Developer Tidbits

I had been using Moniwiki for our company for a while because the installation was quite easy as it was PHP based. However, I found out that document versioning didn't really work. It may have been a configuration issue but I took this opportunity to take a look at MoinMoin, as it was being used by Ubuntu and looked well supported. The server was running Debian stable and MoinMoin was in the repositories. Installing was simple using aptitude. Configuration was a bit more involved as it required copying and editing files. The new wiki site was pleasantly more responsive. The next task was to move the data in Moniwiki to MoinMoin. Upon inspecting the data repositories, I realized that Moniwiki stored the data in individual files with the WikiWord as the filename while MoinMoin organized that data with the WikiWord as a directory with the actual content under the revisions directory. I cooked up a quick script to migrate the data. I also ran the previous file through a 'tr' to...

I just did the Nokia Software Update for my Nokia N80 last night. It took 3 hours to download the 78MB update. It's now running the N80 Internet Edition. However, when I restored my previous backup, the new Internet Folder disappeared. Gizmovoip also responds with a "Unable to configure GizmoVoip" when I tried to run that. I'm reinstalling the firmware again and will synchronize instead of restore. I'll lose my SMS messages and will have to reinstall applications but I guess that's the price of having a nice VOIP phone.

A tool I use to visualize what to do for the year is David Seah's Compact Calendar. He provides an Excel worksheet which you can customize for your own use. Discussing project schedules with other people is also breeze when using this tool. You'll probably throw away your desk calendar once you start using this. Download the 2007 Philippine Version .

You actually don't need to install JInitiator (jinit 1.3.1.21) to run Oracle Applications on Firefox if you already installed the Sun JRE 1.4.2 and above. You will need to edit pluginreg.dat On Windows, that file is located at %APPDATA%\Mozilla\Firefox. Make a copy of the existing one first in case something goes wrong. Search for NPJava14.dll because Oracle runs on Java 1.4. This will appear whether you have installed Java 5 or 6. You will need to add the following line to at the end of the plugins. 6|application/x-jinit-applet;version=1.3.1.21|Java||$ Then update the count at the top of the section. Your modified pluginreg.dat will look like: C:\Program Files\Java\jre1.5.0_09\bin\NPJava14.dll|$ |$ 1160594743000|1|5|$ Java Plug-in 1.5.0_09 for Netscape Navigator (DLL Helper)|$ Java(TM) 2 Platform Standard Edition 5.0 Update 9|$ 7 0|application/x-java-applet;version=1.4.2|Java Applet||$ 1|application/x-java-bean;version=1.4.2|JavaBeans||$ 2|application/x-java-applet;version=1.4.1|J...

The following are useful tips for non-Java people like me. Adding Groovy support to iReport should do the trick but it requires an additional library. The tricky part with iReport variables is getting the data types to match. The highlighting feature of Eclipse BIRT is much better than how it is being done in iReport/Jasperreports. I usually use an arrow character than changing the background color as it looks cleaner in the report design. Accessing variables, parameters and fields $P{fieldName} - is for parameter $F{fieldName} - is for fields $V{variableName} - is for variables To highlight a row when it reaches a certain condition: 1. Add a text field 2. In the properties under PrintWhenExpression: new Boolean($F{owner}.equals("username")) The key thing here is that if the field owner is true, it will print the text field. To set a default date: new SimpleDateFormat("yyyyMMdd").parse("20050101") To show overall statistics on the first page of the r...

If your Eclipse BIRT report suddenly runs with errors after upgrading to BIRT 2.1.1, check if your SQL statement contains any division expression (i.e. SELECT month, sales / 12 FROM table1). This is a bug in 2.1.1 which was corrected in 2.2. Unfortunately, 2.2 is still a milestone release (not stable). As discussed in this newsgroup thread , the solution (until 2.2 is released), is to download rcp-report-designer-2.2.0 and copy the oda-jdbc.jar found in: birt-rcp-report-designer-2_2_0\plugins\org.eclipse.birt.report.data.oda.jdbc_2.2.0.v20061009-0630 and replace the oda-jdbc.jar found at: eclipse\plugins\org.eclipse.birt.report.data.oda.jdbc_2.1.1.v20060922-1058 You will need to replace the oda-jdbc.jar in the webviewer if you are using it. I would have upgraded to 2.2M1 if the webviewer was working right.