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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 [...]

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 [...]

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

I saw this example on a blog today:

(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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 — [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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, [...]

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 [...]

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$” [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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

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 [...]