I have found some really useful links for the SCJP Java 5 exam.  This article is well written and covers quite a few of the tricky areas of the Java 5 SCJP Exam.  Even if you aren?t studying for the exam these article?s might still be of interest to you because they cover topics like Autoboxing, serialization, printf and regular...

Here is Friday why is.  Today as I haven't got much time I thought I would find out how firefox got it's name.  The actual reason isn't that interesting although it has had a lot of other names and it's history is quite interesting.   Taken from the Mozilla FAQ website  September 2002 the browser was...

I found this good page today which basically has the whole book in chapters for you to read and download.here's the link check it out http://www.cs101.org/ipij/ I don't think I am going to read the whole book but it has some tasty chapters on inheritance, Designing with Objects and Encapsulation. This blog entry has the added benefit of...

I have recently been thinking of my code as a public API and being careful what I show to other classes using my classes. Viewing classes in this light also help to reduce coupling with other classes. The big benefit this has also is it hides the implementation of a classes methods from the users of the class. The real benefit of this is that...

I read this article today called Why we all sell code with bugs, I actually read the article in the newspaper which had a link to his site where I found the full article http://software.ericsink.com/articles/Four_Questions.html if you have read my blog recently (hello, is there anyone out there listening, looks like I'm blogging to myself...

I'm out on site up in cannock chase again, it is has gone pretty well today. They seem happy, the installation process has gone okay. The problem I had today was some of the features work in the last release but when I upgraded them it didn't work in the current release but the new feature they wanted and the reason for me being here...

I have seen this mentioned in a lot of refactoring articles. I find it quite difficult or maybe difficult isn't the word but it's not appealing to make such a change to code. It's one of those when you refactoring and it takes quite a while to refactor the code just to get it doing what it already did. The benefit will come when you...

Well I have had one crazy day of programming. I came in early and left late. It was as all last minute dash coding, hectic and time going past at double the speed.It's funny but usually when you are at work time slowly ticks by, it seems to take about three days just to reach lunch and I won't even mention the afternoon. If you have a...

I noticed that the Head First Design Patterns book has a free chapter on the Decorator pattern. I actually own the Head First Design patterns book but because this chapter was free I read it again. The decorator pattern is quite a peculiar pattern to look at, it almost works as if by magic, it has a kind of beauty that tends to come from simple...

The powers that be (my manager and above) decided that instead of the week I had to write the code for my program that they are only going to give me 3 days. I explained that to do this is going to mean that I am going to have to hard code a lot of stuff and rather than extend the current code, it is going to be a one off and not very reusable...

Congratulations to the creating passionate users blog they have made it into the Technorati Top 100. Which is pretty amazing when you see the numbers of people linking to their blog (like me).They are currently 84 with 6260 links from 2733 sites, holy moly that's a lot. My poor little blog only has 105 links from 8 sites and I am rank...

This is probably one of the easier topics on the Java 5 exam because if you are programming in Java then you will have had to use the flow control (IF and SWITCH statements etc). The code also deals with the enum. This can be an exam nightmare because of all the extra things you can do with enums and the fact that it acts like a special class...

I saw this on ZDNet today, jobs being outsourced to India is a bit like global warming melting more bits of the antartic, it's not something you are to worried about until it starts to effect you. I wonder how long this will go on until people really start to get concerned about it."1 mln US jobs to be outsourced by year-end 2006 by...

another day, another bug put in the system which has halted what ever development I was doing. This is a classic case of putting a fix into solve one problem and in it's place is one if not more bugs. This is a slightly interesting bug. Basically we have a Utils Static/helper class and it has a removeFraction function. The function itself...

I had a interesting few days trying to fix this bug. We are not quite sure which of the millions of changes is responsible for the overview map not working. The overview map is a small zoomed out map of the current map. The piece of functionality works 2 releases ago but now doesn't. Obviously there have been a lot of changes that have been...