Category: technology
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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”?
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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Sucky Way to End a Great Conference
I just got this in the mail this morning “The JavaOne conference team has been notified by the San Francisco Department of Public Health about an identified outbreak of a virus in the San Francisco area. Testing is still underway to identify the specific virus in question, but they believe it to be the Norovirus,…
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Pimping Builds
From the Pimp My Build session by the Atlassian guys. Use Ant imports. The imported stuff can check for preconditions and fail cleanly using the <fail unless=”…”> tag. Use macros. Don’t build stuff you don’t need using the <uptodate> task. Use <outofdate> from ant-contrib, which is even better. You can use audio snippets to tell…
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Service Integration with SCA and Tuscany
The nice thing about JavaOne is that if you can’t get into the session that you wanted, the fall-back option probably kicks butt anyway 🙂 Having missed out on the Grails/JFX/Android combo, I had the pleasure of getting the low down on Apache Tuscany, an open source Service Component Architecture(SCA) implementation. Tuscany is really about…
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CommunityOne First Impressions
Well. it’s true what they say about Americans. They like to do things big. I hadn’t had my head around exactly what 15000 people at a conference would look like, but I’m slowly beginning to. Moscone is bloody huge! All this space, and I’m having trouble finding a coffee though 🙁 Thankfully can see folks…