Daniel Wintschel is humandoing

Here is a handy web tool for checking the validity of JSON. I’ve been generating a lot of funny custom JSON lately, and every now and again I get it wrong. When jQuery gets ahold of invalid JSON data on a $.getJSON call, it fails silently, which can leave you with a head-scratcher, until you [...]

After sitting on the code for JarIndexer for about 5 years, I finally got around to throwing it out to the world on GitHub. I’m hoping a few people who use it decide to take it and run with it – or at least enjoy the open sourced version.

I’ve started to use Paperclip on a pet project I’m working on (a recommendation from Josh Owens), and the API is great, except for the fact that I couldn’t get it to work. Files were being uploaded fine, but my thumbnail and other variations were not generating. The documentation says that the whiny_thumbnails option defaults [...]

It’s a typical story. Dan on a rescue mission, fixing a mess that some clown(s) left behind. PHP. No framework to speak of, riddled with SQL injection holes, a TABLE-based layout – and it doesn’t get any better from there. For the love of all things holy, why do people have to do stuff like [...]

Avdi Grim has begun a thought-provoking series surrounding the idea of sustainable software development – specifically targeting Ruby as an example. With some of the recent discussion surrounding “monkey patching” in Ruby, I think that the timing seems about right, for some serious thought to be given about the long-term effects of maintaining Ruby-based code-bases, [...]

I’ve just been doing some reading up on some various Java documentation – and came across the list of new language features in Java 5 (yeah – I know, we’re at 6 now). At any rate, I came across this gem about static imports, copied verbatim from Sun’s online documentation: So when should you use [...]

A couple weeks ago I ran into some horrible issues with Oracle and activerecord-jdbc. Inserts were failing with an “invalid column index” error. It turns out this was reported as JRUBY-2018 and resolved, but there wasn’t a release of activerecord-jdbc that contained the fix. Being impatient like I am, I grabbed the head from svn [...]

I don’t have time to write a detailed review right now, but I just had to tell the world (AKA the 6 people that read this blog) – that FogBugz 6.0 kicks the ever-loving-crap out of JIRA. JIRA looks like a poorly made web-toy from 1997 compared to the responsive, rich, intuitive, friendly, and dare [...]

A new article I wrote recently has been published at last. Since even looking at JSF makes me want to die, I think this little AjaxTags is a nice Ajax library for those of you still using JSP. I’ve started on Wicket this week, which thus far is really impressing me. Sorry I haven’t been [...]

TOAD connected to Oracle Enterprise installed on Windows XP which is a Virtual Machine in Parallels running on my MacBook Pro. Cygwin for OpenSSH in order to access a remote Oracle database behind a firewall through a port-forwarded SSH tunnel. Sheesh. Oracle. Pain.