NewInstance

Locking is a technique used for concurrent manipulation of shared data. Locking is not only related to databases: for instance you use locking in Java to synchronize multithreaded access to shared objects residing in memory. Here I am not going to talk specifically about Java locking or database locking, but only how conceptually locking works [...]

I’ve successfully installed Microsoft Office XP on Linux using Wine. It works quite fine and it’s really fast. I got some problems with Macros in Excel, and in particular I was getting the error “Error accessing file. Network connection may have been lost” on every startup. But I found a way to avoid that annoying [...]

Sometime ago I wrote a watchdog against SSH login attacks. After that simple class, I started working – actually not much! – on a more flexible and configurable watchdog engine. But nothing came out so far. The codebase is short and quite good I think, and I was implementing that using TDD approach (only on [...]

Recently I am getting annoyed by an Internet Service Provider Company from Italy that I was using more than 2 years ago. They made me crazy at that time: I was calling the support and they were very rude and incompetent. They was charging me the double price for the service, so after some time, [...]

Who designed Windows Mobile should be killed, but very slowly… I have an HTC3300 with Windows Mobile 5.0, and as a phone, my Nokia 3210 was much better. Also my Palm Tungsten T2 was much better to handle contacts, TODO lists, calendar, notes, etc. Actually I continue using the Tungsten T2 as PIM, because of [...]

Always dealing with optimized code of incredibly slow and buggy applications… Some of my favorite quotes against premature optimization following. More computing sins are committed in the name of efficiency (without necessarily achieving it) than for any other single reason — including blind stupidity. – William A. Wulf We should forget about small efficiencies, say [...]

This is a story about a problem that can happen if your web application has operations that will require a long time (let’s say more than 30 seconds) to generate a response for the browser. Figuring out what is happening, could not always be so easy. Especially if you didn’t wrote the application and the [...]

Today I got this error message on my blog. WordPress database error: [Can't open file: 'wp_comments.MYI'. (errno: 145)] It’s not the first time. Last time I solved quickly searching on google what the “errno: 145″ is. I found it is a database corruption problem. I don’t know why that happened, I guess spammers are exaggerating [...]

I’ve made some refactoring to make JRainbow support several languages. The result is that now JRainbow supports XML coloring. To learn more about JRainbow source code colorer, check the JRainbow Project Website. Here you can try it right now: XML sintax coloring is almost complete, just need some improvement to support inline DTDs.

In my swing application the requirement was that the user had to be able to issue an action, from a menu or from a button, that generates a letter from a defined msword template filled with data load from the database. Then the application should launch msword to make a preview that the user can [...]