It’s … time to sell some Magic the Gathering cards. Say what now? Yep, really, I’m selling my entire collection of Magic the Gathering cards. I even dedicated a new page on this website to it, go ahead and click ‘Magic’ in the top navigation bar. That page will contain the most up-to-date information about my collection.
So why the heck am I selling it? Well, it has been years since I played the game. It was a nice game to play with fellow students at the University and it was always a very good feeling to open up a new pack of cards and discover the new treasure. I remember the crisp sound of a fresh boosterpack being opened. There is still some tingling left when I browse my collection, but still it is time to give it up.
Collecting and playing Magic can take up the same amount of time as a full time job, or even more. I no longer have that kind of time on my hands, since I am working as a freelance Java Specialist. This job requires me to put a lot of time and energy in developing my network, my name and of course my expertise. Combine that with a very nice girlfriend and a social life and there is no more time left for Magic. After many months of doubt, I finally decided to sell the whole lot.
If you are interested, drop me a message, either as a reply or through the Contact page. Be sure to keep an eye on the Magic page, since I will update it with more details about my collection.
–JH
PS: The next post will again be on software development, I promise 
Are you building a Google Web Toolkit application? Has someone asked you to personalize colors or images for their account? If so, you may have tried to look for things like dynamic CSS in GWT as well. While Googling these terms, I could not find what I needed. After some more Googling and reading some not so helpful posts, I found a project titled Advanced GWT Components.
This project has a set of widgets which support switching themes at runtime. That was exactly what I was looking for, but I had no need for the widgets. So I picked the project apart and adapted the way it changes CSS on runtime to fit our application. In this post I will take you through the pieces of code we used to complete this. Note: this is going to be quite a long and code heavy post ^_^
Hello and welcome back! In this series of posts I am trying to give other teams of developers out there some path to embracing agile methodologies, such as Scrum. Previously, in my Prequel post, I described how you could start doing regular standup meetings in any type of project to increase your teams awareness about each member’s work.
Assuming your team has now incorporated standup meetings, preferably on a daily basis, it is time to take the next step. Agile methodologies generally rely on a rather simple notice: Visualized Management! Now don’t get scared, the word ‘Management’ here does not mean you need another manager. When done right, this visualization can eliminate the need for a manager. Now doesn’t that sound sweet?
Well hullo there! It has been quite some time since my last post. A lot has happened recently, some of which prevented me from posting regularly. Let’s just blame the current economic conditions for that.
Since my last post, we have pretty much finished our JavaFX project. I was at the NLJUG’s JFall where I hosted a JavaFX workshop all afternoon and I have been to Devoxx in Antwerp where I met Richard Bair and Jasper Potts from the Oracle JavaFX team.
I have also joined Stephen Chin in the maintenance of the Visage language. This is the continuation of the JavaFX Script language as an open source project (see Google Code).
Now shut it, you mentioned something about agile…
JavaFX is great for building user interfaces. There is however one large annoyance that is probably considered a feature. JavaFX swallows NullPointerExceptions, among others.
NPE’s are meant to signal development errors. In other words, if you see an NPE, you can call your developer and tell him he screwed up. Some developers even need them to be reminded of the pieces of an application they were working on.
Across the blogosphere, I found a post on how to center controls by using binding. The proposed method certainly works, but there is a catch.
When you are doing your layout by binding the layoutX and layoutY properties of your controls, you may experience a degradation of performance while resizing or scrolling. This will probably not be noticeable with only a handful of controls/shapes on screen. If however you start drawing hundreds of shapes/controls with this method, you will certainly see the slowdown. Let’s see why…
If you’re working with JavaFX, you will probably know these two truths:
- The JFXtras library has some really awesome components
- The JavaFX platform is trying out new controls in the preview packages
A good thing about this, is that the JavaFX team is taking the good stuff from the JFXtras library and putting it into the platform. A bad thing about it is you start to expect the preview controls have the same functionality as the JFXtras controls.
Did you know, you can define ‘relative’ Lines in JavaFX? When you’re drawing complex visualizations, you sometimes want to have a Line that is horizontal and 10 pixels long, no matter what. No problem you say, just define its starting point as (x, y) and its end point as (x+10, y):
Line {
startX: 40
startY: 40
endX: 50
endY: 40
}
Sure, easy peasy. What if you want this Continue reading »Line to move around based on some variable’s value?
I’ve been working on a nice looking application in JavaFX with some nifty transitions. Doing so, I noticed an odd ‘requirement’ when working with Transitions. The problem arose when I tried to split my interface into different files. On one stage, I used two Stacks that each represented a state. Each Stack was defined in its own JavaFX script and another Script contained the transitions and event handlers.
What happened was that not all Transitions seemed to work. I have not yet been able to determine the root cause of it, but the Transition seemed unable to update properties of its target node. After some frustrated trial and error, I discovered a working solution: put the Transitions in the same file as their target node.
Again, I have not yet found the root cause. If someone can tell me why this is a problem, please let me know. I can’t stand not understanding
–JH
Recently I switched from using Windows and Outlook at work to my brand-spankin’ new MacBook with Apple Mail. The first thing I ran into was getting replies to my emails that my signature was all borked.
After a long search I have finally been able to fix these so they look good in my colleagues’ Outlook. The problem lies with the editor in Apple Mail, somehow it just makes completely borked HTML that Outlook interprets differently.
The good news is that the solution is devilishly simple. Just follow these steps for each signature you want:
- Create the signature in Apple Mail
- Save the signature
- Close Apple Mail
- Open ~/Library/Mail/Signatures
- Open one of the .webarchive files with TextEdit
- Make the signature the way you want it in TextEdit
- Save it and re-open Mail and you’re done!
Cheers!
–JH
