Random Stuff About Stuff

Written by David Kerwick who lives and works Dublin as a Java Technical Lead.

Sonarqube missing Integration Test coverage

April 18, 2019

Update So it’s covered in the Java Plugin release here but it’s meant to be a warning I think, not totally stop working like happened in…

IntelliJ working with a Tomcat Docker container

April 16, 2019

I’m in the process of trying out a Tomcat server that’s running JDK 11 and rather than deal with multiple VM’s on my machine for the moment…

Moving Blog to Gatsby

April 15, 2019

It’s that time again, where I look at blogging something and decide I may as well change the system I’m using first. A developer affliction…

Transfer iTunes and iPhone backups to new Mac

March 13, 2018

Having set up a new Mac I wanted to start using it as the primary machine. I’m still old school and plug my phone into the Mac for updates…

Jekyll in the Atom Editor easier own post linking

February 27, 2018

Having built up a few posts the number of times I want to link back to one of them is starting to increase. So I’d like a faster way of…

New Mac Install

February 05, 2018

Having gotten a new computer and doing a fresh install I think it would be worthwhile to write down the steps involved for my future self…

Dealing with Java 8 LocalDate in jsp's

January 17, 2018

When converting legacy apps to bring them up to Java 8 one of the things I sometimes run into is when switching from Date to LocalDate that…

CNTLM and Mac startup

January 17, 2018

In work I need to use cntlm to handle the Microsoft proxy. One of the things I was doing was starting it manually when I needed it. So…

Spring Boot outputting java 8 dates in rest controllers

January 17, 2018

If you are using Spring Boot and have it marshaling your DTO’s to json for you you’ll probably encounter is handling dates in an ‘oddball…

Finding double byte characters in text files

October 06, 2017

Having just coming out of hunting down an oddball error I thought it might be a good idea write down some steps. Things started off with a…

Sonarqube on Docker for Mac configuring a proxy

October 04, 2017

Docker is very handy for throwing up a server and playing around with things, running things locally etc… One of the things I’ve been using…

Thymeleaf - replace c:url and c:param

October 03, 2017

As part of my conversion from jsp’s to Thymeleaf I came across a block that was creating url’s using and for the url parameters. So…

IntelliJ clean up JPA generated models for use with Lombok

October 03, 2017

As mentioned in a previous post, once you have generated your persistence mappings using IntelliJ you will need to do some cleanup and since…

Removing Javadoc

October 03, 2017

At one time or other someone ran an auto javadoc plugin on some of the code base, likely me. Turns out most of it is just general crap just…

Error on Weblogic deploying Spring Boot Unable to access the selected application

October 03, 2017

When trying to deploy a new Spring Boot application on Weblogic the console gave the rather helpful error After hunting around in the logs I…

Spring Boot filter-mapping in Java Config

August 08, 2017

Using Spring Boot for a while you get used to not having a but every now and again you want to do something and all you can find is how to…

Colouring Spring Test output in maven

August 08, 2017

Continuing my little quest to bring colour to the land of maven output so I can better see what’s scrolling past. The next biggish thing is…

Spring Boot - use profiles to have H2 for local and Oracle for prod

August 08, 2017

Having set up H2 in the previous posts which is handyish it needs to be set up in such a way that H2 only kicks in when developing locally…

Access a H2 in memory database from other clients

August 08, 2017

While the H2 console is handy, I’d prefer to use the tool I’m using for sql most of the time just for handiness and in my case it’s IntelliJ…

Spring Data and Named Parameters

August 08, 2017

Having got used to Spring figuring out the name of parameters based on the name of the passed in names I was surprised when using Spring…

Using liquibase to get your existing structure into H2 database

August 08, 2017

Following on from setting up an in memory H2 database in spring boot for initial development I wanted an easy enough way to set up some…

ORA-39726: unsupported add/drop column operation on compressed tables

February 23, 2017

Working on an old table I needed to add a primary key. Attempting the below code Gave the error I think the problem is with the default…

Setting up H2 with Spring Boot

February 23, 2017

Spring Boot makes it fairly painless to spin up a H2 database. So I decided to try it out on my next project as a way to develop locally and…

Intellij customise JPA generation

February 21, 2017

Intellij can generate your initial mappings from your existing database schema if you so wish. This I find is a good starting point but you…

Using SED to delete lines in a file on MacOS

February 07, 2017

I needed to delete a set of lines from a file. I didn’t realise the Mac version of is a bit different to the Linux one. So what I had…

IntelliJ - multicursors

February 07, 2017

On the shortcut front I came across multicursors which seem all cool and stuff but I haven’t had a whole lot of use for them. These are the…

Yarn Global not working

February 07, 2017

I was following a guide that and it used Yarn to install a global dependency. So that’s no problem I’ve been using yarn and it’s great. I…

IntelliJ - moving around with the keyboard

February 02, 2017

To move around in the code in IntelliJ there’s some shortcuts that are handy. What I found was that Mission Control on the Mac already had…

IntelliJ - selecting text

February 02, 2017

To select text in IntelliJ using the keyboard in intelligent blocks can be pretty handy. It starts moving the selection up to the next…

IntelliJ - Switching to recent files

February 02, 2017

Starting the IntelliJ shortcut remembering series with the one I use alot. Switching to recent files. So rather than finding the file in…

Creating little animated GIF's of what's happening on screen

February 02, 2017

Having started with IntelliJ I need a way of remembering the keyboard and other shortcuts I come across. And I think this blog will be a…

Adding color to Maven output

February 01, 2017

Maven output as anyone who has used it knows is pretty verbose and scrolls on by at a good ole lick. And in the terminal it’s hard to see…

Mapstruct and Lombok working together

February 01, 2017

I’ve been using Lombok for a while now and it’s great not having to bother with alot of boiler plate. The ‘problem’ is that it doesn’t play…

IntelliJ - Adding logger definition

February 01, 2017

I find more often than not I’ll need a logger in whatever java class I’m in. Back in Eclipse days I had added it to new file creation. I…

Material 2 - Using primary, accent and warn colours in your components

January 16, 2017

After custom theming the app using material 2 here what I wanted was to be able to use the main colours again and again in my components…

Material Flex Layout - switch images for mobile

January 16, 2017

Having got the basic structure for a material layout based on flex-layout I moved onto doing the header in more detail. It will be the…

Atom autosave

January 14, 2017

I sync files between a desktop and a laptop using dropbox, in particular this blog so I can jot things down as I think of them and pick up…

Material 2 - Customising the theme

January 14, 2017

Material 2 comes with a few pre built themes which can get you started and may if you are lucky fit with the colour scheme you want to go…

Material 2, Flex-layout. Making a sticky footer

January 14, 2017

Having got the initial hello world thing running with Angular CLI, Material 2 and Flex Layout I need to start doing something with the set…

Angular CLI, Material 2 and Flex Layout

January 14, 2017

Having done a bit of Angular 2 work at breakneck speed it’s time to look at better ways. The first attempt was all about getting something…

Moving to the Atom editor

January 09, 2017

With the new flurry of activity with upgrading the blog etc… it’s time to try yet another editor for the doing the blog. I know, I know, I…

Adding some custom css for notes

January 05, 2017

After the conversion to Jekyll 3 and in particular starting fresh on the new theme I’ve lost the odd customisation that’s built up over…

Adding EU cookie message

January 05, 2017

So because I’m using Google Analytics and I’m in the EU I need to add a cookie message saying I use cookies to track the user. It’s a bit of…

Moving to Jekyll 3.x

January 04, 2017

So big gap in the posts again, life does have a way of getting in the way of blogging. Anyway turns out Jekyll has moved on a good bit, I’ve…

Combining zsh history files

January 04, 2017

So more and more I seem to be looking for that command I typed before. The one with the secret magic sauce to get something to work, long…

Per Domain DNS and reverse DNS on a Mac

January 04, 2017

So following on from my fairly old post about static routes on a Mac, in the process of setting up a new machine I realised I solved another…

Why are there asterisks beside some lines in .zsh_history

January 04, 2017

So What’s with the asterisk on some lines? Turns out it means the line has being modified from the manual here it says mark-modified-lines…

Using Bitbucket Pipelines to run Sonarqube analysis

May 25, 2016

So Atlassian just announced Bitbucket Pipelines and they look really good so I signed up for the beta to give them a go. We have a…

Using Gulp to pull in only the needed bower assets

May 04, 2016

While using bower to pull in the assets seems great it pulls in more than is needed for a production deploy. i.e. readme’s, config files…

Using Gulp to create a 'deployment' directory for a php project

May 04, 2016

The PHP project I’m looking at doesn’t have a ‘deployment’ process. The advantage of interpreted languages I guess. The whole thing can be…

Using Bower to pull in external dependencies

May 04, 2016

Following on from using composer to reduce the amount of external code checked into GIT on a legacy project the next step was to look at the…

Getting PHP Composer working for a legacy project

April 11, 2016

I’m looking at an old PHP project which uses codeigniter. The repo is huge, over 100mb or something like that. Which seemed odd when I…

PHPStorm and Codeigniter

April 07, 2016

The legacy php project I’m looking into at the moment uses Codeigniter, version 2 as well. Popular in it’s day I think but I think other php…

Docker tying a php server and mysql server together for development

April 07, 2016

Having got individual docker containers up and running doing simple enough things like serving a html page, basic phpinfo and a mysql server…

Creating a better docker php

April 07, 2016

Following on from Creating a better Docker Mysql I also needed a proper php server. This will be based off the official php Docker image…

Setting up Xdebug for PHP

April 07, 2016

So as part of my fight with the white screen of death I ended up setting up Xdebug which proved very useful. Installation is pretty…

PHP White Screen Of Death

April 07, 2016

What’s with php and it’s refusal to log anything useful? So I’ve been playing with Docker to set up a dev environment for php, all was going…

Docker Dangling Volumes

April 06, 2016

When trying out my own docker image I was creating and deleting it. But I wasn’t deleting it with the -v option so I ended up with alot of…

Creating a better Docker mysql

April 06, 2016

So having played with Docker and the mysql images before it’s time to create something that’s less of a disposable test. The idea is to…

Group By error when updating mysql

April 06, 2016

When playing with Docker, php and mysql I ended up using the latest mysql with some old php This caused php to start spewing errors such as…

Testing out Docker with mysql

April 06, 2016

Now things will start to get interesting I imagine. So far getting apache and php up and running on Docker has been pretty handy. It’s…

Testing out Docker with php

April 06, 2016

Moving along in the Docker series it’s time to try set up a php container. We won’t go down the database route just yet so will be trying to…

Testing out Docker with apache

April 06, 2016

Following on from my last post rather than going directly to php and then mysql it might be worth getting a test container slightly better…

Getting started with Docker

April 06, 2016

Intro So I needed to set up a machine for php development but rather than use a server I reckoned now would be a good time to try and set up…

Adding spell check to Sublime 3

March 15, 2016

So a thing I noticed with the posts is I tend to have a few spellings wrong. Generally on the Mac I can rely on it’s built in spell check to…

Set up static routes on startup on the mac

February 26, 2016

I needed to add some static routes to only one interface on my Mac. One route for ethernet and then default to wireless. To do it go to the…

SVN remove all the locks in a directory

December 04, 2015

I was archiving old projects as we are moving to from svn to git. But I keep coming across old locks, sometimes very old - the developer had…

Comparing property files on linux

December 01, 2015

I was upgrading sonarqube and one of the things was to move custom settings in the old property file to the new one. They say don’t copy…

Git import old kind of related but not really history

December 01, 2015

So some of the projects I’ve work on for a while have had various version control systems used, VSS, SVN and now GIT. The fun here is not…

jekyll stopped working then error trying to install

December 01, 2015

I would guess one of the Apple updates knocked it out Going a reinstall gives I think this must have happened the first time I installed it…

Java 8 replace loop with lamda

December 01, 2015

So we have upgraded to Java 8 and so there’s the oppurtunity to refactor some things when they are being upgraded for other reasons. So one…

Keeping the java jdk up to date

December 01, 2015

So all well and good getting nagged about the updates for the Java JRE, but my jdk quickly gets out of date. And going to the Oracle site…

Bash proxy and https error

November 04, 2015

So I wanted to install Oh-my-zsh on one of the dev servers, shouldn’t be too much of a problem… Well except it has to use a MS Proxy, so…

Pimping the zsh shell

September 06, 2015

So having installed zsh and done some basic config it’s time to really pimp it out and from what I can see that means installing oh-my-zsh…

Trying out the zsh shell

September 06, 2015

So when watching googles coding tips on youtube they were talking about dotfiles and general setup. Going to the dotfiles they recommended…

Getting OSX to use the windows domain ntp server

September 06, 2015

So I use a MacBook on a windows network, most things are fine but recently my tests started failing and it turned out to be a time sync…

Bulk adding users in linux

September 06, 2015

So while I’m no Linux admin I end up having to do the odd thing on test servers, which generally involves some head scratching and googling…

Moving from MacPorts to Homebrew

September 06, 2015

So pretty much every blog you read now that involves installing a package on the Mac gives an example using Homebrew. Years ago I installed…

Moving from Aperture to LightRoom

August 21, 2015

So I haven’t had any need to go at my photo collection for some time, but I’m now looking at it again. Aperture has long since been end of…

Eclipse Resource folders showing as packages

August 19, 2015

So I use Eclipse for my java development. I recently added a new resource folder for testing and for some reason it has decided to treat…

Setting up AutoFileName plugin in Sublime for Markdown files

July 29, 2015

So I was looking for a better way of linking in images in my posts. Well I guess the link would be the same it’s just how I find the images…

Wrapping code with Jekyll and pygments

July 24, 2015

So I’ve been updating my old blogger posts to change them from html to markdown here and one of the very first things I did with blogger…

Tidying up Blogger Import

July 24, 2015

So after the import of Blogger things work but they are an bit of an ugly mess. The import has taken the compressed html from the rss…

Markdown Editors

July 24, 2015

So while editing markdown is pretty easy I do of course want it to be easier ;) So there’s a not so little world of markdown editors out…

Importing Blogger into Jekyll

June 24, 2015

So I believe I have the basics up and running I have the blog published on github and I have analytics added so the next thing is too…

Add Google Analytics To Jekyll

June 22, 2015

So one of the things missing for the new blog is I have no idea how many people are viewing it from where etc… That’s something Blogger took…

Setup Google Analytics

June 22, 2015

So it turns out before using Google Analytics you have to set it up… I thought the Tag Manager might handle the basic setup but I guess not…

.markdown or .md

June 18, 2015

Holy religious wars Batman. So this seems like something that should be very simple, I wouldn’t have thought about it or noticed it at all…

Publishing site on github

June 17, 2015

So to start this process I decided I would publish the blog to github, seems the most straight forward to start with and it’s free which is…

Getting started with Jekyll

June 17, 2015

The Blogger problem So while I don’t blog a lot when I do blog it tends to have code in it and Blogger is a real pain when it comes to that…

Creating an SSH key and add it to a server

March 25, 2015

So it’s rare when I have to generate a new key and add it to a server to I forget the commands, they ain’t complex so here they are To add…

Exclude Generated Files From Sonar Analysis

January 26, 2015

I use SonarQube to scan my projects and check for issues.  One of the things you don’t want is it reporting on issues in files you didn’t…

Getting Oracle Sequences in bulk

January 19, 2015

So following on from getting one value from a sequence  what if you want to get alot of sequences in bulk.  So you could get them as and…

Getting an Oracle Sequence in Spring

January 19, 2015

Ok so this one is a bit of lead in but no harm in it by itself. If you are using Spring and want to get the next value from an Oracle…

Http 400 Error Submitting a Form With Errors With Spring

January 19, 2015

So I got a http 400 error when testing a form I thought used to work. Something like this I’m using Spring MVC. The form will submit fine…

Null Argument Starting Tomcat in Eclipse

January 19, 2015

Every now and again I’ve start getting error’s when trying to start Tomcat from within Eclipse. Pretty much no project will work it just…

Oracle Update Rows With Random Values From A Set

January 06, 2015

So I had to update a table on Oracle and set one of the values to a random value, but that value had to be from a set of fixed values. I…

The Highlighter Fight Continues

January 05, 2015

So I’ve tried a the whole highlight code thing and had it working for a time.  But I noticed it has stopped working again. So I’ll try…

Weblogic setup and install series

April 23, 2014

So I ended up with several posts on setting up weblogic. I thought it would be best to have a page that collects them together and to put…

Ubuntu can't apt-get upgrade because boot partition is full

April 23, 2014

When trying to do an upgrade I got the error below If you do a df you will probably see your boot partition is full. Freeing up space seems…

Java Mission Control and Weblogic Dynamic Server

April 23, 2014

So the problem with dynamic servers is they are dynamic… Most of the time this is fine, Weblogic has ways and means of handling them, it…

WLST to auto undeploy retired apps

April 08, 2014

So something that annoys me is having to clean up retired applications, I generally discover them because the deploy fails as the retired…

Weblogic out of permgen

April 07, 2014

If you are getting out of memory errors such as With the weblogic admin server, it is likely because the memory settings for the default…

WLST health check script for weblogic

April 07, 2014

A script that checks the ‘health’ of weblogic managed servers or admin server and restarts them if required. For some reason on occasion I…

Problem with cmo object in wlst script

April 07, 2014

Do you have a script that’s giving the error below? Or something like it, perhaps no attribute ‘getName’?  Does it work fine when you…

Weblogic startup service for RedHat

April 03, 2014

I want to create a startup service for Weblogic on RedHat so that when the machine started all the Weblogic components I wanted would be…

Bash scripting square brackets and ampersands

April 03, 2014

So I’m trying to create a startup script for Weblogic on Redhat. There’s a few out there, but I wanted one that did everything I wanted and…

Some nice tee

April 02, 2014

I wanted to log something in bash to the console and to a log file. Turns out there’s a command for that tee more information here…

Cron to clean up old log files

April 01, 2014

If you run a few Weblogic dev server installs like the ones set up with the scripts in other parts of this blog, or just dev servers in…

Redirect stdout and stderr of Weblogic managed servers

March 31, 2014

As you may have noticed Weblogic is fond of having two log files for each server. A *.out and a *.log. If you have customised the ‘Log file…

Store WLST login securely

March 31, 2014

If you have started writing several wlst scripts for various functions you are probably happy to store the username and password in the…

Customise the skin of weblogic admin console

March 31, 2014

If you have several Weblogic servers you might find it useful to customise the look of the Admin Console so that you can quickly see which…

Connecting to Nodemanager using WLST in production mode

March 27, 2014

If you have set up a series of scripts using wlst and start by connecting to the nodemanager using nmConnect you may have noticed that they…

Turn off the firewall on RedHat linux

March 27, 2014

If you are  having problems connecting with the Weblogic server you have just installed it’s worth looking at the firewall, as every good…

Local host not known error when running wlst scripts

March 27, 2014

If you are running your own scripts or attempting to run some of the scripts on this blog and you encounter the error On the line that…

Create boot.properties to start weblogic admin server

March 27, 2014

So you have been starting the admin server using the startWeblogic.sh script and you are tired of entering the username and password each…

IIS weblogic proxy and Weblogic plugin enabled

March 24, 2014

If you have IIS in front of your Weblogic cluster you are probably familiar with the ‘WebLogic Plug-In Enabled:’ feature on Weblogic server…

Problems when starting the Weblogic admin server

March 23, 2014

If you have been following my little series on installing weblogic or you have used the configuration wizard and encounter the error below…

Create datasources for weblogic using WLST

March 23, 2014

If you are flattening your dev Weblogic server regularly you might want to have your datasources in a wlst file so you can re run it every…

Weblogic linking machine and cluster using WLST

March 20, 2014

Having created a machine and dynamic cluster you need to set the cluster to use the machine and it’s nodemanager

Create a Weblogic dynamic server cluster using WLST

March 20, 2014

Continuing my little series of posts on using wlst, how to create a domain and how to add a machine  the below will set up a dynamic…

Create a 'machine' for Weblogic with WLST

March 20, 2014

Following on from my post  on creating a domain using WLST here is how to create a machine on the weblogic server.

Create new Weblogic Domain using wlst

March 19, 2014

If you rather create the domain yourself instead of using the configuration wizard you can use wlst. You don’t have to configure everything…

Really slow wlst and adminserver start on weblogic

March 12, 2014

As an alternative to my post here  instead of feeding /dev/random with data from /dev/urandom you can switch the weblogic components only…

Not enough entropy on RedHat

March 12, 2014

Chaos is good… I found the wlst and the weblogic adminserver kept ‘hanging’ on me.  When doing a domain creation sometimes the script would…

Syntax Highlighter - Remove the lime green help box on blogger

March 11, 2014

I thought I already had this sorted by setting when setting up SyntaxHighlighter. but what this does is turn of the toolbar for…

Installing Weblogic 12c

March 11, 2014

Installing Weblogic 12c. Some preample, I created a 64bit Redhat 6.5 virtual machine using VirtualBox.  Just followed the default install…

Fixed IP under Red Hat 6.5

February 12, 2014

I have a Red Hat test server I needed to set up with a fixed IP address.  Handy info with a good bit of info available so just a memory dump…

Remove the social buttons from Blogger Dynamic Views

February 08, 2014

The layout section has an option to not display the buttons for Twitter, Facebook and Google Plus but it seems to be ignored in Dynamic…

Syntax Highlighter and Blogger Dynamic Views

February 07, 2014

The last time I looked at this it was a bit of a pain to get highlighters working with dynamic views, as you couldn’t edit the html template…

Spring @Autowired and the new operator

August 09, 2012

So there I was happily shooting the breeze and added @Autowired to things like it was going out of fashion.  But I then added it to a normal…

Get prettify to behave in Firefox

May 03, 2012

Force wrap of long lines in Firefox So having got Google code prettify working on blogger and being quite happy with myself I was testing it…

Google Code Prettify - Add a Theme

May 03, 2012

Adding a theme to Google Code Prettify So in my first post I got Google Code Prettify to work, happy days.  I wasn’t happy with how it…

Blogger Getting Started

May 03, 2012

Blogger Getting Started So I decided to give this blogging thing a go.  Mainly so that when I figure out something I’ll have a place to find…