Year: 2012

  • Providing EL Access for Beans

    There are a lot of good ideas in JEE but there are also some sharp corners that the unwary developer could hurt themselves on. Over the next few articles I’m going to point out a few of these less than brilliant pieces of design so that hopefully you’ll be able to avoid them. This article…

  • Google Analytics Data Ranges

    I use Google Analytics to monitor the number of visits I get to this website. For the most part I find Google Analytics to be an exceptionally well put together service but, as with a lot of Google tools, there are a few sharp edges that just never seem to get fixed.

  • Applying Updates on ESXi 5

    I was recently faced with the task of having to apply updates to an server running ESXi 5. Now, you would think that this would be a pretty simple job but it actually turned out to be more difficult that I would have though. The main problem was that I couldn’t find any concise instructions.…

  • Monitoring an LSI MegaRAID on ESXi 5

    I’ve been installing a new ESXi 5 based VMWare server recently. The machine contains an LSI MegaRAID 9260-4i RAID card and four decent sized disks. The host operating system installed fine and I thought everything was going well until I got almost to the point of completion when I went to check that error reporting…

  • Epic Template Modifications

    This site currently uses the JSN Epic template by JoomlaShine. While I’m normally allergic to spending money I felt I had to cough up some cash and buy this template as I use it in a few places and a good amount of work has clearly gone into it.

  • LSI MegaRAID Firmware Upgrade under VMWare

    I was recently faced with the task of upgrading the firmware on an LSI MegaRAID 9260-4i RAID card. Normally this would be a fairly simple process as LSI provide an easy to use command line utility called MegaCLI. The difficulty was using this utility on a machine that was running VMWare ESXi 5 Update 1.…

  • MySQL JDBC Connection Pool in GlassFish

    Creating a connection pool should be a simple and straight forward task in an application server but sometimes it just becomes unnecessarily difficult. That is completely true for creating MySQL connections pools in all versions of GlassFish from 3 onwards.

  • JavaFX 2 Generic Editable Table Cells

    A few days ago I wrote an article which gave a more complete example of editable table cells in JavaFX 2.0. In that article I promised another article discussing how to make generic editable tables cells since the first article just expected everything to be a string. I’m fairly happy with this solution to the…

  • Switching on Hyper-V Management

    I recently installed Hyper-V on a spare machine to have a bit of a play with it and to find out if it would be suitable for a little virtualization I would like to do. Everything was going really well up to the point where I wanted to manage the server. For the life of…

  • OS Install from USB Stick

    I’ve recently found myself having to do a fair bit of system administration work which makes an interesting change from the usual software development. My current project is to put together a beefy server which will run a few databases and other web applications. Ideally I’d like to run these on separate machines (virtual or…

  • Upgrading a MikroTik Router

    MikroTik release updated versions of RouterOS on a fairly regular basis and it is normally a good idea to update your router when they become available. Upgrading is a fairly painless process but I found the instructions given on the website were a little out of date.

  • Fixing the MikroTik Router After an Upgrade

    I recently upgraded from RouterOS V5.13 to V5.16. The interface is a bit nice to look at (especially in the web configuration tool) and there is now a quick setup window in WinBox. The only downside of the upgrade is that all of a sudden my Internet connection stopped working.