Database Connection Strings
From Mark comes a couple of useful sites listing common database connection strings
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January 12, 2007
Demo Days
Kathy Sierra has an excellent post on the problems with showing a stakeholder a demo. Do you work your ass off and make the slickest demo possible or do you show them a sketch on a napkin?
The thing I want to point out is the Java part of the entry. The Napkin Look & Feel shows the power of layout managers in Java Swing and is about the coolest thing ever! Check out a page of the swing set demo using it:
Our Country
The Mellencamp Our Country song just won't go away. You can't watch a football game without hearing it at least 20 times. I'm sure you all know the words...
From the east coast to the west coast Down the Dixie Highway Back home This is our country
The Sports Guy mentions it often in his blog. A couple classics:
Yo, Sports Guy, me and my friends tried to do a drinking game where we did a shot every time we saw the Melencamp commercial. Two of us died from alcohol poisoning, one choked on his own vomit and my liver exploded by halftime of the 4 p.m. game. This really is our country.
and
Let's flip "This is ourrrrrrr country" around for a second. Isn't the goal of any commercial to get people to notice your product? When ads come on, we're either flicking channels or zoning out into a three-minute coma until the game comes back on, so there are only four ways we'd ever notice an ad: if it's a fantastic commercial (which rarely, if ever, happens); if they happen to startle us (like those Jetta ads that show car accidents and people crashing into air bags); if there's a good-looking woman (like the saucy brunette in the Mercury ads); or if they annoy us to the point that we start reacting like a dog listening to a fireworks display (like the Mellencamp ads). Which leads me to believe that the most effective commercial possible would feature the saucy brunette from the Mercury ads driving a Jetta while singing along to that Mellencamp song, then crashing into another car and slamming face-first into an air bag. This is ourrrrrr country.
January 2, 2007
Java Character Encoding
Charlie sent this to me earlier this year and I read it again tonight. Character Encoding when doing Java web development isn't easy and this article spells out what needs to be done when dealing with non-Western languages.
- UTF-8
- UTF-8
- UTF-8
- ...
January 1, 2007
TuneSleeve
If you are missing a bunch of album covers in your iTunes music library try this neat shareware program called TuneSleeve. It isn't the quickest program around but it did a pretty good job on my library. It didn't do them all but it got most of them.