HappyPappy Blog

As one of what I imagine is a minority of Canadians I thought I’d report my thought on this device.
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I have to say that so far I really like Wicket, after years of developing J2EE Web application it’s a big relief to be able to develop Web application without having to maintain reams of URL or Action mappings in XML files.

Wicket offers a programming paradigm much closer to standard Java Swing instead which makes Web development much smoother.

There are a few pitfalls unfortunately as nothing is perfect but so far it’s been great.

One problem I’ve run into is when using Wickets LinkTree component (an Ajax based explorer like tree structure) is that it assumes that I always want to do an Ajax update from the server. But what if I want to run some JavaScript or simply redirect based on the clicked node. Read the rest of this entry »

I originally got my inspiration from this article on how to send Javascript functions over JSON and most of this work here is based on it.

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Modern cameras have become very powerful and have myriads of features to help us take better and more pictures.

Unfortunately with all that power comes significant complexity which sometimes makes it hard to use these cameras and gear effectively.

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Oracle Components for Java (OC4J) is a top notch J2EE container based on the Orion J2EE Server.

OC4J provides a number of mechanisms for user authentication; the older less secure method which uses the principals.xml file and a newer method based on the Java Authentication and Authorization Service (JAAS) standard.

Oracle’s implementation of JAAS is known as JAZN (Java AuthoriZatioN).
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I recently attended a photography workshop by Darwin Wiggett and although I’ve been shooting pictures for a while it still turns out that I knew nothing (now I only know next to nothing) about photography.

If you want to gain an insight into how to take better pictures I highly recommend Darwins seminars, check out his web site for seminar dates.

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For all the times I was looking through a big project trying to find my TODO taks I’ve created an Eclipse plugin which helps track TODO tasks in any large Eclipse projects. Read the rest of this entry »

They say that as one gets older it becomes harder to learn new tricks and try new things. Accordingly I count myself lucky to be able to try new things even at my advanced age of 40 (and we’re not talking dog years here). Read the rest of this entry »

Introduction

A Trie (pronounce “try”) is a tree-based data structure in order to support fast pattern matching. The “trie” comes from the word “retrieval”.

This structure is particularly useful for any application requiring prefix based (read “starts with”) pattern matching.A good example is any kind of application where we let the user type and quickly come up with a list of words starting with what the user typed in. Read the rest of this entry »

I just bought myself a new budget server and was having no end of grief trying to straighten out the integrated video on the el-cheapo-grande motherboard (Asus K8S-MX). 

After hours of poking, prodding, loading and unloading and copious amounts of cussing I finally called upon a friend of mine who knows a lot more about computers that I ever will.

He gave me a few pointers and within fifteen minutes I had all my issues resolved.

If you’re having PC trouble save yourself the time and aggravation and look Tom up at Save the PC.

This is a true story and not a cheap promotional effort.