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Thread safety issues with Java SimpleDateFormat class

One of the common programming practices is to define a static SimpleDateFormat instance and use it in your application whenever you need to parse and/or format Java dates. It actually does perfect sense, because parsing and formatting in general is a computationally expensive operation and rather than creating the object over and over again, [...]

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Introducing music.isallicare.com

A while back I blogged about music theory for geeks and got a lot of feedback from my fellow musicians (some geek some not). Then I blogged for over a month about a new technology named Dojo Toolkit, which essentially is a JavaScript toolkit to create really cool looking AJAX/Web 2.0 applications. As a pet [...]

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An Outside the Box Look at Public Key Encryption II: Asymmetric Encryption

Last week I went through symmetric encryption, and explained why it is not accepted as a great fit for secure communication. Today I’ll talk about asymmetric encryption and public key infrastructure.

The invention of asymmetric encryption as we use it today is attributed to a publication by Whitfield Diffie and Martin Hellman in 1976, who were [...]

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Developing a Dojo Application 6 – Epilogue

About 6 weeks ago I started a pet project to experiment with Dojo Toolkit which I tentatively called Musician’s Friend. My goal was to see whether this technology is really mature and stable enough to be used in an enterprise grade software project, and to create an application that might one day [...]

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Developing a Dojo Application 5 – Cross-browser (IE) problems

I was hoping to wrap up our mini application this week and move on to another project. Then I suddenly realised that the application stopped working for Microsoft Internet Explorer (IE) after version 3.  I pretty much spent my entire spare time trying to debug the problem with not much traction so far.

Documenting failures [...]

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Developing a Dojo Application 4 – Splash Screen, Title Pane and Dialog Box

This week I’ll complete the chord and scale definitions and add some functionality to the application.

There is a large number of chords, most of which I believe is now included in our application. I omitted some rarely used chords which spread out to two octaves. Also note that some added notes, such as ninths, elevenths, [...]

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Developing a Dojo Application 3 - Wiring it up

I left it where we had a simple GUI that didn’t do much last week. This time I’ll try to implement a simple, but working version of our little Musician’s Helper application. My primary design goal is to make this really intuitive and useful for a musician who wants to figure out or practice [...]

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Developing a Dojo Application 2 - Fisheye and Tabbed Pane

I’ll continue to develop our application I’ve started last week by refining the layout of the user interface and continue adding more features to it.

First thing I’ll do is to add the keys and scales under the Accordion Panels named Keys and Scales. Here I’ll try to introduce another cool visual feature of Dojo framework, [...]

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Developing a Dojo Application 1 - Layout Manager

If you have ever attempted to write software that has a GUI (Graphical User Interface), you’ve probably noticed that creating both intuitive and functional user interface is a lot harder than it looks.  A number of different skills are required to design a good user interface, skills often hard to find in one [...]

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How to Pick Strong Passwords? Part 3: Doing the Math

Now that we know how to calculate the number of operations we need for each type of password, and have a tool to experiement with, let’s calculate how long will it take for a modern computer to break passwords of different strengths. This is a bit tricky as computers have different calculating powers, multiple [...]

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