bryandunn.com

It’s rare I deal with any kind of MS product. On occaision, when I develop a UI one of the last steps I take is to “debug” it in IE, or work around the general IE idiocy issues. That’s about it. My Xbox 360 has worked well for the last several years but I don’t [...]

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Last year at this time I took a Java programming class as a refresher as I hadn’t done much with Java since my days as an undergrad (and a few short programs in grad school). After primarily using Perl for the last 7 years, this was a big switch. The difficulty with Perl is that [...]

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I spent roughly 6 hours Sunday trying to fix the wrong bug. Long story long:
Due to a problem with the timezone on one of our database servers, the last two time changes caused several issues. Among them, a message from our mail software claiming we were trying to schedule a mailing for a time in [...]

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Took my first delve into google charts today and it was the balls. Gathered a bunch of data and had google charted it for me, all in less than an hour. Needed to find the number of occurrences of a problem one of our logging facilities was having per day and figure out if they [...]

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I spent an hour trying to figure out what a field in a fixed width file was being truncated by one character. This is what I found:
Definition
<header start=”1″ end=”8″>accountnum</header>
Calcuation
$length = $header->{end} – $header->{start}
Great, except that columns 1 THROUGH 8 total 8, not 7. Ugh.

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Interesting article on Agile/Scrum development process:
http://jamesshore.com/Blog/The-Decline-and-Fall-of-Agile.html

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This took me a few hours to figure out so I’m logging this here for my own sanity. If you have a bidirectional many-to-many mapping in Hibernate with a join table, the join table is only updated when the noninverse side of the mapping is inserted/updated. In the example below, the join table (pane_specs) is [...]

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Interesting post at O’Reilly about Perl and how some companies view it as the major problem behind legacy applications. Obviously false but it just goes to show that Perl should be “used by consenting adults” with some semblance of adherence to standards.
http://www.oreillynet.com/onlamp/blog/2008/08/why_corporates_hate_perl.html

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I’m currently maintaining a production application that has given me headaches since I started. It is less than two years old and meets all of it’s requirements, but it’s lack of maintainability has it slated to be rewritten in the next few months. Despite several subroutines that are more than 2000 SLOC I’ve sort of [...]

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Much to the dismay of many standards proponents, the OOXML office standard passed the fast track International Standards Organization (ISO) vote last week. For anyone reading this that doesn’t know what this was all about here’s a quick rundown:
Despite the dominant market postion held by Microsoft, some companies had started moving away from using Microsoft [...]

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