Jakub Korab

Author: Jakub

  • Why I am ashamed of the Australian Government

    I don’t typically blog about politics but there is something that I need to express my views on. For those who are unfamiliar with the story, a guy called David Hicks, an Australian, was captured in Afghanistan by the US military and sent to the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay. After years of confinement, and…

  • Java PC Emulator/Open Source Goodness

    After the recent announcement by Dell that they were going to be selling Linux-based desktops and laptops, I decided to check out their site to see what’s on offer. For some strange reason the open source laptops they are selling don’t come with Linux at all (?) but with FreeDOS. I had never heard of…

  • What bugs me about Guice

    Last week I switched a basic Spring app to Guice, the new dependency-injection framework from Google. It’s nice, it’s quick, and it does what it says on the box, but one thing bothers me. I know it’s not really logical, but it’s like a rock in my shoe – I need to import com.google.inject annotations…

  • Why risk life and limb?

    Running with the bulls is possibly one of the most insane things you can do, and definitely right up there with the essential European experiences. My cousin did it a few years back, and I can’t be outdone 😉 See more progress on: Run with the bulls in Pampalona

  • Becoming a Programmer

    I came across an article posted a while ago by Rob Walling (http://www.softwarebyrob.com/articles/Software_Training_Sucks_Roll_it_Back.aspx) proposing that the best way to learn how to program is via an apprenticeship with a more experienced programmer. I love the idea, it just sounds right to have someone shortcut you through a lot of the unnecessary pain. It is something…

  • Talking causes accidents

    A long time ago, I posted (http://jakubkorab.blogspot.com/2005/07/hands-free-mobile-use-causes-crashes.html) about a study in which researchers found that talking on a hands free phone kit was just as disruptive as using a mobile phone. I laughed that it was actually talking to other people that was the culprit. Well now it turns out that that’s not far from…

  • Dependency injection killed the factory pattern

    I was having a play with Guice (http://code.google.com/p/google-guice/), the new dependency injection framework from the folks at Google, and something quite profound happened. I realised that having used Spring for a while now, it had been ages since I had to code up a factory class for pretty much anything. No more weird JNDI lookup…

  • Thought for the day

    "How many people can say they’ve climbed Mount Fuji? How many people can say they’ve drank snakes’ blood in Thailand and eaten Guinea Pig in Peru? How many people have run with the bulls in Pamplona and downed ten steins at Oktoberfest? How many people do you know who’ve worked in a strip club in…

  • A problem worth solving

    I came across this article in Technology Review, which talks about a completely green-field approach to software development – Intentional Software. Getting the domain experts to write their own code. There have been less-than great implementations of this sort of thing in the past, but a guy like Charles Simonyi (Microsoft Word/Hungarian notation fame) just…

  • OpenID comes to town!

    Seems the ball has really started rolling on this one. According to O’Reilly (http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2007/02/aol_supports_op.html) AOL has started supporting OpenID for AIM users. It’s only a matter of time before Google’s on this one. I had a look at the OpenID specs to get a decent understanding of exactly what the protocol was about. There is…