After some break, I dusted off the Ruby to try out one interesting idea Peter presented yesterday that literally ASKS for Rails. So I grabbed the latest and greatest RubyNetBeans from Ruby Hudson. For some reason it stopped updates on January 26th so the latest version I have got was build 6327. It is bundled with JRuby 1.1RC1 and the Rails version that comes preinstalled is 1.2.6. Using the menu Tools -> Ruby Gems, they can be easily upgraded to latest and greatest 2.

Guess what are three most useful tools without which no proper Ottawa household can exist ? Snow shovel, snow pusher and car window ice scratcher. If the number was 4, the next would be snowblower. Up to yesterday, our family was in safe position being equipped with several shovels, four or five scratchers and one pusher. Then disaster stroke: my son broke the pusher while moving away few cube meters of snow we removed from the roof.

Lured by the iPhone platform, this is what I read in the evenings. Feels kind of funny: after 10+ years of Java/C# and almost as many years of C++ beforehand, I mostly lost my C instincts and C habits. Fortunately, I have also mostly lost my C++ bad habits as well. The Apple site is definitive starting point - put the http://developer.apple.com/referencelibrary/index.html into your bookmarks. From non-Apple sources, very bookmarking-worthy is the Cocoa Literature and Cocoa Devcentral.

This is post is NOT about version control in the sense of source code control. It addresses the issue how to easily tell which version of the Web application is running as well make sure that the same version is reflected in the snapshots performed by Ant. We have used this approach on several applications and found it quite useful. The version I talk about is not the automatically generated version from VCS system (such as SVN revision).

I better blog this before I forget what was the issue :-). During daily run of unit tests, I started to receive this (very well explained) exception: [sourcecode language='xml'] org.springframework.jdbc.UncategorizedSQLException: SqlMapClient operation; uncategorized SQLException for SQL []; SQL state [null]; error code [17004]; --- The error occurred while applying a parameter map. --- Check the APPROVAL_TASK.insert-InlineParameterMap. --- Check the parameter mapping for the 'scheduledDate' property. --- Cause: java.sql.SQLException: Invalid column type; nested exception is com.