Author: ericblue

Essential Eclipse Plugins

Reading Time: 2 minutesI’ve been using Eclipse now for a few years (Since version 2.1), and one of its best features is the great selection of plugins. The de-facto sight for getting the latest and greatest plugins is at http://eclipse-plugins.2y.net/. This site has really helped me find a great selection. The following list is only a *fraction* of…
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Getting XMLSpy to support EXSLT dynamic functions

Reading Time: < 1 minuteRecently I have been using XSLT to transform XML from one format to the other. I use Xalan (for Java) in the application itself, but often develop and debug with XMLSpy. I needed a way for XSLT to dynamically evaluate and select a given string, and found no easy way to do this other than…
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Real Rhapsody uses SQLite for its database

Reading Time: < 1 minuteBy shear coincidence this evening, I discovered that Real Rhapsody is using SQLite for it’s local cache. After some brief inspection, it looks like this db is used to store playlists, user credentials, radio stations, and info about music that was imported from local disk. I thought this was pretty cool since I’m a big…
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Persistence Strategies: DAO (Data Access Objects) and ORM (Object-Relational Mapping) – Part 2

Reading Time: 3 minutesArticle 2: DAO – Data Access Objects Some time has passed since my first posting. My investigation on persistence originally focused on DAOs. I was looking for a relatively simple way to persist data, without a full-blown persistence solution (like Hibernate, OJB, or iBatis). Before I get too far ahead, a definition of DAOs are…
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Persistence Strategies: DAO (Data Access Objects) and ORM (Object-Relational Mapping) – Part 1

Reading Time: 2 minutesArticle 1: Overview I’ve been working on some recent projects, both personal and professional, where the topic of object persistence has come up. As I’ve learned over the last few months, while this is certainaly a common problem and there are no shortage of solutions out there, this can be a challenging area. While researching…
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Software for tracking your book collection

Reading Time: 2 minutesLast year I started looking for a better way to keep track of all my books. Over the last 10 years, I’ve accumulated dozens and dozens of books. Most of them are currently at home, however I have a number of books at my office, my home where I grew up, and have lent many…
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Tools/tips for helping with organization

Reading Time: < 1 minuteHere are some tools and suggestions to help organize projects, documentation, etc. I’ve tried a lot of things in the past, but here are some things that I’ve been doing recently: Project Management I’ve been using a program called GoalCentrix for the past 6 months. I’m pretty happy with it, but I still prefer using…
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MusicPlasma… a new innovative music search tool

Reading Time: < 1 minuteI discovered yet another interesting site from del.icio.us today. MusicPlasma is a flash web interface that allows you to search for music artists that are similar to your search criteria. What’s impressive is the way that the results are displayed. The graphical interface allows you to see which artists are most popular, how closely they…
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Quote of the day and words to live by

Reading Time: < 1 minuteI’m in the middle of reading Turning Numbers into Knowledge: Mastering the Art of Problem Solving. At the end of each chapter is a relevant quote, and I found one that is definitely worth sharing. To laugh often and much; to win the respect of intelligent people and the affection of children; to earn the…
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Adding navigator filters to Eclipse 2.x

Reading Time: 2 minutesFor the last year or so, I’ve been using Eclipse as my IDE. One limitation that I’ve noticed with Eclipse 2.1 is the inability to customize file extention filters. These filters are important because every time you checkout files from the CVS repository a new CVS subdirectory is created. And, each time you recompile, there…
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