Natural Born Coder

  • Well here’s something I didn’t expect, the delete confirmation dialog has been removed from Windows 8 by default. Now, when you press the delete key the item goes straight to the recycle bin without stopping to ask you is you…

  • I recently took the plunge and installed Windows 8 which meant re-installing Picasa. As I had to go through the pain of installing a new operating system and all my applications I thought I might as well get a solid…

  • As a general rule I don’t include license information at the top of each source file (I’m sure a lawyer would be outraged)  because no one but me should ever see the source. I’ve recently started work on an open…

  • I, as I suspect you also do, use the JavaFX Scene Builder to put together your JavaFX interfaces. There’s certainly still work to be done on Scene Builder but even now I prefer it to any of the GUI builders…

  • In an earlier article I gave a complete break down of how to write a generic editable table cell. I’ve found versions of this code posted around the place so I thought it was only right that I point out a…

  • So you want to develop websites for a living and you don’t know much about software / web development. Ok, my first piece of advice to you (unless you are really young e.g. still at school) is don’t bother. If…

  • I was recently copying some code from one project to another (yes, we all do it) and I hit a problem – it wouldn’t run. The error message was less than useful as shown below.

  • I recently tested this site using this online website performance tool: Web Page Test and I thought I’d share some of the results and what I did to improve them. You can also try YSlow however this will generally give you a result…

  • I’ve been working with the built in Java XML libraries quite a bit lately and one of the things I’ve noticed is that there are very few good snippets of what I call recipe code – little bits of code…

  • I’ve just added a couple of new projects to my Hudson CI system and I noticed that one of the projects, which was configured to build with Java 7, had every test fail with an exception. I decided to use…

  • In the past I have always used either JDOM or Dom4J to interact with XML but I’ve never really been overly happy with either library. JDOM is very simple to use and great for simple XML structures but as soon…

  • Java has a wide selection of built in XML handling capabilities but they are little used by most developers because they are felt, unfairly I think, to be difficult to use. I freely admit that I fell into that camp…