NewInstance

In this post I’ll discuss a technique to generate Microsoft Excel compatible files without any third party library and in an easier than ever manner. If you ever faced the problem of generating Excel report/export from your application, I guess you know libraries like Jakarta POI and its wonderful APIs on the “Horrible SpreadSheet Format”. [...]

I've just written this little tool to encode email templates into mailto URLs. It's based on URL Decoder/Encoder by Eric Meyer. Hope it could be useful to someone. The "to" field is mandatory. You can specify multiple values separated by comma. For more info on mailto URLs, see rfc2368. To download this script just grab [...]

Most of the times, you don't need to paginate on the client side: if you have an enough small set of records to be displayed, I would suggest you to choose a scrollable <div/>. Server-side web pagination is really needed when you have to display hundreds of records. You may fetch results from the DB [...]

LinkedIn is a web site that lets you build your business contact network and put online a sort of resume that people can search. Here is mine. Currently I’m looking for next occupation and I am evaluating some jobs. Observing the Italian IT landscape, the idea to go outside Italy is growing seriously. And it’s [...]

Since Google released Google Talk (GTalk) I started using it. I liked it because it is (or seems) lightweight, it’s easy, and it’s able to notify me when I receive a new mail on GMail account. Also some friends was using it, so I had enough contacts. The problem was that there are too many [...]

With Firefox you can define your preferences on how Firefox should display the web sites you visit. To do that, there’s a file called userContent.css in user home directory (in windows it’s placed on “C:\Documents and Settings\[user]\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\[8digits].default\chrome”); modifying this file you can, for example, modify default font style and size, to make website more [...]

Today I tried to use remote debugging with Eclipse and Tomcat. I usually use a Tomcat Sysdeo Plugin to run Tomcat inside Eclipse, but today I faced remote debugging. To run tomcat in remote debugging you can start it with command catalina jpda start But this will start remote debugging using shared memory, and Eclipse, [...]

I never understood why HTML spec, still links the action of a form to the form itself: in a form you may need more possibility (edit, delete, insert, etc...) and you'll have many buttons then, so I think that html should link the action to the button, like in any intelligent gui language.So it would [...]

First of all, I have to precise that I'm not a sysadmin, and you may not assume that the things as explained here are best way to handle the problem, or just that this is a correct one. This worked for me yesterday night, and I share my notes here so that I'll find this [...]

Working with my laptop on different places I often have to configure network settings. Fortunately I always work on places using DHCP, so this isn’t an issue. But I’ve still to waste time switching the proxy settings in browsers (IE, Firefox, Opera, Maxthon…). Of course there are plugins that handle proxy switching with less effort, [...]