In order to get an application running for testing purposes on our servers, my team and I needed some configuration data that was stored on the client's production database. After asking them for what we needed, they soon sent us back an Oracle DMP file. Shoving data from the DMP back into the database would be as simple as using Oracle's imp utility...or so I thought.

I recently read a Coding Horror blog post about how, as a user of free software, one ought to seriously consider donating money to the software's authors. Jeff gave the application Paint.NET as an example, also mentioning just how awesome of an application it was in general. I needed to create some screenshots for a project I was working on, so I thought I'd give MSPaint a rest and give this new-fangled Paint.NET a try.

I was pleased. I had finished integrating the fantastic Javascript Image Cropper UI into a web-app that, among other things, searches a database of images for those that are similar to a given query image. The user could now upload an image and, with the help of the UI and some server-side JAI code, search the database using a cropped portion of the image...

...in Firefox, anyway.