Victoria's Blog

Open APIs

I’ve recently bought a device which lets me see how much electricity is being consumed, produced and the surplus electricity at any point in time. It’s called a Wattson and sits in the kitchen and lets us know when we can switch on the dishwasher for example and maximise the …

15/12/2013

Arduino Meter Reader

I’ll post soon about my latest purchase – an Arduino and Wifi Shield. The reason I purchased this little toy was to read the impulses from our meter and upload the results to PVOutput. Yeah, I know… sad or what… but when you’re in software integration, it’s oddly good fun …

08/10/2013

Email Price Checker – Part 3: Filtering From Addresses

In the part 2, the basic app and splitting into sub codes had been built. To keep this part short, I’ll just be adding fromAddress filtering. When a price request is received via email, not only does the payload have to be of the correct type and contain a code, …

09/06/2013

Email Price Checker – Part 2: Code Verifying and Splitting

In part 1 we built the basics of the app – and by basics, it really was basic. In this part, code checking and sub code splitting will be added. To start with we’ll add sub code splitting. This is heavily dependent on the website code and for the website …

04/06/2013

Email Price Checker – Part 1: Initial Setup

This post will walk through a complete project from start to scratch. Previously I’d created a small Selenium price checking test which runs great, but means that my pc has to run the app and no one can use it except me. This new project will build on that but …

02/06/2013

Retrive embedded ActiveMQ messages

How can you get messages out of an embedded ActiveMQ kaha db? Well this question came up this week in conversation at work after my colleagues had spent a fair few hours trying to achieve this goal. I always prefer the simplest option possible and thought, well why not just …

13/01/2013

Java Wi-Fi QR Code

I read a few blogs about technology and new things on the internet and the other day this post (Have guests often – Generate a QR Code with your Wi-Fi details that you can frame on your wall) came up about printing off a QR Code for your guests to …

05/01/2013

Remote Printing – E-mail – Part 3 Printer POP3

(Unfortunately this is the second time I’m writing this as I trashed my database to correct an apostrophe problem before thinking about the post I’d just written…) I’ve just switched hosts this week and was updating various settings in my network when I logged into the Kyocera Command Center and …

29/12/2012

Remote Printing – E-mail – Part 2 HTML

In this part, I’ve added the ability to print HTML. In order to print HTML, the HTML first needs to be converted so that it can be put into a PDF document and printed just like a PDF. The following class has been extended to handle HTML attachments and print …

18/11/2012

Remote Printing – E-mail

If like me, you’ve been looking at printers recently, you might well have noticed that some printers now come with email addresses allowing you to email the printer with items to print. I’ve already written a few months ago about the fact that I chose to buy a Kyocera laser …

17/11/2012

Spring properties – multiple values representing a list of objects

There are many cases in a recent project I’ve worked on where we need to configure the app using properties and the properties values represent a list of objects. The list can be a variable size and the objects might not have all the same fields defined. The solution to …

01/07/2012

PVOutput integration v1

As I mentioned back in November, I’ve been working on integrating with the PVOutput website so I don’t have to manually read the Sunnybeam output files and add stats to the website. In order to be able to look at creating a solution, I need a set of requirements. These …

29/01/2012

PVOutput integration v1 – code

The entire source is shown below, but can also be downloaded. The MD5 hash for the zip is: 54de9a8eb71637bb00a8f454ae939016 Source CollectedData.java Device.java DeviceDecorator.java EnergyData.java SolarData.java WeatherData.java PeakPower.java SunnyBeamDailyOutput.java SunnyBeam.java SunnyBeamDailyOutputReaderImpl.java SunnyBeamData.java SunnyBeamFileHandler.java SunnyBeamDailyOutputReader.java CopyDataException.java NoDataForDateException.java AbstractDateTime.java Date.java Time.java IntegrationException.java MuleFactoryImpl.java GeneralMuleException.java MuleFactory.java Condition.java OutputImpl.java Output.java OutputBuilderImpl.java AddOutputServiceImpl.java GetMissingServiceImpl.java PvOutputServiceImpl.java AddOutputService.java …

Unmarshalling XML without a namespace using JAXB

Ok, this is just a short post on unmarshalling XML which doesn’t have a namespace but the objects that you have do have a namespace. Right, first you’ll need two XSDs which have some objects that you’ll be receiving in String XML format: vsf-payload.xsd vsf-domain.xsd In order to get the …

08/01/2012

GU10 follow up – price checking

This is really a follow up to https://blog.v-s-f.co.uk/2011/12/the-real-cost-of-gu10s/.  I’ve been monitoring the prices of the new 4W LED GU10s on CPC for a few weeks now.  When CPC adds a product to their website, they add the base product code, E.g. LP04169 and then there are up to 99 further …

25/12/2011