Natural Born Coder

  • In my day job I have the unenviable task of looking after our connection to a SharePoint server. I say unenviable because if there’s one thing that is going to go wrong this connection or something to do with it…

  • I enjoy a good film and in my youth I used to love going to the cinema but as I got older I found the cinema became far too expensive for the reward and I just didn’t have the time…

  • I’ve just started learning Spring / Spring Boot so I’m at that stage where I’m making all the stupid beginner mistakes. In the past I used to catalogue the problems I hit, especially when learning a new technology. A few…

  • I’ve recently switched from Picasa (which has been retired) to Digikam for photo management and I’ve noticed a few quirks that I need to document to or I’ll forget them. For the most part Digikam is a massive upgrade over Picasa but…

  • When I set up my QEMU virtual machine system I made a couple of mistakes. As I was running on a host that had very limited resources I made the virtual machines as small as I possibly could and that…

  • I hate to think how many computers I’ve built and installed over the years. I’ve found that there are a core set of utilities that I keep coming back to that I’ve found really useful on most installs. As I…

  • In this article I discuss cPanel addon domain management and what you need to do to prevent your website being accessible by multiple different domain names when you run more than one site using cPanel (known as add-on domains). You…

  • I’m not normally one to complain about Windows, there’s more than enough people doing more than enough complaining about it that I don’t feel the need to add my own frustrations but the start menu made something snap inside me…

  • The project I’m working on at the moment requires me to achieve the fastest updates I can into a moderate sized SQL Server database table. My initial attempts were adequate for the testing I was doing on my development machine…

  • I generally develop any Java applications I’m working on in NetBeans and while I prefer to use GlassFish as a container I find myself using Tomcat quite a bit. Unfortunately the debugging connection between NetBeans and Tomcat can sometimes be…

  • When I installed my Ubuntu Linux virtual machines I just let the installer do whatever it felt was right in terms of disk partitioning. In hindsight that was probably a mistake because it gave me a separate 256Mb boot partition.…

  • I wouldn’t normally stick my head above the parapet and write a post like this but DRM on ebooks really annoys me as it impacts my enjoyment of the books I’ve bought. I personally find the default option of black…