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Clearing your Google App Engine datastore
Warning! This is a method to erase the data from your Google App Engine datastore. There is no way to recover your data after you go trough with this! Only use this if you’re absolutely certain! If you have a GAE account used for experimentation, you might like to clean it up sometimes (erase the…
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Relaxed JSON parsing
This blogpost was originally posted to the Transylvania JUG blog. JSON is a good alternative when you need a lightweight format to specify structured data. But sometimes (for example when you want the user to specify JSON manually) you would like to relax the formalism required to specify "valid" JSON data. For example the following…
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Updating the root certificates for Java
One usually thinks of SSL in the context of HTTPS, but there are also other protocols which rely on it to provide security. See this link for a short overview of SSL – it only mentions HTTPS, but the same applies for IMAPS, FTPS, etc – SSL is independent of the wrapped protocol. You can…
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Vagrant and VirtualBox on Windows
Vagrant is a collection of scripts written in Ruby to manage VirtualBox images in a shared environment (like the QA boxes inside a company): install them, update them, etc. Unfortunately installing it under Windows is not as straight forward as one would want, so here are some useful tips: Read the Windows setup page and…
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Another friend blogging
Another friend bit the dust started blogging: Cleonte’s GitHub blog – bookmarks at the moment but looking forward to more involved posts :-).
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Using Jython from Maven
This blogpost was originally posted to the Transylvania JUG blog. On the surface it looks simple: just add the dependency and you can run the example code. However what the jython artifact doesn’t get you are the standard python libraries like re. This means that as soon as you try to do something like the…
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How to post high-quality videos to Google Video
If you have Google Apps for Business, Google Video is still the preferred method of storing videos "in the cloud": it is easier to embed into Google Docs and probably more importantly – it can be truly private (you can only access it if you are logged in with the correct account – as opposed…
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Integrating Maven with Ivy
This post was originally published on the Transylvania JUG blog. The problem: you have some resources in an Ivy repository (and only there) which you would like to use in a project based on Maven. Possible solutions: Migrate the repository to Maven (Nexus for example) since Ivy can easily use Maven-style repositories (so your Ivy…
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Upgrading the Options (GlobeTrotter) GI515m
Recently I needed to install an Options (GlobeTrotter) GI515m 3G USB modem on a machine which previously used an older version of the modem (the iCON 225). This seems a pretty common scenario (an existing user getting an update), however the process seems less-than-straight forward: Get a second computer with the same operating system version…
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Getting the most out of your audio recording with Audacity
This article aims to show you some simple techniques to improve the quality of your voice recording quickly and cheaply (for free actually). But first things first: The best audio is the one you don’t have to improve. Some simple steps you can perform in advance to maximize quality: Use quality equipment. Here are some articles…