Archive for the ‘Useful’ Category

Look Ma, no files! Portable object persistence

Friday, August 19th, 2011

Originally posted at JavaProgrammingForums.com Where can I store my application data? I see a lot of people starting threads because they're struggling to persist (often) a little bit of data from one run of their Java application to the next. The offered solutions are often some kind of jiggery-pokery involving java.io.File. Not ...

Foreign Exchange data from Central Bank of Russia

Friday, July 29th, 2011

[caption id="attachment_1302" align="alignright" width="128" caption="The Central Bank of the Russian Federation"][/caption] I've been re-jigging and polishing up some of the leftover code from spider.my and am now fairly happy with the way Shipping-Quote.net keeps its currency exchange rates up to date. I wanted to add another rates source just to fill ...

IE8 javascript not running from script element in head

Sunday, July 17th, 2011

After staring at other people's solutions to this problem for a day or so, I finally realised what I was doing wrong and thought I'd better share it, just in case you also fail to see for several hours how you caused the problem. I have a page that works ...

Having your own printer is so last century: online printing services

Friday, July 15th, 2011

We needed to send a couple of small documents by post and realised - while we are in the 'No Fixed Abode' phase of our Keep-It-Simple-Stupid plan to move back to the UK - that another thing we don't have in our luggage is a printer. We're currently using a ...

Wind power in Malaysia – the missing map

Monday, March 28th, 2011

[caption id="attachment_1252" align="alignright" width="150" caption="TNB's wind power in Malaysia map"][/caption] Just a quick note to myself really - many, many times online I'd replied to people saying "why doesn't Malaysia use wind power?" with my belief that it doesn't have any. I couldn't find a good source for that  before today, ...