Natural Born Coder

  • The having clause is used when filtering has to be performed on aggregate functions since the where clause can not be used in this situation. Since the having clause is often used in conjunction with the group by clause the…

  • The group by statement is generally used in conjunction with the various aggregate functions in order to produce results that are grouped by one or more columns. This is a very powerful way to report results for groups of results…

  • This page describes the initial set up of my MikroTik RB751G router with a Thompson Gateway TG585v7 BeBox. Although that sounds quite specific these settings are should work with most or all ADSL routers that are in bridge mode and…

  • Beginning with Expression Language (EL) 2.2 it is possible to call method with arguments. I feel that most of the time it is generally a good idea to try not to use this feature because it breaks the KISS principal…

  • A project I’m working on recently presented me with the problem of totally dynamically creating a data table on a JSF page. At first sight I assumed this would be fairly trivial since I had created a number of other…

  • I recently decided to try writing my own JSF component as I had a need that wasn’t met by the excellent PrimeFaces component library. I had read some horror stories about how hard it is to write custom components so I’d put…

  • I’ve been asked a couple of times recently about adding cover art to video files. This process will replace the default icon used, which is a frame from the film, with the DVD cover or any other artwork you want…

  • As we’ve now been using the Netflix service for a few weeks I though it was time for a bit of an update. Overall I’m still generally pleased with the service. The lack of a queue still bugs me but…

  • A project I have running at the moment may require the fairly rapid deployment of a number of servers so I decided to get a head start and have a play with Oracle VM 3 (and as Wikipedia says –…

  • One of the projects I’m currently working on requires me to build a component tree dynamically. To complicate matters the components also require ajax functionality – in this case they are panels that need to be closed and notify a…

  • After putting together the first page on writing a dynamic dashboard with PrimeFaces I descovered that the method I had come up with wasn’t as good as it could have been. Most noteably it didn’t work properly when the dashboard was…

  • After a long wait the UK finally has access to the Netflix film and television streaming service. We signed up on the day of release and after a few days of use I can say that over all I’m fairly pleased with…