Webmasters/Webdesigners often need to do repetitive image manipulation tasks like resizing for thumbnails, image borders etc. Even though a plethora of image manipulation software are available, nothing beats ImageMagick when you need to perform simple tasks, especially since it lends itself well to automation using shell scripts. We outline here 5 common image manipulation techniques with ImageMagick.

Like it or not pop ups are there to stay and often values need to be passed from the pop up to the parent window. Although modal window based popups are currently less popular and being replaced by (slicker?) div based ‘pseudo’ popups, its still worthwhile to know how to pass values from a popup to its parent window.

Iterating through collections in jsp using JSTL and Struts tags can be confusing, especially since the attributes can be a little hard to figure out. Here’s a ready reference of some iteration examples that may help.

Problem: You get this error while trying to access a property of an object in JSTL but you are absolutely sure that the property is present in the Class.
Solution: It is likely that the culprit is your getter method for the property or the way you are trying to access it in JSTL .

Ever ftp’d Windows files into a unix box and then found that some of your scripts break because the file names have spaces in them? Here are couple of one liners that will help fix this by removing one or more spaces in the file names.

Although it is not usual (or preferred) to use a shell script to execute sql queries in Oracle, this recipe discusses how this can be done for those rare cases when you need to.

This tutorial is a cheatsheet of post install customization of Mediawiki, covers user permissions configuration, look & feel customization and some basic editing configuration. Hopefully this will be of some help to other newbie Mediawiki admins like myself.

Problem: you get an error during build saying “Build error java.util.Enumeration cannot be resolved” even though you have the correct import statement.
Solution: Set the compiler compliance level to 1.4 (window->preferences->Java->compiler) and rebuild.

Environment specific configuration of Java applications usually require changes to properties files before the application can be deployed. We discuss here how this can be achieved using ant tasks.

Problem: The error “project .jetemitters is missing required library” prevents you from building your project.
Solution: Go to package explorer window and click the down arrow button in the right hand corner.

Then select filter and uncheck *.resources. The project .jetemitters should now show up. Just delete it.