Sending UTF-8 Email with Oracle

Originally written Wednesday, 18 April 2007

I have seen several examples of sending email using oracle with non-ascii characters floating around the Internet, but few seem to tackle sending these ‘special’ characters in…

Sharpening Screenshots in Photoshop

Originally posted Friday January 14, 2011

I often find myself wanting to clean up screenshots for use on our site and in various places after they’ve been resized down to a typical thumbnail size of say 250 pixels…

Accessing as400 databases with Ruby, Java, and the RubyJavaBridge

Originally posted August 24, 2006

iSeries systems and Ruby are separate universes right now; I know of no native Ruby way to connect to an AS400 system. However, with…

Ruby Oracle DBI ActiveRecord in 7 steps

Originally posted March 22, 2006

Setting up ruby to work with Oracle seems to be a pain for a lot of people. Here are the steps I follow to set it up on a linux box from nothing to Active Record or DBI in 7 steps.

Streaming Data to S3 with Ruby

Originally posted March 29, 2006

One of the downsides of the ruby S3 example code is that it doesn’t support streaming of data (it loads the entire file into memory). It turns out, however, that all that is needed to stream data…

Computing Time with Oracle Sysdate

Originally posted April 11, 2007

If you ever need to work with something other than a day when using sysdate you are in luck. As it turns out you can work on sysdate with fractional days. This is just what a person needs…

Credit Card Type and Luhn Check in Ruby

Originally posted on March 15, 2006

I was looking at implementing a luhn and credit card type check the other day in java and I noticed that there seems to be a lack of code for doing this in ruby. So I figured…

Online Vs Offline Applications: Everything Old is New Again

Originally posted March 28, 2007

Everyone has probably noticed this already but the old is new again cycle for “online” desktop apps has been shortening at a rapid pace. Everywhere…

Thread pooling with Java concurrency utilities new (java 1.5) and old (util.concurrent)

Originally posted April 24, 2006

Threading in java is fairly easy and now with java 1.5 some of the stuff that was harder has become…

iSeries SQL Performance

Originally posted March 11, 2007

Our project has entered the stage where we start tuning the data access to improve performance. This project uses Hibernate to access a AS400/iSeries system via the JT400 JDBC driver. My prior experience…

Accessing oracle with sqlplus and no tnsnames

Originally posted July 28, 2006

If you want to access a database without it being in your tnsnames.ora file, you can use a ‘URL’ at the command line:

sqlplus…

Smooth scrolling image list

Originally posted Feb 15th, 2006

I had someone ask me about fitting more images in a small area and the way flickr does their image scrolling came to mind. I wanted to see how hard it was to do and as it turns out it isn’t hard to do…

JDBC + Batch updates + Non-Standard == Oracle

Originally posted February 11, 2006

I recently ran into an issue where doing a large number of inserts and updates in an Oracle 8i database was taking forever. I was already using a prepared statement…

Using the Hibernate API to Inspect Mapped Classes

Originally posted August 2, 2006

For my current project we needed to audit the property setters Hibernate was using on our objects to make sure that any logic in them was not overly state…

Painting our portrait of Marvin Chartoff

Once upon a time, it was said that “Every man’s work, whether it be literature or music…

Firefox Saved Form Data Frustrations

Originally posted on May 2, 2006

Have you ever mistyped your login name in firefox, only to have it save the wrong entry as well as the correct one? How do you get rid of the wrong entry? You could clear out all of…

Epicurean Tips on the Go

Originally posted January 11, 2011

Nature as an Enormous Design Experiment

What if, instead of building in nature, we built as nature does? The launch of…

Mission Data awarded the prestigious Alfred P. Sloan Award

Originally posted August 19, 2009

Mission Data has been selected as a winner of the 2009 Alfred P. Sloan Awards for Business Excellence in Workplace Flexibility in the greater…

IE ‘Code’ bug

Originally posted February 16, 2006

We had a problem with how code was being displayed on the blog. IE wasn’t respecting the width of the code block and it was throwing the entire layout off.

Search Engine Optimization

Originally posted May 10, 2006

Recently I’ve been collecting links on interesting SEO topics. I figured I would dump a few of them out with quick reasons why I think they are good to read.

Business First article spotlights Mission Data

Originally posted October 30, 2009

It has been a busy few years. The Mission Data team has grown by 50% and our revenue has increased by 20% each year. Focusing on strategic partnerships has been…

How Do You Define “The Arts”?

Screen capture of the Kentucky Center for the Performing Arts Website

CVS History

Originally posted February 22, 2006

For a lot of people, CVS is history; they’ve switched to SVN and are loving life. For those of us continuing the use this venerable tool, I present the following cobbled together bit of utility.

Quick and dirty cryptfs

Originally posted February 15, 2006

Here is a quick rundown on how to create a cryptfs partition that mounts during boot with Fedora Core 4.

Presentation at the Kentucky Association of Realtors Annual Conference

Originally posted September 24, 2009

Mission Data recently designed and developed the new Kentucky Association of Realtors (KAR) website, check it out…