I recently had an error loading a Java project in Netbeans – whenever I selected it, I’d get this: How to fix After some Googling, the fix appears to be commenting out the <parent> tag from the project’s pom.xml file. <!–<parent> <groupId>foo</groupId> <artifactId>bar</artifactId> <version>1.0.0</version> </parent>–> File this under “I have no idea how, but it fixes the problem”.
Day six and Lady Luck finally flashed me her brassiere. Met a mope named Gilles said he had a lead. An artist surprise surprise. Unshaven, unintelligible, and stinking of wine, I went to meet him. Told him I had more leads than a dog-walker – and more balls. When he finished talking my jaw was on the floor. So was the rest of my face; I passed out. This thing… Read More »Paris Update in Film Noir #3
The plane landed like a legless cat on a sidewalk. My ears rang worse than Notre Dame. I shoulda told the broad in 4B to pipe down, but along with locks I’ve learned to pick my battles. First day back in Paris and it’s like I never left. Cigarette smoke burning the inside of my nose, money burning the inside of my pocket. Last night I scoped a place called… Read More »Paris Update in Film Noir #2
I recently went on a trip to Paris to visit family, and decided to post status updates in a Film Noir detective style. I woke up feeling like I’d been eating gravel. But those days are behind me so it had to be the bourbon. The plane shook like a dame trembling in the rain and my nerves rattled more than the windows, but I could fix that with a… Read More »Paris Update in Film Noir #1
I recently read a fascinating article by Thomas Baekdal about why the password “this is fun” is 10x more secure than “JS4!2” – I highly recommend taking a look at it. His point is essentially that passwords need not trade readability and memorability for secureness. But, although the issue of password complexity vs security is interesting, it seems to me almost pointless to address it until we find solutions to… Read More »You Shall Not Password!: An Evil Plan
We recently had an interesting discussion at work about our UI paradigms. Let’s assume we have an information management system which allows you to create, manipulate and link objects which represent, say, Persons and Dogs. Now assume that through a wizard, we allow a user to link a Person to a Dog as an “Owner”. Lastly, let’s imagine a scenario in which the Person is already linked to a Dog,… Read More »Click it Twice, Shame On You
Biomechanically, I am not the man I was when last I typed at this laptop. I sit before you now with only one pleura. Technically, half of me is breathing like an elephant.
To drop the epic wordage for a moment, I’ve just come back from a stay in hospital after receiving a pleurectomy, an operation which basically consists of removing the lung’s protective outer-layer and gluing your lung to your chest wall. This was sadly a necessary step after falling prey to a second collapsed lung.
So how to summarise the whole experience? I’m now short a pleura, I have 5 new scars and I partially breathe like an elephant.
The “Doors to Heaven and Hell” riddle. It’s an oldie and a goodie. I’m sure everyone’s pretty familiar with it, but in case you’re not here’s a quick recap: Bad news, you’ve just died. You find yourself in a nondescript hallway with two identical doors, each guarded by a man. You realise you’re holding a scrap of paper. It reads: 1. One of these doors leads to Heaven, one leads… Read More »But would they be neighbours like this?
So, my lung collapsed on Tuesday 22nd of June. I woke up at my usual time, stood up, sat down. Stood up, tried to stretch, sat down again. It felt like a lead ball was sitting in my chest – every time I tried to take a breath, it would send a wave of – not pain – discomfort across my upper body. I shuffled around for a while, giving… Read More »Lead Balloon
Some guys at work ran into an interesting problem yesterday: since upgrading to VS2010, they found none of their breakpoints were being hit when debugging their apps. Without giving too much away, my work consists of writing .NET apps which run on top of a custom platform application we’ve developed. These apps are compiled to .NET 2.0. Debugging typically involves setting our platform app as the startup program to debug… Read More »Debugging .NET 2.0 apps in Visual Studio 2010