Stephen’s Thoughts

At a time when the Euro is getting very close to the 80 pence mark, M&S in dublin are ripping people off with an exchange rate of 55 pence to the Euro.

See the example below, a packet of puff biscuits that retails for 99p sterling was being sold for 1.79 Euro in M&S in Dundrum.

I can understand that not all shops are going to update their prices every week to keep in line with the current exchange rate but an exchange rate of 55 pence is disgraceful.

Tags: 178

Jakub Korab of the Dublin Java users group raises some good arguments about agencies updating a CV before submitting it to an employer.

The logic being that the agency does not want the employer to contact me later on without them involved. While I appreciate the logic behind the practice, and have no problem with submitting a resume without contact details, I take objection to it……
Pasting an agency logo onto my CV without my permission is at the very least undesirable. I do not work through any given recruitment agency before a contract is signed, and do not wish to be represented as such.

As a result Jakub has decided to only distribute his CV in pdf format.  I did have my CV in pdf format in the past but changed it back to word format as some agencies would only except this format.

I have never had a problem with agencies removing my contact details from my CV but he makes a very important point about turning up for an interview and seeing a CV representing you badly formated. The post is well worth a read.

Tags: contracting, CV, resume

…then check out iWebMVC.

I came across this framework during the week via Ajaxian. It provides an end to end solution with all of the plumbing in place for DWR, Dojo, Spring and Hibernate/JPA. This is a great place to start for someone that wants to get up and running fast with inner plumbing in place for these frameworks. Here is what the developer Jose Noheda said he was looking for from the project:

Nonetheless, in my mind what I really needed was a platform that:

• Is based on Java
  Although supporting Grooy / JRuby is a plus
• Helps me to kick start a project
  But simplifying the process by giving me the best (and this can be tricky) set of frameworks for each task
• Integrates both server and client sides
  And it’s lightweight, robust and extensible. Read enterprise quality.
• Supports all the common tasks a web app has to handle
  I include here: User Management, CRUD operations, i18n support (both framework & data), AJAX and astounding visuals

The project is only at the preview stage so it does come with caveats. When you start up the app you get a sample app showing some of the Dojo widgets in action as well as some screens demonstrating basic CRUD operations.

If you want find out more you can download the project from here or check out Jose’s blog here.

Tags: iWebMVC DWR Dojo Spring Hibernate JPA

Since I got my N95 last year, I have been really impressed by it’s features and am constantly singing it’s praises. Unfortunately I have found a issue with the phone and it looks like I am not the only one to find this. The catches that keep the back cover from falling off are very weak. I was surviving for the last few weeks on just one catch but the weight of the battery won and I have to finally admit that the back cover is broken.

I was keeping an eye out for a shop that sold covers for the N95 but did not find one. Luckily I came across a link to Blueunplugged.com. They sell all sorts of spare parts for mobiles so I ordered my replacement cover (2 just in case the same thing happens again) as well as a carrying case to protect the phone. It’s worth checking out the site as they have some cool things for sale.

Luckily I have found a high tech solution to hold the cover on the phone until my order arrives. Thank God for rubber bands

Tags: 171

I came across this issue a while a go and couldn’t really find much information on it at the time so thought that I would post about it just in case anyone has a similar issue.

We had the following code that loads an XML document and then applies a XSL transform against the XML document. The code looks a bit like following:
(This is the IE Specific version)

xmlDoc = new ActiveXObject(’Msxml2.DOMDocument.3.0′);
xmlDoc.loadXML(XMLString);
xslDoc = new ActiveXObject(’Msxml2.DOMDocument.3.0′);
xslDoc.load(xslFile);
output = xmlDoc.transformNode(xslDoc);

We would normally run this over HTTP and it always applied the transform and generated our output as you would expect. When we ran the same code over HTTPS the transform would never work.

After a lot of investigation it turned out that the issue was being caused due to a cache setting in the response header. We were setting the Cache-Control parameter in the Response header to ‘private,no-cache,no-store’. It seems that not allowing the XSL form to be cached was preventing the ActiveObject from loading it for the transform. By removing Cache-control parameter from the response header it worked fine every time.
Hope this can save someone with the same issue a bit of time.