pull changes from different Git repositories into your local Git repository. Last week I worked with three different Github forks of a project. Now for standard, when you clone a Github repository, […]

Comments working again

Sunday, June 14th, 2009 by Thomas Watson Steen

Thanks to one of our dear readers we just discovered a bug in our commenting system that basically meant that you could not leave a comment on any of our posts. This has now been fixed and you can now again tell us your thoughts. Of cause we should have noticed, since the amount of […]

Shorthand to clean up installed Rubygems (but don’t cleanup Rails)

Friday, May 29th, 2009 by Jesper Rønn-Jensen

I trimmed my installed Rubygems on my local development machine. The command “sudo gem cleanup” is just for that. Only problem: What about my older Rails apps that require a specific version of Rails, ActiveRecord, etc.? My solution: gem list –no-versions | grep -v “^active” | grep -v “^action” | grep -v “^rails$” | xargs […]

Web Server Power Calculation

Friday, March 13th, 2009 by Jesper Rønn-Jensen

In our company’s basement a small server room where we put a few sandbox machines we use for quickly starting up projects, simple project and version control management. Over the time, quite a few of our clients have benefited from this setup as it can create instant project infrastructure. But what is the cost of […]

HTML Guide Textmate Snippets Open Sourced

Wednesday, February 25th, 2009 by Jesper Rønn-Jensen

One year ago I published “Design Guide or HTML Markup Guide” with link to the HTML guide we did for the biggest Danish business internet portal. The HTML guide is a really useful tool for every public authority that must deliver applications for the portal. As a help for my own work back then, I […]

Using Local File-based Git — Server Laziness

Saturday, February 21st, 2009 by Jesper Rønn-Jensen

My problem this week: I wanted to share some work with a colleague. Unfortunately we have not yet setup our caplab environment with git server. Nor did i want to push this particular project to GitHub or Unfuddle. My alternative was a file-based setup: Each developer’s machine has it’s own Git repository. On my machine […]

CSS Fun: Flag Deprecated HTML Tags

Thursday, January 8th, 2009 by Jesper Rønn-Jensen

.NET tips for my development environment

Thursday, October 9th, 2008 by Jesper Rønn-Jensen

At a recent project I had to work in a full-blown .NET environment. Here are some of the tips I collected from my colleagues. Visual Studio I added the methods below in the Macro editor (Tools > Macros > Macros IDE) Stop the build on error. When an error occurs I am notified instantly and […]

Fixes to Common CSS Problems

Monday, June 16th, 2008 by Jesper Rønn-Jensen

Just home again from two weeks vacation, I found this in my delicious popular feed (i usually scan the delicious popular feed for links others find interesting). Using CSS to Fix Anything: 20+ Common Bugs and Fixes Good explanations to some of the usual I run into. For instance, the double margin float bug in […]

Webdesign Tutorial by Rap Video

Thursday, May 8th, 2008 by Jesper Rønn-Jensen

Learning web design by a hiphop video is really neat. Four years ago we had the usability rap (along with the excellent gangsta-style cartoons from the OK/Cancel guys): (the mp3 file with the actual rap seems to have disappeared… could anybody point me to a working link?) Now there is this even cooler rap. Web […]

Design Guide or HTML Markup Guide

Friday, February 8th, 2008 by Jesper Rønn-Jensen

At a recent project, there was a requirement to describe the CSS used on a site, as a documentation, other developers could use. We decided to go a bit further — not only documenting the CSS classes — but making a guide that developers could find easy to use. Also we wanted developers with little […]

Sharepoint 2007, Accessibility, and Impossible UI Customization

Sunday, January 20th, 2008 by Jesper Rønn-Jensen

Emil Stenström’s recent “Sharepoint 2007 from an interface developer’s view” is definitely worth reading if you care about webstandards, accessibility and decent frontend code in general. Here are some of the quotes that really stand out in an excellent article that i really recommend you read before picking your web development platform. One major problem […]

Avoid Innovation (The Word) — Use Better Words Instead

Tuesday, January 1st, 2008 by Jesper Rønn-Jensen

Scott Berkun brilliantly notes that the word “innovation” has lost it’s meaning. Stop saying innovation – here’s why Use better words instead. Often people mean one of 1) we want new ideas 2) we want better ideas, 3) we want big changes 4) we need to place big bets on new ideas. Great. Any of […]

Textmate Snippet: Convert HTML entities for viewing code

Tuesday, January 1st, 2008 by Jesper Rønn-Jensen

Happy New Year everybody. Here is a tiny Textmate or E-Texteditor Snippet: Convert HTML entities for viewing code. I created this recently for a HTML cookbook on a project, where we made HTML pages showing HTML example code. It converts & to &amp; < to &lt; > to &gt; That’s it. Basically, I made a […]

Setting Up Subversion Externals With TortoiseSVN

Tuesday, October 23rd, 2007 by Jesper Rønn-Jensen

Just a tip I spent some time on figuring out: Found information today on how to use TortoiseSVN to manage svn:externals. I’m working on a big project where we need many different branches and parts to use the same css and images libraries throughout all subprojects. I had to Google to get the information on […]

Firefox Tip For Framebuster JavaScript

Monday, October 22nd, 2007 by Jesper Rønn-Jensen

I have for long been struggling with an internal legacy application that wraps the content page in a frameset. Very annoying because I have spent some time to reverse engineer a poor-mans API to the application. Problem: An inline “reverse” framebuster script that makes sure that everything is nicely(?) wrapped in the frameset. As you […]

Web Site Investigation Toolbox Update

Friday, October 12th, 2007 by Jesper Rønn-Jensen

bookmarlets.png I figured the original bookmarklet toolbox needed an update. Added Quirksmode detection, layout grid and updated PageInfo to accept framed pages.

Drop-shadows Don’t Fill Shopping Carts

Thursday, August 30th, 2007 by Jesper Rønn-Jensen

I think Zeldman has a fantastic point here: Drop-shadows don’t fill shopping carts. Aside from a few buttons and arrows, nearly all of the work of a user interface is performed by words. Yet most designers don’t question the text their clients dump on them, and most budgets don’t cover editing and writing. Learn how […]