News | Blackburn Labs

Hasbro-Hackathon

I had the pleasure of being in a team with Doug Hopkins (@combatadvantage) and Steve Weed (@sweed84) at this weekend’s 2014 Hasbro Hackathon. Our small team won in our category! I'm very proud of what we accomplished in such a short time. Thank you to Hasbro for...

Adaptive Website Made Easy

General, HTML5 & jQuery

A few years ago a colleague of mine and fellow developer, Craig Verrastro, invited his daughter’s music teacher to come present to my department. Why? Because he was seeing impaired, and we wanted the team to see what browsing the web (especially our own applications)...

Quick and easy performance timing for your HTML5 page

General, HTML5 & jQuery, Projects

When I was a teenager I had a job at Burger King. If you have never noticed it before, there is a large digital clock next to the drive through window, which tells the employee how long the cusotmer has been waiting for their order. Measuring drive through wait time...

Secure your Java Spring app with PropertyPlaceholderConfigurer

General, Java, Spring

This is a trick that I have used many times which I first learned about on Mkyong.com – one of my favorite Java/Spring/Hibernate resources. Just about any application will need to connect to external resources like databases, web services, file servers, and the like....

Google Visualization’s table charts lacking?

General, Google API, Google Visualization

Back in June I posted a quick fix on how to Placing Google Chart Filters in Table Header. Since then I have continued to use Google’s table chart in a few projects – and have grown to find it a bit lacking. As I recently pointed out when responding to Saranya’s...

Solution to Google Visualization API’s incompatible JSON date format

General, Google API, Google Visualization

For over a week now I have been struggling with a rather tricky formatting issue with Google Visualization API. My server side code which was generating the JSON needed to put Date objects into a string format to be compatible with jQuery’s AJAX parsing. However the...

The iFrame Is Evil!

Featured, General, HTML5 & jQuery

So it seems that every job I work on, the same topic comes up. Someone, at some point will say, "just use an iFrame for that". Then I need to go down the old tired road as to why that would not be a good idea. Well, this article is going to be a bit utilitarian for...

Unable to activate your SAP HANA views or procedures? This might be your fix

General, HANA, SAP

Here is a quick tip to all those who are investigating SAP HANA for the first time. I have found that a common mistake people make when they first start using HANA is not granting access to their schema to the “_SYS_REP” user. This can be very tricky because the error...