The last few weeks I was frustrated about not being able to write any code for the project I am on at work. My days are filled with email, spreadsheets, documents, discussions and distractions. All important stuff, I'm sure, but none of it has got to do with actual coding. I tried to write code during the evenings for …

Last wednesday I was at J-Fall 2008, a fairly large event for Java programmers in the Netherlands. This event is organized by NLJUG. You can read some of my notes on the different sessions in my public evernote. Here's a one-minute impression of what J-Fall looked like this year: …

At work, we've got two Oracle databases and a Java web application. One of the tasks of the web application is to copy tables over from one database to the other. Last week we ran into a funny problem which turns out to be an Oracle bug. I've posted a question about this last week on stackoverflow.com but it seems that …

I ran across this wiki page which has a nice piece on the virtues of a good programmer. I found it so recognizable that I decided to copy it over for you to enjoy: _**"We will encourage you to develop the three great virtues of a programmer: laziness, impatience, and hubris."**_** **-- Larry Wall, Programming Perl (1st …

As I explained earlier, I think it is really important to go beyond the specs. It's really important to put care and attention in your product. The new version of iTunes has a great (little) example of what I mean. I use Itunes to play music through both the computer speakers and a stereo in the livingroom, connected …

I had a 160GB drive holding my Time Machine backups. Because I wanted to backup external disks, and still wanted to be able to travel about a year back in time, I bought a 1TB USB disk. Stephen Foskett wrote a great article about how he migrated his TimeMachine backup to a larger disk, but it's lengthy and misses one …

I just bought a Maxtor Basics 1TB drive, and found that I could not seem to format it using the Leopard Diskutility. Then, I found this page which contained the golden tip. I'll save you some reading: 1. Open Apple's Disk Utility 2. Click on the drive (not the partition in it, if there is any), and select …

In Windows, there is a great tool called "PureText" which sits in your tray, and can remove formatting from copy/paste actions if you want to. In stead of pasting into notepad, and then copying it again, you now can use the Windows-V combination to paste without formatting. It works in any program, and I'm a …

My wife has this great Macbook Pro 15", and I "don't mind" using it every now and then. I noticed that when running on batteries, screen updates are a bit strange: * When scrolling down a webpage, the page get garbled. Scrolling the garbled piece out of the window and in again sometimes fixes it. * When …

My Nokia 6300 behaves like a flash or thumb drive when I connect it to a computer using an USB cable. I think this should be standard functionality nowadays. Cellphones are replacing the Filofax and MP3 players. I can read mail on my cellphone, take pictures and movies. It contains an 4GB memory stick, sometimes even …