Author: David Beaumont

  • Hosting SNOMED CT on Heroku

    Hosting SNOMED CT on Heroku

    At Birdie we’re big believers in making the data we receive about older adults’ care as useful as possible in improving their quality of life. That means making it available in the formats that other parts of the health and social care can understand. SNOMED CT is a lingua franca for encoding facts about patients…

  • Favourite talks from JSConf Iceland

    I was very fortunate to visit Reykjavik in August this year for JSConf Iceland.  Apart from relaxing trips to natural hot spas, battling vikings on rooftop bars backed by the setting sun, dramatic geysirs, gigantic waterfalls and snowmobiling on glaciers, there was also the best selection of technical talks I’ve seen at any conference. Here…

  • Getting Started with Graylog on MacOS

    Graylog is an amazing open source tool for recording, viewing and analysing application logs. The performance and full text indexing of the underlying elasticsearch database means you probably won’t need any other logging tools throughout your whole organisation. Application developers writing to Graylog may need a local instance to retrieve diagnostic information during development. This…

  • First steps with Azure CLI

    This guide uses Azure’s cross platform CLI to create and destroy a virtual machine. First things first, lets define some basic properties about the machine such as the adminstrator credentials and its hostname, which will be given the suffix of cloudapp.net: HOST=cccu-dev-adfs USERNAME=djb PASSWORD=Password1! To make changes to your Azure account you’ll need to authenticate…

  • Switching Hibernate’s UUID Type Mapping per Database

    JDBC doesn’t include UUIDs as one of its generic SQL types and so the different relational databases supported by Hibernate have different mechanisms to save and retrieve UUIDs. PostgreSQL’s JDBC driver, for example, requires that you use Types.OTHER as a surrogate for the missing UUID constant: preparedStatement.setObject( index, uuid, Types.OTHER ); Whereas H2 requires the…

  • Copying Mail using Imapsync

    Mail can be copied between IMAP servers using a graphical client such as Outlook or Thunderbird. However, these tend to be quite unreliable, often resulting in duplicates or missing messages. An alternative is to use the imapsync script. For example, the following command copies all your mail from Fred’s INBOX folder at example.com to the…

  • Virtualbox Guest Additions in Fedora 16

    VirtualBox compiles kernel modules against the running kernel. This means you should update your system before you start as otherwise the Guest Additions will stop working when you upgrade in the future. yum clean all yum update I recommend doing this in a virtual terminal of the guest machine (press CTRL-ALT-F2) as in graphical mode…

  • Adding a MySQL datasource to JBoss AS 7

    This post assumes you are using a Unix like system with a bash shell and have already downloaded and extracted the JBoss AS 7 application server. Retrieve the MySQL Connector The connector can be downloaded from: http://dev.mysql.com/downloads/connector/j/. The current version at the time of writing is 5.1.17, further sections of this guide assume that version…