VE Day in Montréal
In 1945, my grandmother worked in the Sun Life building in downtown Montréal. A gentleman in her office took pictures of the VE Day celebration from the 17th floor and on Ste-Catherine. He gave copies to my grandmother who passed…
Compile Groovy to Executable JAR
I’ve been working on automating some deployment tasks using Jenkins and Groovy. Fun stuff, but dealing with dependencies at runtime is a hassle. Yes, Maven will fetch everything you need, but sometimes you don’t have line-of-sight to Maven Central from…
Automated Testing of Lucene-Backed Search
The Problem Suppose you build a website about the history of fasteners. It will be full of solid information about bolts, nails, nuts, pins, clips, rivets, rods, screws, and washers. It will have all the bells and whistles, and all…
Jira for All
A bug tracker is an indispensable for grown-ups who write software for a living, and Jira is one of the best ones available. Over the last year my workplace has expanded its use if Jira from within the development team…
Again with the Books
Here’s a pair of notebooks I made for some friends. They are about 90 pages and have soft spines, but no headbands. The covering Japanese paper and bookcloth are from Au Papier Japonais. This store is gorgeous and deserves a…
Git, GIT_SSH, and SSH
As part of a project at work, a web application running in Tomcat must periodically pull files form Git. No, it’s not Jenkins. Usually it work a treat but getting it all working on Windows proved to be tricky, and…
A Noble Spirit Embiggens the Smallest Man
I wanted to try making my own 8.5×11 notebook for work and finished with a slightly flawed outcome. It may not be perfect, but it has heart. The big lesson here is you can get away with things on a…
Another Book
A small case-bound notebook, around 120 pages, covered with bookcloth I made over the holidays. Getting the pattern to align properly on the spine was a headache, but worth it. It gives a very crisp result. Unfortunatley, much of the…
Assessment of Technical Resolutions for 2014
It is with great pride I announce I have met a record 20% of my technical resolutions for 2014. In a feat of raw courage and perseverance I gave serious consideration to the other items well into the spring. I…
Replace XML Entities with Elements
Stuffing XML into someone else’s system is always a treat when there is no schema or DTD. It’s even more fun when the original dev teams on both sides have moved on, leaving no documentation whatever. The particular system I’m…