Jakub Korab

Author: Jakub

  • Would you like a toolbar with that platform upgrade?

    It’s innocuous enough. “A new update of Java is available. Do you want to upgrade now?” Sure, OK. Why not. Click. Dowload. Install. WTF? What’s the story here? Are Sun that strapped for cash that they need to make a few bucks by installing Yahoo’s “value adds”?

  • A fire-side chat about programming

    Every once in a while I go through a period of introspection where I pose questions like “why am I solving the same stuff all the time?”, “is there a better way to be doing this?” and “what’s around the corner?”. I think it’s pretty healthy, and I prefer to give it a good two…

  • Why wrong licenses kill good products

    Being on the ODBMS train of thought, I checked out a few products that are out there, and something struck me – all of them would be really difficult to bring in to a project. The reason is not technical, but rather one of hassle. All of the products are either proprietary closed-source or GPL…

  • When a Cache is more than a Cache

    Recently I have come across a number of instances when I have needed to perform searches across data cached in memory. Standard cache implementations, however do not provide anything more than basic key-value lookups, which is a bit of a pain. One of my colleagues came up with a clever solution to this – keeping…

  • Be a Better Developer

    I came across 91 Surefire Ways to Become an Even Better Developer while loooking for programming resources similar to Project Euler (the best way to learn a new language). Dozens of links and ideas when you feel that work is not stretching the brain as much as it could. My favourite? Get your boss to…

  • The Moustache is Back!

    During Movember (the month formerly known as November) I’m growing a Mo. That’s right I’m bringing the moustache back, because I want to help tackle men’s health issues and fight prostate cancer.The Movember rules are simple. I start out on the 1st clean shaven, and for the rest of the month grow the most awesome…

  • Conference organizing no more

    After taking a step back to have a think about my situation, I have regretfully pulled out of organizing the IJTC conference in Dublin this year. Putting together a conference is a hugely involved activity and I just do not have the time to spare on it this year. I wish the remaining organizers the…

  • Hibernate/JPA Ternary Relationships

    After much pain and suffering trying to get ternary relationships working correctly using the JPA annotations, I finally hit upon this post. The secret sauce: it makes use of the (rather poorly documented) @CollectionOfElements Hibernate annotation to annotate the set of link objects in the primary class, and makes the link class @Embeddable. No primary…

  • Irish Java Technologies Conference 2008

    It’s that time of the year again. We are just starting to ramp up getting this year’s conference in Dublin together for November. A good few months this time, as opposed to our insane 3 month schedule last year. There are a bunch of themes that we are looking to cover in this year’s line-up,…

  • Who reads your blog?

    So, why no blog posts lately? Most of the interesting stuff that folks blog about are those issues and ideas which have currency, those at the forefront at their minds. Tech blogs too deal with the everyday. Issues that we have come across, interesting ideas, problems and techniques. However, in this day of corporate non-disclosure…