Natural Born Coder

  • Neatbeans 7.3 has just been released (yeah) and, like every release it has brought a host of new bugs with it. I try not to document bugs because they tend not to be around for very long and bug databases…

  • I’ve run more Tomcat services than I care to think about and I reckon I’ve probably seen just about every different way they can fail now. The failure mode I describe here seems to catch me out every time though…

  • I seem to end up looking this one up everytime I install a new instance of SQL Server so I’m sure I can’t be the only one. The default backup path for SQL Server is somewhere deep in the Program…

  • Well here’s something I didn’t expect, the delete confirmation dialog has been removed from Windows 8 by default. Now, when you press the delete key the item goes straight to the recycle bin without stopping to ask you is you…

  • I recently took the plunge and installed Windows 8 which meant re-installing Picasa. As I had to go through the pain of installing a new operating system and all my applications I thought I might as well get a solid…

  • As a general rule I don’t include license information at the top of each source file (I’m sure a lawyer would be outraged)  because no one but me should ever see the source. I’ve recently started work on an open…

  • I, as I suspect you also do, use the JavaFX Scene Builder to put together your JavaFX interfaces. There’s certainly still work to be done on Scene Builder but even now I prefer it to any of the GUI builders…

  • In an earlier article I gave a complete break down of how to write a generic editable table cell. I’ve found versions of this code posted around the place so I thought it was only right that I point out a…

  • So you want to develop websites for a living and you don’t know much about software / web development. Ok, my first piece of advice to you (unless you are really young e.g. still at school) is don’t bother. If…

  • I was recently copying some code from one project to another (yes, we all do it) and I hit a problem – it wouldn’t run. The error message was less than useful as shown below.

  • I recently tested this site using this online website performance tool: Web Page Test and I thought I’d share some of the results and what I did to improve them. You can also try YSlow however this will generally give you a result…

  • I’ve been working with the built in Java XML libraries quite a bit lately and one of the things I’ve noticed is that there are very few good snippets of what I call recipe code – little bits of code…