If you're working on some source code and you quickly need to insert a hexadecimal color code for a color you currently have on your screen, then here is a neat little trick I found: First, install Hex Color Picker by Waffle software. It will add an extra option to the built-in OSX color picker to show you the selected …

On StackOverflow, there is a question asking for the greatest programmer quotes you know. In the top 3 quotes are the following two quotes which I think hold much truth: _**"Always code as if the guy who ends up maintaining your code will be a violent psychopath who knows where you live."**_ - Rick Osborne …

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 …

When using POI in any of your projects, and the application you're building is a web application, you probably have it running on a Windows machine. If not, you know all about the struggle with the "headless mode" environment setting to tell the JVM how to handle graphics rendering. I always like to keep my …

I found a nice blog post which describes how it is after you leave school and start programming for a real company. You discover that programming is more like 80% reading and 20% coding. Read the article at the Tired Architect's blog titled "Hacking Your Way Through Codebases".

At work we were testdriving SourceForge Enterprise Edition. It is a great system to keep all your project information, source code, documents, bug reports and changes together, and linked. As you may have noticed, the pricing model of the Enterprise Edition is a well kept secret on the site. Our management bargained …

Recently we had a problem connecting to our GForge CVS through SSH. We added the public RSA key to the GForge user, but because of wrong configuration on the client we tried to connect a couple of times with the wrong key. After a while the GForge CVS will return the following error: Received disconnect from : 2: Too …

Today I spent some time figuring out what the exact format of the CVS comment is when I want to link a commit to a GForge tracker item. I'll try to explain it a bit simpler: * We have [GForge](http://gforge.org/) installed at work. We use GForge to manage a software project for a customer. * The customer reports a bug …