by Florian Fankhauser
Wow, took me over half an hour to find out how to access Context Initialization Parameters directly in a JSP page. Simple, if you know how. I wonder, why this is so badly documented. Anyway, here’s how:
${initParam['PARAM_NAME']}
Source: http://www.informit.com/articles/article.aspx?p=30946&seqNum=7
I recently searched for ‘jquery‘ at bing.com. I expected to get the jQuery homepage as first hit, or at least as one of the first hits. I was wrong. The jQuery homepage wasn’t even on the first page. It was listed on page 5. How could bing.com not list such a popular website on top position? Google does…
Btw, the same happens for a search for ‘openoffice‘.
I guess I better switch back to Google 🙂
Another interesting video on infoq.com:
http://www.infoq.com/presentations/Grails-For-Spring-Developers
Joe Celko explains the Nested Set Model. It is an alternative way of storing tree-structured data in relational databases. The main benefit is that it allows you to make queries that would be hard or impossible if you follow the classic approach i.e. storing the parent id in each node. One example: with the nested set model it is easy to select all children recursive of a given node.
Fog Creek Software uses this approach in FogBugz.
Joel Spolsky made a nice mercurial tutorial at http://hginit.com.
A good read, especially for subversion users and people not familiar with distributed version control systems.
Jason Fried talks about interruptions at workplaces.
Oh, I love Beethoven’s 9th symphony. The recording with the Staatskapelle Dresden and Sir Colin Davis. Just listened to it while I was writing some code and my last blog entry.
So Windows 7 finally arrived. I am really looking forward to it. But I have to say, Vista was not that bad. Especially since Service Pack 2. Ok, you really needed a powerful machine.
One of the small things I really liked in Vista was a small improvement in the Explorer. Not Internet Explorer, but the file manager. When you moved up to a parent folder, the folder you came from got selected. This made a quick navigation in complex folder structures possible.
XP on the contrary always selected the first file in the list which made navigating in folders cumbersome. There was no way around using a third party file manager.
Anyway, nice to see that Windows 7 Explorer does it the same way Vista did.
