My Eclipse recently stopped working gave me this error when I tried to launch it:

Failed to load the JNI shared library “C:\Windows\system32\..\jre\bin\client\jvm.dll"

While it doesn’t look like it explains anything at first, looking closely, you can see that it’s looking for the JVM DLLs under the System32 path. That’s because something, somehow, placed the Java executables (java.exe, javaw.exe, javaws.exe) under the System32 path, and when Eclipse is launched it tries to use this path as the JRE/JDK path.

Accessing the Active Directory is a pretty common problem in software projects, especially in enterprise-related ones. Although, since it’s usually an “implement once, reuse forever” feature, it’s usually overlooked as well people usually join projects halfway through, when all critical features have long been implemented.

In my case, I had to come up with our own solution to generate LDAP queries when the project I joined halfway through didn’t have the necessary components to query the AD and return results, even though an LDAP-based authentication was a core feature. I personally took over that part and implemented something similar to CodeIgniter’s active record feature, a set of simple classes to generates LDAP queries (search filters, to be exact), run them and parse the results into strongly typed, annotation-based models.

That particular implementation will be the subject of a future article, but in the meantime I’ve decided to share what I’ve gathered through my work. Not much, perhaps, but here it is anyway.

I’ve been using static images for arrows for quite some time, and as you can imagine it’s been cumbersome. You can’t modify an image triangle in any way (at least by conventional means), so as the UI gets more complex, it gets increasingly difficult to maintain them. Not to mention that they eat up a little bit of your users’ bandwidth. A very small portion, perhaps, but still.

Let me give you an example. On a website that features 4 different colors of arrows meant to be displayed in 4 different places (top, right, bottom, left) of the elements they’re placed upon, you would need to generate 16 different triangles and add them in your sprite. Now, what if your designer decides to add 2 more colors and 4 more directions (top left, top right, bottom right, bottom left)? It’s a pain, right?

Fortunately, there’s a maintainable, cross-browser (even in IE6!), pure CSS way of achieving this: borders. You may have already seen it being used on many websites, like The Verge, Gizmodo, Twitter, even Google, but it first caught my eye on Google. At first it blew my mind and I couldn’t understand how it worked, but then it dawned on me. If it boggles (or did, at some point) your mind as well, continue reading.

I’ve been in love with VtM: Bloodlines ever since I’ve first played it back in new year’s eve, 2008, and the attention I could pay the details in the game could only increase gradually over time. This time, after I’ve had a 1-year-long Beatle-mania, I’ve realized that the game contained a reference to The Beatles, particularly the song of theirs called Doctor Robert.

The reference can be found pretty early in the game, in the hospital in Santa Monica, the first area in the game. In the administration PC on the first level of the hospital is the following note (regarding a “Dr. Roberts”):