Not-So-EasyChair Hints

There is a conference management system called EasyChair which many of the academic conferences use to manage the submission to the conference, the reviewing of the submissions, and the selection of the papers to be included.  It is tried and true, but it has one of the worst user interfaces you are likely to ever experience.  This post is the result of my struggle to get it set up for an event.

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Storing Date Values in Files

XML and JSON files store and transport data.  What is the best way to store a Date-Time value? Always, always, always use the integer epoch format: the number of milliseconds since Jan 1, 1970 UTC. This post tells you why.

Robust Web Application Initialization

When a web based application starts up, it should do so carefully to avoid a number of problems.  This post outlines the problems you might run into, and a list of coding preparations that can be made to avoid these problems.

Proper Stream Patterns

Java has streams for bytes, and streams for chars.  Learn to use them correctly.  It can be daunting at first, but if you just learn a few basic patterns, it all works well.