Here’s A Useful Testing Application

So, a few years back, I consulted at NASA doing some work on a really cool system for storing and retrieving documentation on systems in flight. Basically, it was a very customized Bugzilla that winds up saving the American taxpayer millions of dollars every year. There’s a post I wrote at the time about how toContinue reading “Here’s A Useful Testing Application”

TableColumn and ObservableValue

Today I learned a couple of things that they don’t tell you in the official documentation or on Stack Overflow. If you want to display some information in a table and that information updates and you want to display those updates, then you have to hook things up the hard way, and not the wayContinue reading “TableColumn and ObservableValue”

More MIME Tricks

Several days and a lot of testing later, I think I have the answer: don’t try to build a play-by-email service in Google AppEngine. The limitations imposed by the environment make it a bad place to do a lot of email traffic that requires anything other than text/plain or text/html. Because Google has defined javax.mail.TransportContinue reading “More MIME Tricks”

Stupid Email Tricks

I’ve been working on adding play-by-email support to my turn-based game server. The first problem I hit was that the PGP signatures on the server’s messages were invalid when I checked them on my email client. This led to lots of debugging and unit tests in my crypto utility. That’s not really wasted effort, butContinue reading “Stupid Email Tricks”

OAuth, twitter4j, and JavaFX

I’ve started developing a text-only client for Twitter. The impulse came from getting fed up with all the auto-playing promoted tweets that were clogging my timeline. I looked around and found a library to handle all the Twitter API calls and started coding. The example code was all a bit bare-bones, but mostly it wasContinue reading “OAuth, twitter4j, and JavaFX”

Once Again, Most Documentation Sucks

I have been having fun, recently, programming a couple of services that run in Google’s App Engine. One thing they do is maintain some data in that cloud’s version of a database, so one of the important aspects of the services is controlling just who, exactly, is allowed to see or modify the data. I’veContinue reading “Once Again, Most Documentation Sucks”

How to Draw a Line

I became a bit intimidated and frustrated with my simulation framework so I set it aside for a while. I played a lot of video games and I practiced my piping. I’m bored with the video games, though, and last night I came back to the sim. I’ve got some ideas for making the problemsContinue reading “How to Draw a Line”

Hey, I Built a Thing

My new job involves hacking on Bugzilla and part of that involves email. Bug email, system administration email, yadda yadda. I wanted a way to test that email without it ever leaving my development system. We had a mechanism in place where the emails would just get written to a plain file, but that doesn’tContinue reading “Hey, I Built a Thing”