Christoph Jahn

One of the less known libraries of the Apache Commons project is JXPath which implements XPath (and not only for accessing Java beans but of course also DOM structures). Documentation, however, is scarce so the tutorial provided on http://www.tfo-eservices.eu/wb_tutorials/media/JXPathTutorial/PDF/JXpathTutorial.pdf is something you want to look at.

While looking for a regex reference for XML Schema I came across the site http://www.regular-expressions.info that offers a plethora of information about regular expressions in general. And as each programming language’s implementation is a bit different from the others, there is also a special section that points out these aspects. This is where I found [...]

I hadn’t looked into the topic of Java decompilers for quite a while and was interested to learn from a colleague about the Java Decompiler project. It comes with either an Eclipse plug-in or a stand-alone GUI that doesn’t require installation.
http://java.decompiler.free.fr/http://java.decompiler.free.fr/

I recently looked into the subject of cross-platform installation. In this context I have come across the multi-platform installer IzPack (there is also an interview on InfoQ). Although this creates Java installers, as opposed to native formats like MSI or RPM which I prefer, it seems to be an interesting product. So I will spend [...]

I have been a happy user of the typesetting system LaTeX for almost 20 years. For creating the actual output (be it a DVI, PostScript or PDF file) I have usually used some home-grown script in the past. But recently, when digging through the repository of available software for my Fedora 12 system, I came [...]

Just having started with a new personal “project” I needed a good style for BibTeX. In the past (read ten years ago) I had used dinnat.bst which had good support for citing URLs (at the time that was rather unusual). This has been replaced by natdin.bst, which is not installed on Fedora 12. So here [...]

If you are looking for a Subversion web interface, chanes are you come across USVN (User-friendly SVN). I first used it in August 2009 during a complex proof-of-concept (PoC). The current version at the time was 0.7.2 and it was of great help. Nevertheless there were a few things missing, esp. LDAP support. So I [...]

There is a great online book available for Solaris, called ‘The consolidated “Less known Solaris Features” tutorials‘. It is constantly being extended and at the time of this writing contains almost 400 (!) pages.

CollabNet are providing up-to-date binary packages of Subversion for many platforms. In my case this is CentOS 5, which by itself only has a rather dated version of Subversion. So I downloaded and installed the client, server and extras packages from CollabNet. The server package comes with a bundled Apache and a pretty nice installation [...]

Sometimes people wonder why Oracle DB (both 10g and 11g) will not start after installation on Linux/Unix. In many cases the simple reason is the content of /etc/oratab. For each database it contains a line in the format $ORACLE_SID:$ORACLE_HOME:START_DB_FLAG:The last column is set to “N” by default. Just change it to “Y” and run $ORACLE_HOME/bin/dbstart [...]