I write here now

The posts I write for the tech blog at work are all here: http://artplustech.com/author/joff-millerredbubble-com/

Ubuntu clone with git ‘hung up unexpectedly’ problem solved

I was experiencing a very strange issue where I was unable to clone or pull from some repositories on github. It would only be for some (larger) respositories, and I could sometimes pull them fine using the https:// protocol, but not using the git:// or ssh:// protocols. What I would see in the output, is …

Continue reading

Brew: the future of package management on OSX? Hope not.

Warning: This might come off a little ranty. You know, it might just be that some people need to install older-than-the-bleeding edge versions of software. Some of us have stable production systems, that for whatever reason, don’t always run the latest, nightly-build-sure-it’ll-be-fine-no-really versions of everything. Turns out to to this using “brew”, you have to …

Continue reading

Modern Java

While it’s something I’ve been intending to do for quite a while now, I’ve finally managed to actually start using the Guava Libraries. This is a superset project which includes the Google Collections libraries, which are a huge improvement over the traditional J2SE Collections API. It allows for very quick construction of collections objects: e.g. …

Continue reading

Recovering lost IntelliJ IDEA shelved changesets

Imagine the following scenario: You are moving your beloved project out from a subdirectory of an svn repository, into it’s own brand spanking new repository. You have about 3 days worth of large refactorings to the codebase waiting in the wings, with most of the tests passing, but not quite ready for commit to the …

Continue reading

Selenium testing RichFaces comboBox controls

Ok, so I’ve spent the last day and a half chasing down a really weird bug I was seeing with our Selenium integration tests. Basically, we had a RichFaces rich:comboBox component – which gives you a thing that looks like a drop down combo box, but also allows you to type free-form text into it. …

Continue reading