Nothing to see here...

What the hell happened to this blog?

2010-05-19T06:56:00.000-07:00

In short? Twitter.I haven't been blogging much as of late because I simply haven't felt inspired to do so. This blog has always been a hotbed of Java stuff and I (thankfully) don't work with any of that any more. Now a days I work entirely in Ruby and am so much happier for it. Any time I do something interesting with Ruby I never felt like this blog was the place to talk about it for some reason

Enjoying a cupcake

2010-04-04T15:12:00.001-07:00

Posted via email from Ray's posterous

Handling the Twitter Stream API with Ruby

2009-12-16T07:40:00.000-08:00

I've been doing a lot of things with the Twitter API lately. More on that another time though. I started messing around with their stream API last night. It's pretty fun to play with and I wanted to put the code up somewhere so I can use it later. Right now it works, but it clearly isn't very robust. It needs retry logic and better error handling. Right now, it's just a toy :)You'll need the json

Spymemcached Optimizations Followup

2009-09-29T17:32:00.000-07:00

A couple days ago, Dustin Sallings, the other of the spymemcached Java client for memcached, posted an article on some optimizations done to the library. If you are currently using hibernate-memcached you may want to try out the latest spymemcached RC release.If you combine the latest spymemcached RC release, with memcached 1.4 and the new binary protocol you should see significant performance

Tales of a Bottom Feeder Recruiting Agency

2009-09-24T04:26:00.000-07:00

I'm a moron. At least according to the well formed opinion of one Kevin Higgins of H.T. Associates. He formed this opinion after I repeatedly asked for his "Executive Search" firm to stop contacting me. Now, I've checked with a few authoritative sources, like my Mom and my Wife, and it turns out; I'm not a moron (my Wife did appear to be on the fence).Last week sometime I was sitting at my desk

iPhone QR Code Readers

2009-09-18T07:46:00.000-07:00

I was playing around with some QR code readers for the iPhone. If you don't know what a QR code is you might recognize it as a crazy looking square full of smaller squares. Apparently these things are on everything in Japan, and are used to market products as well as presenting URLs.I tried two so far this morning based on what Jeff Judge and Doug Barth at Interactive Mediums were playing with.

Windy City Rails 2009

2009-09-13T07:16:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I attended the Windy City Rails 2009 conference. This is the first conference I've attended in a few years. More notably it was my first Ruby related conference. I have to say, I loved the format most of all. The conference was only $99 to attend, there were no tracks and therefor no session overlap. It was a quick one day in and out affair with great speakers and really good material.

Hibernate-memcached 1.2.1 Released

2009-08-10T09:46:00.000-07:00

I released 1.2.1 this morning to fix an NPE that was brought up in the group this morning. The NPE only comes up under an error condition so it really shouldn't be affecting too many people. Either way, it was crappy code and it needed to get fixed.You can download the 1.2.1 from the site, or just update your maven pom.http://code.google.com/p/hibernate-memcached/Enjoy!

Hibernate-memcached 1.2 Released

2009-07-17T18:34:00.001-07:00

Earlier this week I released hibernate-memcached 1.2. Hibernate-memcached is a simple library that enables the use of Memcached as a second-level cache in Hibernate.The 1.2 release updates the Maven dependencies to spymemcached 2.3.1, which includes some bug fixes and reduces the dependencies by one jar (spy.jar is gone). The main purpose of the hibernate-memcached release is to add support for

Rails Authentication: restful_authentication vs. authlogic

2009-05-17T07:10:00.000-07:00

I've been spending a bit of time comparing Rails authentication mechanisms. The two main frameworks out there are the "restful-authentication" and "authlogic" libraries. The two provide the same general purpose functionality; users, sessions, cookies and emails.The Restful authentication library is the current popular choice. I believe this is due to it being one of the first real options, as

Follow up to the AbstractHibernateDao

2009-04-16T07:17:00.000-07:00

In my writing about the AbstractHibernateDao here I mention that you no longer need to extend HibernateDaoSupport class. You do lose one thing though. Your new AbstractHibernateDao based DAO will now throw HibernateExceptions, not Spring DataAccessExceptions. Now, to me, this isn't the end of the world. In a Hibernate 3.2+ world Hibernate does have a clear exception hierarchy. Not like the old

Amazon Elastic MapReduce

2009-04-02T05:32:00.000-07:00

Amazon announced an Elastic MapReduce service in the AWS environment. This service combines S3, EC2 and the Hadoop MapReduce framework to provide a powerful distributed processing engine. This is pretty awesome stuff. Too bad I have no use for it right now, maybe I should make one up :PAmazon Elastic MapReduce

Announcing Tiny VH

2009-03-12T17:30:00.001-07:00

My Buddy Sean got angry about is.gd going down the other day, so he wrote his own URL shortening service. I'm gonna use it for everything, and you should too :PAnnouncing Tiny VH

Announcing Fidgetr | >140 Characters

2009-01-30T03:39:00.000-08:00

Announcing Fidgetr | >140 CharactersMy friend Paul Kehrer over at the "> 140 Characters" blog has released his new WordPress plugin called Fidgetr. From his blog... Fidgetr is a WordPress widget that displays the latest photos from your Flickr photostream in an attractive manner. It features support for its own themes along with very simple setup and good compatibility with various WordPress

YouTube - SCRUM in Under 10 Minutes (HD)

2009-01-22T18:12:00.000-08:00

YouTube - SCRUM in Under 10 Minutes (HD)Awesome!

git ready - pushing and pulling

2009-01-22T06:18:00.000-08:00

git ready - pushing and pullingA great overview of how git distribution works.

Simple Maven Archetype

2008-12-18T20:28:00.000-08:00

I've been doing more and more with Maven lately. We're currently beginning the effort to migrate some of our stuff to Maven at work. A new feature of the archetype plugin was introduced a bit ago to generate java projects from a menu. This is done using mvn archetype:generate. This provides you with a (hideous) menu of options to begin a new project from a template.The problem I have with this (

Hibernate-memcached 1.1.0 Released!

2008-12-07T16:00:00.000-08:00

After a bit of trial and error with the maven release plugin, the latest release of hibernate-memcached is available. This release includes a few new features:Support for the Whalin memcached client New Key strategies: Md5KeyStrategy, Sha1KeyStrategy for reducing the length of keysBetter Exception handling during cache failure scenarios This is the first release after moving the source to

Rails 2.2 Released!

2008-11-22T14:33:00.000-08:00

Rails 2.2 was released this week with some really interesting new features. Most interesting, to me at least, is "Thread safety and a connection pool". Rails applications are generally run using many single threaded instances through something like Mongrel. Now they'll be able to run multi-threaded, a huge leap forward.What's most interesting, it almost only matters to JRuby users! For more

3 Reasons to Switch to Git from Subversion � markmcb

2008-11-21T08:17:00.000-08:00

A great little comparison of day-to-day type operations with Git compared to Subversion.3 Reasons to Switch to Git from Subversion � markmcb

Grails 1.0.4 Released

2008-11-14T09:25:00.000-08:00

Grails 1.0.4 was released today. This is the first release from G2One after the SpringSource acquisition. I don't know much about new features yet though. So check the internets :)SpringSource Team Blog: First Grails Release Under the SpringSource Banner

YouTube - Google Techtalk on Git

2008-11-11T08:45:00.000-08:00

If you want to get a better understanding of what Git can do, check this talk out...YouTube - Google Techtalk on Git

Graeme Rocher's Blog: Groovy and Grails join the Spring family

2008-11-11T03:12:00.000-08:00

This is good news I think. Hopefully this gets Groovy and Grails some much needed visibility.Graeme Rocher's Blog: Groovy and Grails join the Spring familySpringSource Team Blog: More Weapons for the War on Complexity: SpringSource Acquires Groovy/Grails Leader

Android: Best Android Apps to Boost Your Mobile Productivity (So Far)

2008-11-05T10:27:00.000-08:00

Why I want a G1...Android: Best Android Apps to Boost Your Mobile Productivity (So Far)

InfoQ: Writing JEE applications with Grails and Flex

2008-11-05T05:56:00.000-08:00

Ironic, I was just looking at doing something like this.InfoQ: Writing JEE applications with Grails and Flex

O'Reilly Feeds Gone Wild

2008-10-19T07:04:00.000-07:00

Anyone else notice that the news feeds coming from various places on the O'Reilly network have gone nuts? For instance the O'Reilly Ruby feed suddenly had like 20 Linux articles published at once. I also have a feed for articles from my friend Tim O'Brien that, right now, shows 42 new articles. Those articles all have the same publish date and are from just about every author in the O'Reilly

Yesterday's Post

2008-10-15T08:29:00.000-07:00

I posted a rather lengthy article yesterday that got screwed up a bit. I tried to use "Windows Live Writer" to write the article offline. That didn't go well, as I accidentally posted just the title and the word "blah". I removed that immediately, but it sill made it to the feed somehow. When I reposted the final article Live Writer reused the URL and so therefore it never showed up in the

Using JRuby and ActiveRecord Migrations to Manage Database Change

2008-10-13T14:21:00.001-07:00

Managing change to your application databases is a very common requirement for any development team. The usual approach seems to consist of piling scripts into some "db/changes" folder in your project. This is probably fine for the most part, but when you have multiple databases in multiple environments, managing that across multiple developers can be a problem. If have the usual minimum of three

Discursive: Tim O'Brien: Buy the New Maven Book Today (Support Free Books)

2008-10-05T16:31:00.000-07:00

Discursive: Tim O'Brien: Buy the New Maven Book Today (Support Free Books)I have a copy of this free book on the desktop of both my desktop and my laptop. An excellent resource for all things Maven. I'm planning to buy a few books here shortly, and this is on my list.

Hibernate-memcached moved to github

2008-10-05T13:40:00.000-07:00

I just completed moving the source for the hibernate-memcached project from subversion at GoogleCode to GitHub. There's a great guide at GitHub about importing a project from subversion. The only notes I'd add is that you pretty much have to do the authors file trick or your history won't accurately show you as the person making the changes. Also, I had to push using "-f".git svn --authors-file=/

Installing Adobe Acrobat Reader on Ubuntu 8

2008-09-23T13:18:00.001-07:00

The stuff I saw out on the "internets" for installing this was totally bunk. Here's what we did...wget http://ardownload.adobe.com/pub/adobe/reader/unix/8.x/8.1.2/enu/AdobeReader_enu-8.1.2_SU1-1.i386.debsudo dpkg --install AdobeReader_enu-8.1.2_SU1-1.i386.deb

What am I working on?

2008-09-22T17:05:00.000-07:00

Lately I've been using Twitter more and more, and haven't really been updating my blog a lot. I feel bad about that really. I'd like to post more stuff more often, but frankly if it's one sentence worth of information Twitter is the way to go.Currently I'm hacking on a few open source things (on top of my day job). First there's my hibernate-memcached project. I haven't done much with it since

Selling Git to the Business

2008-09-01T06:03:00.000-07:00

An interesting article from Josh Symonds on selling Git to the business.http://www.pathf.com/blogs/2008/08/selling-git-on-the-business-end/

Max Payne

2008-08-28T06:12:00.000-07:00

I've played the game and I loved it. I also dig Mark Wahlberg, he's a decent actor. I've been keeping an eye on the new Max Payne movie for a bit. Now there's a a trailer out there!http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JboQmDIdKWsThis... Looks... Awesome!

Note to Self: Read About Automating Ubuntu Installs

2008-08-27T10:40:00.001-07:00

The Ubuntu documentation mentions using preseeding files to automate the Ubuntu 8. I may end up having the Ubuntu installs be automated into VMWare anyway, so maybe just a clean VM is the way to go.

Hibernate-memcached 1.0 released into the wild!

2008-08-20T18:46:00.000-07:00

This evening I decided it was time to release hibernate-memcached 1.0. It has all the features I intended for it to have and I haven't seen any problems come up with it at all, so it must be time. Please, spend some time checking it out, even if you don't think you're going to use it right now. I'd really love to get some feedback and see if there is anything folks would like to see it do in a

Hibernate 3.3 and Hibernate-memcached

2008-08-19T04:13:00.001-07:00

I spent some time looking over the new Cache SPI released in Hibernate 3.3.0.GA. Definitely a much more in-depth API compared to the old CacheProvider/Cache interfaces. Following the new interfaces (RegionFactory, Region) you can be much more aware as to your specific responsibilities in the caching system. I have tested that hibernate-memcached remains compatible with hibernate-3.3.0 and

Maven: The Definitive Guide

2008-08-06T12:59:00.000-07:00

An informative book about Maven2, free, online, and straight from the source (the guys at Sonatype. Thanks Tim et al!

Hibernate-memcached in the MySQL faq

2008-08-05T13:59:00.000-07:00

I was stumbling through google analytics today and saw that there were some referrals coming from dev.mysql.com. Apparently they added a link to the project in both the 5.0 and 6.0 faqs.Neat!http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/ha-memcached-faq.htmlhttp://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/6.0/en/ha-memcached-faq.html

Hibernate-memcached 1.0-RC1 Released

2008-07-26T09:44:00.001-07:00

This morning I've released hibernate-memcached 1.0-RC1. This release contains the new Dogpile prevention feature as well as some minor refactoring. If you're using hibernate-memcached, or are even slightly interested in testing out using memcached in combination with hibernate as a second-level cache, you should check this version out.If you have questions or problems please visit the

Dogpile Prevention for Hibernate-memcached

2008-07-11T06:11:00.000-07:00

I posted on the hibernate-memcached project that I was going to release a 1.0-RC1 soon. I will, but first I want to implement one more feature that I think people might like; Dogpile Prevention. If you're only running 2 or 3 instances of your application this really isn't a problem. If you're running 42 instances there is the risk of a "dogpile". If a frequently used item drops from the cache

Jt - Java Pattern Oriented Framework

2008-07-02T10:44:00.000-07:00

Folks actually built an application framework dedicated directly to GOF software patterns. I'm pretty sure this absolutely what patterns were never meant to be used for. Software design patterns are meant to be applied to specific scenarios were they can be proven to be useful. Not as some golden hammer that when repeatedly bashed into your project will somehow produce the holy grail.

A Fantastic Example of REST

2008-07-01T10:50:00.000-07:00

I don't know how I've missed Joe Gregorio's "RESTify DayTrader" article. THIS is what REST is all about. Great stuff...

Remember the Milk

2008-06-30T11:57:00.000-07:00

This is the coolest use of Twitter I have seen yet...Remember the Milk

Open Source Application Monitoring from Orbitz

2008-06-27T12:34:00.000-07:00

This week Orbitz announced that our internal monitoring api "ERMA" is now open source. ERMA (Extremely Reusable Monitoring API), as a framework for monitoring the health of simple applications or large distributed applications alike. The framework is based on Aspect Orient Programming and Complex Event Processing.I've had the pleasure of using ERMA at Orbitz on many applications and projects.

Buying a Laptop: Mac or PC

2008-06-19T12:04:00.000-07:00

For the first time, I find myself in the market to buy my own laptop. I've been going back in forth in my head about this. On one hand is the Macbook Pro with all it's sexiness. On the other hand is the fact that I don't know a damn thing about using a Mac. I could buy a PC laptop and install Windows and Ubuntu on it easily and have the best of both worlds.Then a friend of mine at work (Thanks

Firefox 3 Download Day

2008-06-17T11:59:00.000-07:00

Today you'll make history with FirefoxAre you ready to make history? Are you ready to set a World Record? Today is Download Day. To become part of the official Guinness World Record you must download Firefox 3 by 17:00 UTC on June 18, 2008, or roughly 24 hours from now.

Videos from Google I/O 2008

2008-06-12T14:54:00.000-07:00

The folks at Google posted a few videos from Google I/O 2008 on YouTube. I'm not sure but it looks like they posted videos of all the sessions too, nice.

Hibernate-memcached 0.6 released

2008-06-10T10:49:00.000-07:00

I've released version 0.6 of the hibernate-memcached integration. Mainly this was to fix the "nextTimestamp" stuff that hibernate uses for query caching. Apparently that value needs to be "course grained" when using a distributed cache.hibernate-memcached at Googlecode

Grails 1.0.3 Released

2008-06-06T07:44:00.000-07:00

Graeme Rocher announced the release of Grails 1.0.3 this morning. Great news, time to upgrade my apps!Read Graeme's post

Introducing hibernate-memcached

2008-05-31T11:01:00.001-07:00

Some of you may, or may not (care), know I am a huge fan of memcached. Its combination of simplicity, elegance and performance make it fantastic choice for any real caching solution. I've recently begun work on implementing a bridge for using memcached as a second-level cache for hibernate. The project is hosted at googlecode right now, and the code is currently available in the googlecode

SAP Memory Analyzier

2008-05-22T08:42:00.001-07:00

I know nothing about SAP, but they built a nice memory analyzer worth checking out.Check it out

Scalability Principles

2008-05-21T19:33:00.000-07:00

Author Simon Brown discusses 7 principles of scalability.1. Decrease processing time2. Partition3. Scalability is about concurrency4. Requirements must be known5. Test continuously6. Architect up front7. Look at the bigger pictureCheck it out

David Heinemeier Hansson at Startup School 08

2008-05-16T11:13:00.000-07:00

David Heinemeier Hansson, creator of the Ruby on Rails framework and Partner at 37Signals gives insight into creating a profitable startup company. Watch it

Better World Books

2008-05-14T07:54:00.001-07:00

I found Better World Books a while back by reading a story I don't remember now. I had completely forgotten the name of the site and couldn't find it again, until now. I am selfishly blogging this so I don't have to look for it again :) That being said, check out Better World Books next time you're looking to by some fat-ass technical book. Their mission statement sums it up pretty well...

Pro Web 2.0 Application Development with GWT

2008-05-08T12:55:00.001-07:00

Jeff Dwyer has just released his book on GWT. Jeff is a really bright guy and has done some extensive work with GWT. Aside from that, he's a good guy so throw him a bone and check it out... Pro Web 2.0 Application Development with GWT

Distributed Version Control

2008-05-08T06:46:00.001-07:00

I've recently done some work with git as a source control system. I was pretty impressed by its functionality and the overall concept of distributed version control. In my career I've been exposed to a rather limited set of version control systems. I've used CVS, Subversion, SourceSafe and Accurev. Each of those systems are based on a central repository with many clients. The concept is a simple

SpringSource Application Platform Details

2008-05-04T19:02:00.000-07:00

Last week SpringSource announced their Application Platform project. It is an interesting attempt at slimming down the J2EE environment by tying things like Spring and OSGI together. On the SpringSource Team Blog, Rob Harrop begins an in-depth explanation of SpringSource Application Platform and it's features. Very interesting stuff...

Trying to get Git

2008-05-01T11:29:00.001-07:00

I'm trying to patch some stuff in the java-memcached-client right now. The code is hosted at GitHub. I've never used Git in my life so this is a brand new experience for me. Boy did I screw this up :PI've got branches gone wild and accidental reverts. I think I'm starting to get the hang of it now though. Thanks to this cheat sheet, and this tutorial.

SpringSource Application Platform

2008-04-30T09:37:00.000-07:00

The guys over at SpringSource have created an "Application Platform" based on Tomcat, Spring, and OSGI. Interesting stuff, read more at InfoQ.I'm gonna get my hands on the beta. Though if they intend to release it as Open Source anyway, why is there a beta sign up? Odd...

Mastering Grails

2008-04-16T18:09:00.000-07:00

Scott Davis has posted "Mastering Grails: Many-to-many relationships with a dollop of Ajax" in the Mastering Grails series. If anyone can master Grails; it would be Scott Davis. Have a look.

Spring Security 2.0 Released

2008-04-15T16:34:00.000-07:00

Spring Security 2.0 has been released into the wild. Tons of great new features, including OpenId Support!http://www.springframework.org/node/627http://forum.springframework.org/showthread.php?t=52640http://www.nabble.com/-ANN--Spring-Security-2.0.0-Released-to16701081.html

Hibernate and Memcached

2008-03-13T18:23:00.001-07:00

As I mentioned at the end of my last post, Cache Everything, I am working on building a library to use memcached from Hibernate as a second level cache. That project is hibernate-memcached and its in it's infancy over at googlecode.The Hibernate second level cache is used to cache items between session invocations. Hibernate always uses it's session as a first level cache, but if you want to

Cache Everything

2008-03-13T06:20:00.001-07:00

So I'm working on this Web Service project and its time to consider scalability. Which means its time to setup memcached. If you haven't looked at using memcached, you should.Memcached is a totally stupid-simple distributed memory object cache. It's this super tiny application that slices off a chunk of RAM and listens on a port. Yeah, that's about it :)It gets cool to talk about when you start

Open Source Licensing: WTFPL

2008-03-05T13:18:00.001-08:00

I think I'm going to start using this license for any open source stuff I do...WTFPL

Battlefield Heroes

2008-02-29T08:29:00.000-08:00

I can't wait to play this!

Grails 1.0 Released

2008-02-05T03:02:00.000-08:00

Graeme Rocher, from G2One Inc., announced the release of Grails 1.0 this morning. The release notes are available from grails.org.If you're a Java person and aren't familiar with Grails or Groovy for that matter, you should definitely check out Grails. Grails is a rapid web application development framework based on convention over configuration. It is designed MUCH like Ruby-on-Rails, but built

Out of the Sandbox: Spring-Security OpenID Support

2008-01-27T09:02:00.000-08:00

I just finished moving the OpenID support For Acegi/Spring-Security out of the sandbox and out into it's own module. It is in dire need of documentation, but the code itself is pretty solid.Here's the post to the mailing list.

Save Windows XP

2008-01-20T07:07:00.001-08:00

InfoWorld has started a petition aimed at getting Microsoft to keep Windows XP support around past the June 30th end-of-life date.To summarize, here's why I like XP...XP is simply the best OS Microsoft has produced. I realize that doesn't say much, but it's true.I am a gamer. I'd gladly run Ubuntu or Fedora Linux, but I am not down with playing Pac-man, Super-pacman, or one of 200 Tetris

Sun to Buy MySQL

2008-01-16T06:03:00.000-08:00

This is huge news! MySQL has to be the single most popular open-source database in the world.

Acegi OpenID Support Update

2008-01-15T20:56:00.000-08:00

I said I'd work on the OpenID support in Acegi (aka Spring-Security) and I finally did. Really nothing major, I refactored the functionality from the CAS package that we needed in OpenID up into its own existence in the "providers" package. So now there's a now AuthoritiesPopulator and DaoAuthoritiesPopulator impl that uses the UserDetailsService to look up Authorities for a given principal. This

OpenID Gains Steam

2008-01-09T09:03:00.000-08:00

From TechcrunchTechCrunch UK’s Mike Butcher is reporting that Google, IBM and Verisign are in late stage discussions with the OpenID Foundation.Good to see OpenID getting some traction. I really regret not finishing up the OpenID support for Acegi now. The code is still there in the sandbox. It apparently works, the folks over at MyHippoCampus were using it.

An Exercise in Flowcharting

2008-01-08T11:26:00.000-08:00

This made the rounds a while ago, I thought it was great. It needed to get dusted off, so here it is. Enjoy...

Is Rails a Ghetto?

2008-01-02T04:04:00.000-08:00

Zed Shaw, creator of the extremely popular Mongrel server for Rails applications, thinks so.Rails Is A GhettoEven if you don't know a damn thing about Ruby or Rails this is some pretty funny shit.

Ruby on Rails Stuff

2007-12-21T07:38:00.000-08:00

I've found a few interesting resources for Ruby on Rails stuff and I figure I'll link 'em up here.First up, Railscasts.com; a collection of video screencasts on various small Rails tricks.Railscasts.comNext, a presentation from Dave Thomas at QCon about meta-programming in Ruby.MetaProgramming - Extending Ruby for Fun and ProfitRails 2.0 just came out, here's a post from DHH about some of the new

A Brief Introduction to REST

2007-12-15T09:01:00.000-08:00

InfoQ posted a very good article introducting the concepts of REST. If you've heard the buzz and are looking for a practical explanation, this looks like a good place to start.A Brief Introduction to REST

Spring Framework 2.5 Released

2007-11-20T06:03:00.000-08:00

http://www.springframework.org/node/561The latest version of Spring is released, and it has tons of new features. I can't wait to get them going in some of my projects. I'm especially excited about using the @Resource annotation support.The good folks at InfoQ have posted the first of a series of articles about Spring 2.5. Have a look...http://www.infoq.com/articles/spring-2.5-part-1

NBC Pulls their Youtube Channel

2007-11-15T06:05:00.000-08:00

I just noticed today that NBC pulled down their YouTube channel. This is a tragedy. I loved watching the stuff they put up. I was generally impressed with NBC and the amount of content they were putting out on YouTube. Hell, I am still impressed that you could watch past episodes of their shows on their site. Unfortunately, I shouldn't have to be impressed by this. How hard is that? You lace some

Introduction to the Spring Framework 2.5

2007-10-30T10:57:00.000-07:00

Rod Johnson updated his "Introduction to the Spring Framework" article to include the Spring 2.5 updates.I've always forwarded this article on to folks that are new to Spring to get a footing.Link

Securing Java Applications with Acegi

2007-10-19T06:22:00.001-07:00

Consutlant Bilal Siddiqui wrote a series of articles at IBM developerWorks around Acegi. Definitely worth a read if you're trying to understand Acegi. Our reference guide is good, but it's a bit over the top for most folks.The first article was released in March 2007. The third part was released on September 25 2007. I've fallen behind on my feed reading a bit :PSecuring Java applications with

IntelliJ IDEA 7.0 Released

2007-10-18T05:45:00.000-07:00

IntelliJ IDEA 7.0 was released three days ago. I just got it up and running here, so I'll be feeling out the new features. The folks at IntelliJ were kind enough to provide the developers of the Acegi Security (aka Spring Security) framework an Open Source license for use in the Acegi Security project. In the past I had to contact them when new major releases came out. This time they were on the

Video: Rolling out Web Services the Right Way with Spring-WS

2007-10-12T03:48:00.000-07:00

http://www.springframework.org/node/544Posted two days ago at Springframework.org, a video about the Spring Web Services project. The video is a recording of Arjen Poutsma of Interface21 at the Spring Experience conference in December 2006. We have chosen Spring-WS for a project my team is starting at work. We will definitely sit down and watch this. I have no idea if the video is good or not, I

Saturday Night Live: Digital Shorts

2007-10-05T13:46:00.000-07:00

At lunch today someone mentioned that they don't watch SNL any more. They asked if it was still funny. Honestly, they can't all be gems, but yeah it's definitely still funny from time to time. When people think about SNL, they only remember what they want to remember. Most folks tend to remember the "Land Shark", the "Samurai Tailor", and most stuff Dana Carvey did. You know what was in between

Adding Generics to the AbstractHibernateDao

2007-09-26T06:20:00.001-07:00

In my previous post, "The Best AbstractHibernateDao Ever", I made a passing reference to the generics being a problem.So now, in slight contradiction to my "The Best Generic Dao Interface Ever" article, I am going to add Generics to the "AbstractHibernateDao".If you don't know what Generics are, and you're a Java developer, you obviously aren't keeping up-to-date with your chosen trade. In fact,

The Best AbstractHibernateDao Ever

2007-09-24T05:45:00.000-07:00

(Follow up to "The Best Generic DAO Interface Ever")I love the 3rd grade title theme I got going on here. Anyway...I've seen so many incarnations of an AbstractHibernateDao out there; some are good, some are bad. Myself, I've always gone the AbstractHibernateDao extends HibernateDaoSupport route myself. I'm a huge fan of Spring for the amount of helpful stuff it provides in all areas of "

The Best Generic Dao Interface Ever

2007-09-12T18:04:00.001-07:00

If you Google the phrase "Generic Dao" or "Generified Dao", you'll find several hits all over the internet. They all look like this.../*** This sucks, keep reading...*/public interface Dao { List loadAll(); E findById(I id); void save(E entity); void remove(E entity);}Now, the code above might not even compile, I just slapped it in. The purpose of this interface,

Mavenize your development

2007-08-09T08:04:00.000-07:00
Great blog; chocked full of tips for using Maven2.http://mavenize.blogspot.com/

iPhones at Twitter

2007-07-12T03:20:00.000-07:00
From the Twitter Blog:As you might imagine, there are lots of expenses associated with employees--salary, health insurance, etc. In the grand scheme of things, buying 10 employees a fancy new iPhone is not a gigantic expense. However, arriving at the office on a normal weekday and discovering a brand new iPhone waiting for you feels like an extra fancy perk.They bought each of their employees an

Top 25 Worst Tech Products of All Time

2007-07-09T13:57:00.000-07:00
PC World's "The 25 Worst Tech Products of All Time" has the 3Com Audrey on their "(Dis)honorable mention" list. She didn't make the Top 25 at least.I worked on Audrey at 3Com back in 1999. I saw where it and the company were going and got the hell out of there. There was no hope for it, and nobody was listening :(

Groovy Views in Spring MVC

2007-07-02T14:01:00.000-07:00
I thought it might be fun to try and implement Groovy as a View technology in Spring MVC. Most people that use Spring MVC are familiar with the JstlView for Jsps, or the VelocityView for Velocity templates, and the far superior FreemarkerView for FreeMarker templates.So, let's think about what we'd have to do to use Groovy to render views...We'd need to be able to load a resource as a groovy

OpenId updates to Acegi

2007-07-02T07:18:00.000-07:00
I've promoted my first wave of changes to the Acegi OpenId support in the sandbox.Added support for OpenId4javaAdded OpenIdAuthenticationProcessingFilter to replace current Servlet+Filter approachI'll remove the existing Janrain and servlet stuff once I've had a chance to try and build a sample using the new code.

South African Chenin Blanc

2007-07-01T19:07:00.000-07:00
This weekend my wife and I opened a bottle of "2005 Man Vintners Chenin Blanc" from South Africa. This rocked our socks off. We really enjoyed it. The wine was off-dry and very fruity, a fantastic summertime wine.We had gotten into a rut of bad Rieslings and Pinot Grigios recently. I was feeling pretty down on the whole white wine thing again. Then we tried this Chenin Blanc; it really opened my

Microsoft Surface: Part II

2007-06-21T13:33:00.000-07:00
I blogged previously about Microsoft creating the coolesting thing ever. Well here's a video showing the world what it's all about...

Netflix: "Watch Now"

2007-06-21T04:08:00.001-07:00
Netflix introduced a new service that allows you to watch movies online. You have to use Internet Explorer and Windows Media Player to watch them, but whatever; it works.It is an interesting model they've set up. For each dollar you're paying in to your Netflix subscription, you get an hour of movie watching. So if you're paying $19.99, you have 20 hours of movies you can watch online. The movies

Mark Buehrle: 100 Career Victories

2007-06-11T05:40:00.000-07:00
It took eight tries, but Mark Buehrle finally got his 100th victory this weekend. Granted, this not as exciting as his no-hitter this year. But congratulations Mark, not that you'll ever see this :P

Microsoft Creates the Coolest Thing Ever

2007-05-30T09:50:00.000-07:00
From TechCrunch.com, Microsoft has introduced their "Surface Computing" system. This has got to be one of the coolest things on the planet...

Big Day for Soccer Fans

2007-05-23T06:50:00.000-07:00
Today is the UEFA Champion's League Final. AC Milan will play Liverpool in what's sure to be......oh who cares.I'm an ignorant American and I don't give a damn about Soccer. I've been listening to sports radio and poking around on the internet a bit. I can appreciate the magnitude of it to the individual fan, this is their SuperBowl, their World Series. Here's the thing though, the rest of the

One App, Multiple Architectures

2007-05-20T18:25:00.000-07:00
I've got my eye on a few different technologies these days. I figure it might be fun to write one application in each of them and see how it goes. I intend to write a basic wine cellar application (gotta scratch my itch) using a few different technology stacks.First, I'll go with my usual set. Java with Spring 2.0, Spring MVC, Spring Webflow, and Hibernate. I may not finish this as it will

F*cking Logan...

2007-05-19T19:07:00.000-07:00
Boon Logan gave up a Pinch Hit Grand Slam to Derek Lee off the bench to put today's Sox Cubs matchup out of reach.And now back to drowning my sorrows...

Sox @ Cubs

2007-05-18T06:49:00.000-07:00
It's interleague play time this weekend for Major League Baseball. I am a White Sox fan as everyone born on the Southside of Chicago should be. Really, as everyone in Chicago should be. The Sox-Cubs series is always a good time around Chicago. I love watching all the cubs fans wear their cute little red, white and blue jerseys, and then look away in shame when a Sox fan comes along.I am not a