Category Archives: Hints and Tips

Replacing Symantec VIP with a generic TOTP app

Posted on 1st June 2019 by Andy Brodie

Occasionally, I need to log in to a system that requires the use of a Symantec VIP code.  For those that haven’t come across this before the app displays a 6 digit numeric code that changes every 30 seconds.  When … Continue reading →

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Dell L521x Brightness Controls on Windows 10

Posted on 12th August 2015 by Andy Brodie

I do love my Dell L521x, it’s worked really well for 2 years so far, but I hit my first problem with it after upgrading to Windows 10. After the upgrade I found that I was unable to control the … Continue reading →

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The Right Live Writer on Windows 10

Posted on 11th August 2015 by Andy Brodie

Having performed a clean install of Windows 10, I wanted to re-install Microsoft Live Writer.  I’ve never found anything within which it is easier and quicker to create and edit blog entries, and editing offline was an essential requirement for … Continue reading →

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Don’t confuse Service Oriented Architecture with writing services

Posted on 22nd July 2015 by Andy Brodie

Something I’ve witnessed many times in many different places, is a confusion between service oriented architecture and the use of services (usually web services). Separating an amorphous block of code with an interface and JAX-RPC or WCF makes you no … Continue reading →

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The Importance of Consumability

Posted on 2nd April 2015 by Andy Brodie

Consumability is a word that my blogging software hotly denies is a real word (with an angry red underline), but it is probably the most important word an architect needs to keep in the forefront of their minds and be … Continue reading →

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Creating portable file names in Java

Posted on 7th November 2014 by Andy Brodie

Today I needed some code in a Java application that would create a file with a valid file name, based on some user input. Of course, Java is a very portable language, so it was no good to only remove … Continue reading →

Posted in Hints and Tips, Java | Leave a comment

Default behaviour of logging frameworks

Posted on 26th October 2014 by Andy Brodie

I’ve used logback in my latest project, xml2csv, and I think it’s great. Except for one tiny, but important detail. I’m writing a standalone command line utility, designed to be used by people are neither Java experts nor developers. I … Continue reading →

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Validating Schemas in JAXP

Posted on 19th September 2014 by Andy Brodie

I try to avoid moaning in blogs, personal or especially professional.  However, having been in .NET land for so long, coming back to Java and trying to do some XML processing has simply been a nightmare. So many magic strings, … Continue reading →

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Encoding base-N numbers using custom digits

Posted on 24th January 2012 by Andy Brodie

It’s been almost a year since I had to code in anger.  I wanted to do some compression on an XML document by shortening element and attribute names to the bare minimum.  The documents I’m compressing contain an unknown number … Continue reading →

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Mobile browsing on SharePoint, it’s not just for mobiles!

Posted on 22nd January 2012 by Andy Brodie

SharePoint sites do suffer from performance problems from time to time.  Perhaps the link between clients and WFE’s is congested, or the architects didn’t quite anticipate the usage patterns of their users, or maybe the orbit Neptune is wrongly aligned … Continue reading →

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