After reading my last blogpost on Anonimatron, you must have asked yourself "Great, but how do I actually use Anonimatron to de-personalize my database"? I tried my best to make basic Anonimatron configuration as self-explanatory as possible, just start it without any command line arguments and it will tell …

In every software project, there comes a time where a bug pops up, nobody knows how to reproduce it, and somebody says "I know, let's test this against a copy of the production database". Even with the best intentions, once production data leaves the production machine with all its safeguards it becomes …

In my morse training adventure on lcwo.net, I hit a slight bump in the road. At Koch lesson 33 (of 40 lessons total), I can't seem to copy with 90% accuracy, which is the criterea for moving to the next lesson. See my downward trend here. It is partly because of gradually speeding up the Farnsworth timing from 10wpm to …

Dear Keith, I read your letter about Skitch and would like to respond to all that has happened from my end-user perspective. I am a long-time Evernote user and fan. Evernote changed note taking by being truly searchable. I can confidently drop all the websites, receipts, todos and ideas in there, and clear my mind of …

Want to save a single email from gmail to disk, in a readable format for Outlook, Thunderbird or Apple Mail? Here's how: 1. Open your browser and log into your gmail account. 2. Open the email you want to save. 3. On the top-right, there is a little triangle next to the "Reply" button. Click that, and select …

You know how it is on vacation. You take your camera, shoot pictures, and when you get home you see that you forgot to set the date/time on your camera. Even worse: your wife also took a camera with her, and she actually read the manual and set the time correctly. So now you have two sets of photos with mismatching …

A few months ago we had a problem where Eclipse could not automatically run all jUnit unit tests in a package if that package references a class called "enum", which is a reserved word in Java 1.6. I'll spare you the details, but we were forced to create a TestSuite. Normally we avoid this construction …

As you may know I started working on a little tool to anonymize databases. Nothing fancy, just a Java tool that uses jdbc to replace live data with fake generated data which still looks representative enough to do testing and make believable screenshots. Oh and did I mention that it is 100% free of charge? You can get …

In Java, the DateFormat.parse() method is a funny little critter. It helps you by trying to figure out what date you actually meant when you typed in "35/12/2O10" (note the letter "O" in 2O10). In this case, it will parse the date without errors or warnings, and returns the date "11/12/04" …

During one of my Omniplan sessions at work, I discovered that the resource leveling was acting a bit funny, where people were not planned to do any work for days. I played around with a fake planning and soon discovered the problem and several solutions to it. Imagine you have a 1-man project, with a couple of tasks. …