betweenGo

• Ignore Files and Directories in Subversion. A little bit of a pain but it works. http://bit.ly/99GLxk #
• How to Achieve Painless Registration. Getting people to register is always bedeviling for web application developers. http://bit.ly/9AJqmg #

Ruby on Rails

• Numeric data types and zerofill. Explains what all those int(11) columns are in your Ruby on Rails tables. http://bit.ly/9Tcf7q #
• undefined local variable or method "acts_as_list"? – Ruby Forum. Do ruby script/plugin install acts_as_list http://bit.ly/9kFWbG #
• ruby on rails : adding child records to an existing parent without visiting the parent – Stack Overflow http://bit.ly/cQiGSP #
• Multi-Table Inheritance in Rails – When two tables are one… This is not easy and I wish it was. http://bit.ly/9fbzgk #
• has_many :through – count vs length vs size. Use count if u don’t want to load the contents of association into memory. http://bit.ly/dtqXe1 #
• A gentle reminder about pluralizations. config/initializers/inflections.rb to customize pluralizations in Ruby on Rails http://bit.ly/bN9GO5 #
• Ruby on Rails – Rails Migrations Cheatsheet – Dizzy. Pretty helpful. http://bit.ly/9wNvRx #
• RailsGuides Migrations. Nice guide, especially about explaining the naming convention which I don’t like. http://bit.ly/cjZ7aB #

ATG

• Configuring ATG to Send Email via Comcast SMTP – betweenGo. Configuring your ATG app to use your ISP’s SMTP server. http://bit.ly/7M5bhx #
• Enabling non-XA Resources in JBoss 4.2 with ATG – betweenGo. http://bit.ly/aDN3Po #
• Combining XML in ATG – betweenGo. Combining XML files not as straight-forward as w/ properties files but more flexible. http://bit.ly/8kVwvA Jan 12 12:00 PM

Eclipse

• Debugging Applications in IBM Rational Application Developer. Page 12 for how to set up server for debugging. http://bit.ly/aaYUHb #

JavaScript

• How can I submit a form along with some parameters using JavaScript? (JSF forum at JavaRanch). Answer #3 was helpful. http://bit.ly/b17ymm #

JSP

• Testing Which Page Loaded your JSP Page Fragment – betweenGo. Simple enough to do w/ JSTL but I always forget how. http://bit.ly/cEh7IZ #

Miscellaneous

• Cygwin 1.7.x, mounts and /etc/fstab – betweenGo. Mounts are no longer saved from session to session in Cygwin 1.7. http://bit.ly/bmaYEu #
• Git in 5 Minutes http://bit.ly/bSt3dd and Git for the lazy – Spheriki http://bit.ly/aefD17 #
• The Thing About Git. Nice article describing how flexible Git is, especially compared to SVN. I may never use SVN again http://bit.ly/bD0tuS #
• I use DreamHost and am shamelessly plugging them both for a referral and to try to win an iPad. Honestly they’re great. http://bit.ly/ctYv3Z #

• Undefined – betweenGo. Turns out there are at least two ways to determine if something is undefined in JavaScript. http://bit.ly/4Q98X5 #
• NullPointerException in ATG OrderDiscountCalculator – betweenGo. Fortunately fix was simple. Notifying @atg_support. http://bit.ly/84iTKB #

• ATG Date Tag Converter is Buggy because Java’s DateFormat are inherently unsafe for multithreaded use. http://bit.ly/4VmN3l #
• Covariant Return Types in Java – betweenGo. It is nice to be able to override the return type. http://bit.ly/51JpAt #
• JavaServer Pages (JSP) and JSTL – attribute items does not accept any expressions. I was getting this because wrong URI http://bit.ly/5j5b3I #

• Seth’s Blog: “What do you need me to do?” Seth says it’s not good to ask that, better instead to describe solutions. http://bit.ly/34q59p #
• Version Control with Subversion. Undoing changes or rolling back to a previous version. Very simple. http://bit.ly/h0iOD #

• How to Debug an InvalidVersionException from Updating an ATG Order. Eclipse debugging and JSP debug code. http://bit.ly/MUMIH #
• How to Debug an InvalidVersionException from Updating an Order in @ATG_ecommerce. Eclipse debugging and JSP debug code. http://bit.ly/MUMIH #
• ATGLogColorizer for Colorizing ATG Server Outputs and Logs. Color is wonderful. Red means errors, yellow means warnings. http://bit.ly/IQLBv #

• JavaScript Invalid Argument in Internet Explorer Only. You can't have spaces in windowName argument of window.open method. ://bit.ly/5JUZk #
• ATG Currency Converter Not Working With JSTL c:set. Debugging with Eclipse helped solve the problem. http://bit.ly/kMmSV #
• SugarSync promo ends 8/31. Sign up for free service and we each get 500 MB more. http://bit.ly/5Lu69 Why I like it lots http://bit.ly/17UwyP #

From the Mac Tricks and Tips blog I saw this interesting article, Extracting Text From PDF Files.

1. Open Automator, found in Applications > Utilities
2. In Automator drag out “Get Selected Finder Items”, then “Extract PDF Text”. I recommend changing the output option to Rich Text.
3. Save the file. Either as an application or a file.
4. Test. Drag a PDF file onto the Automator file and let it do its work, after a short time you will have a text file with the extracted text.

I was looking for a program that would merge Adobe PDF files.  At first I found this trial program, A-PDF Merger, which worked fine but left a small watermark on the first page.  Then I found this open source program, PDF Split and Merge, which did the trick but the UI is kind of slow, possibly because it is written in Java.  It looks like there are plenty of other free programs available too.

Often I find myself wondering what version of Adobe Flash or Shockwave I am running. Here are some useful pages for doing that.

• if you’ve installed Flash and/or Shockwave
• what version of Flash you are running
• install Flash
• install Shockwave

One day I might try to figure what is the difference between Flash and Shockwave, when I actually care.