Design Decisions

Warped Logic & the Open Web

2011-07-28T00:07:00.000-04:00

I really want to shout loudly about what's the most annoying thing to me in Google Chrome that Firefox gets right but won't cause they might fix it then Firefox would [currently] have no usability advantage over Chrome and I want openness/Firefox to win. BTW, winning doesn't mean, let there be one ring to rule them all. Winning means domination by a single corporate interest over the browser and

Liar! A.K.A This one is for my PGEast 2011 peeps

2011-05-16T13:50:00.002-04:00

If you attended PGEast 2011 then you know that a certain company had tons of coffee mugs everywhere. They couldn't give them away even though they were giving them away. It got so bad that the conference organizer thought that maybe the attendees didn't realize that the mugs where for them to take so he made an announcement that the mugs were for us to take. So let's recap. PGEast 2011 almost 2

Breach

2009-06-29T14:53:00.005-04:00

I am an IT Consultant. Exactly what I do depends on who I'm working for because I'm capable of doing many things. The reason I'm being explicit about being a consultant is because I want you to understand that I don't have a single employer. I have clients, and depending on the contract sometimes their problems become my problem. This weekend was one of those times. A system was compromised

Eli's Dirty Jokes

2009-06-22T14:18:00.003-04:00

The, Eli's Dirty Jokes, videos on YouTube are absolutely hilarious.

Stuck!

2009-06-15T09:36:00.002-04:00

Even though the bulk of my professional writing is technical, meaning the data is mostly available I just need to put it into a format understandable by my audience (aka, the people writing the check), I still sometimes encounter writer's block. Like right now. What the hell does that mean exactly? Because here I am writing this blog entry and I'm not having any trouble finding the words to

Quote of the Day, 4 June 2009

2009-06-04T17:03:00.002-04:00

Me? I'm going back to running the browser on my UNIX box. It's way too frustrating trying to be a UNIX Engineer via the Windows platform.

PGCon2009 Summary

2009-06-02T13:26:00.003-04:00

I'm back from PGCon2009. No, I didn't just get back. I've been back for a smidgen over a week now. When I first got there I decided I would blog daily about it, but time didn't permit me to write in any detail. So I decided I would make notes and summarize it all when I got back. The notes thing didn't pan out thanks to twitter. It was simply easier to tweet my thoughts as I thought them than

My Apologies to opensolaris.org Blogs

2009-05-27T17:19:00.003-04:00

For the last three years all my blog posts have been showing up at http://opensolaris.org/os/blogs/, even though a big chunk of them had nothing to do with Solaris. At the time, I had no idea how to filter just the Solaris specific entries. Now that I think about it, I don't think Blogger even supported tagging back then, and without tags, filtering would have been impossible. Nevertheless, I

PGCon2009 Postscript: Unit Test Your Database!

2009-05-26T14:42:00.006-04:00

I started watching some of the PGCon2009 videos that I didn't attend while at PGCon. Last night I watched, Unit Test Your Database!, by David Wheeler. I have had my come to Jesus moment on unit testing years ago, so I'm really happy that there is a solution for testing strictly at the database level without depending on the application layer. Some developers make the mistake of treating the

The Nail in the Coffin

2009-05-19T23:27:00.000-04:00

My experimentation with Solaris/OpenSolaris is over. Amid the uncertainty that the Oracle purchase of Sun Microsystems has introduced I got some advice at PGCon2009 today that put the nail in the coffin. I asked someone, what OS was the best for running PostgreSQL? His response was, "The OS you are most familiar with". That OS is GNU/Linux. In recent years Sun has tried really hard to change

Choking on Birdseeds

2009-05-19T19:23:00.003-04:00

Five days ago I joined twitter. Today I deleted my account. So called micro blogging is just not for me. It just seems totally pointless and I'm way too old to care about being hip. As far as I'm concerned if a technology doesn't make you more productive, entertain you, or help you express yourself, it's a waste of time. Twitter may be great for everybody else, it's just not for me. I'll stick to

Going To PGCon2009

2009-05-15T00:23:00.002-04:00

It's official. I'm going to PGCon2009. I just registered and booked my flight. It will be my first conference in quite some time. About 3 years ago me and a buddy attended a Sun Developer Day event in Atlanta. Loved the city and it's people. The event was okay. The key insight I walked away with was I should give OpenSolaris a serious look. The fog of uncertainty that has enveloped the MySQL

Aspect Ratio & You

2009-04-02T14:58:00.006-04:00

There are no shortages of libraries and toolkits available to programmers for scaling images. But if you ever find yourself in a position, as I recently have, where you need to roll your own (or maybe you are just curious) I'll explain everything you need to know about maintaining the aspect ratio of a scaled image. When the issue of scaling images landed on me, the first thing I did was to

Amazon's Cloud: What is EC2?

2009-02-11T20:23:00.012-05:00

I'm doing research on Amazon's cloud computing platform. So I'll be jotting down notes here in case this information turns out to be useful to someone other than myself. EC2 is part of Amazon's cloud computing platform. It enables one to run a full stack (operating system, applications, scripts, etc) on one or more compute nodes. There are different types of compute nodes. Compute nodes are

Central New York

2008-03-13T11:14:00.001-04:00

I'm in central New York (Syracuse) and I'm having a heck of a time writing anything. My imagination is as frozen as the ground outside. I'm going to the city this week to visit places I haven't been in over 17 years. Maybe I'll be inspired by the trip to jot down a few words.

Finished Reading: The End Of The Alphabet

2008-02-04T01:20:00.000-05:00

I contracted the flu/cold during the Christmas holiday and it lasted at least three weeks. And though I'm not a big fan of Christmas [consumerism] it felt ruined. I know what you are thinking but you are wrong. It had absolutely nothing to do with the fact that Santa dissed me again. We've had beef since I was twelve so getting dissed was expected. What I didn't expect, was that his punk ass

Totally Naked and Loving It!

2008-01-26T16:35:00.000-05:00

I just got naked and saved 30+ bucks a month. Yeah me!Maybe you should get naked too!

My New Favorite Method

2008-01-24T11:33:00.000-05:00

Some days I manage to really amuse myself with my work. Today I've added some flare to a method that may otherwise be really boring. So let me introduce you to my new favorite method: /** * Flattens the sub directories of roots into a single array. * * @param roots The root directories. * * @return The [sorted] subdirectories of roots. */

Two Reasons To Use LineNumberReader Instead Of BufferedReader

2008-01-02T21:40:00.000-05:00

Preamble LineNumberReader extends BufferedReader so LineNumberReader "is a" BufferedReader. This "is a" distinction is important in this discussion, because I spend a bit of time talking about BufferedReader. But because of the "is a" relationship (a.k.a inheritance), anything said about BufferedReader is also true of LineNumberReader. Reason Number One LineNumberReader keeps track of line

2007 Recreational Reading Summary

2007-12-24T23:22:00.000-05:00

As a younger man, recreational reading was a passion of mine. But once I started college I found I did less and less reading outside of the the curriculum. Things got worse once I started my professional life in earnest. Keeping up with IT requires volumes of technical material. The explosion of self published technical content in the form of blogs, white papers, and online documentation has

Finished Reading: Beautiful Code

2007-12-06T13:08:00.000-05:00

Disclaimer**: I'm not a professional book reviewer so my rating system is succinct and should be taken with a ginormous grain of salt. I recently finished reading, Beautiful Code, from Oreilly Publishing. It sucked! Avoid it if you can.

IDEA-7+Glassfish, First Impression

2007-12-06T13:04:00.000-05:00

It's been years since I've worked with Java EE in any meaningful way. Back then it was called J2EE and my application server of choice was Resin because it was blazingly fast and allowed me to bypass all the J2EE crud --like EJBs, deployment descriptors, war files, ear files, etc-- and just get stuff done. Truth be told, I've always disliked J2EE. It just always smacked of self important (read as

Of Blogs and Google Docs

2007-11-13T09:56:00.000-05:00

This is my first post from Google Docs. I've been searching for a decent blog editor for years and have not been able to find anything I really like. Most of the problem stems from the fact that the pickings are pretty slim if you are a GNU/Linux user. But things may be turning around. While surfing doggdot this morning I came across this link. It lists five blog editors for GNU/Linux with Google

QOTD, 8 Nov 2007

2007-11-08T11:57:00.000-05:00

As the amount of RAM installed in systems grows, it would seem that memory pressure should reduce, but, much like salaries or hard disk space, usage grows to fill (or overflow) the available capacity. ----Jake Edge November 7, 2007

Google, I'm Still in Love

2007-11-08T09:10:00.000-05:00

God I love Google! I've been trying to get to the Gentoo wiki since last night. But the forces that be have conspired against me. The evil Internet gremlins doth deny me [and everybody else, for that matter] access. 'Tis hopeless it seems. Or, it would have been hopeless if not for Google. I just searched for "gentoo wiki paludis", and Google has the Gentoo wiki page cached. Friggin' brilliant.

KernelTrap.org

2007-10-26T00:40:00.001-04:00

One of my favorite sites on the net is KernelTrap. Though KernelTrap describes itself as, "... a web community devoted to sharing the latest in kernel development news.", all of the heavy lifting is done by one person, Jeremy Andrews. So I would like to take this opportunity to say thank you to Jeremy for his tireless efforts at making KernelTrap a great site and one of my favorite destinations

7 REPSLM-C, Expanded

2007-10-23T16:30:00.000-04:00

This post is a follow up to 7 Reasons Every Programmer Should Love Multi-Core and a direct response to this comment. Maybe I should have put 6 before 4 because 6 makes the point that most of today's programs aren't written to take advantage of multi-core. So what exactly do I mean by take advantage? It seems you think I'm saying, it means simply running today's GUI, client/server, and P2P apps

7 Reasons Every Programmer Should Love Multi-Core

2007-10-20T20:59:00.000-04:00

The technology is not new it's old. It's just really cheap SMP and the SMP domain (shared memory model) is a well understood domain. So there are tons of resources (books, white papers, essays, blogs, etc) available to get you up to speed. Shared memory concurrency is challenging. It's guaranteed to grow your brain. Most programming languages [already] have language and/or API level support (

Saved By Chappelle

2007-10-19T03:43:00.000-04:00

The last three weeks have been a hell. If it could go wrong it went wrong. It started with the death of my workstation followed quickly by a fender bender. But I'm not going to dwell too much on the fender bender because I got off easy. The short version is, the moron that ran into me didn't get beaten to a pulp, thus I'm not writing this from a prison cell (thank you Dave Chappelle). My car [

[BUG] JE never stops logging ...

2007-09-18T16:30:00.000-04:00

This is entry is a partial repost of a message I posted to Oracle's Berkeley DB JE Forum. The forum software does not allow for the proper formatting of source code and I personally hate reading unformatted source code. Therefore, I have reposted it here so people like me can't read the code right off the page. The code import java.io.File; import java.lang.reflect.Field; import java.util.List

The Missing Minute

2007-09-15T20:41:00.000-04:00

Sometime earlier today A minute of mine went away So I thought about main But that thought was in vain The minute was hiding okay? I opened the profiler quick And attach to the app in a nick I collected a sample It wasn't quite ample The minute continued to tick. I decided to give it a rest In order to give it my best I went for a drive And in about five My mind was finally unstressed. But

Becoming a concurrency expert. Rule number not one, Relax.

2007-07-12T14:58:00.000-04:00

The holy grail for a concurrency expert is wait-free, and if you can't achieve that, lock-free code because generally they are more scalable than algorithms that use locks. The previous link and this one describes some of the benefits of non-blocking synchronization but I'll give you a contrived example. LF/WF algorithms can't deadlock! No locks, no deadlocks. Deadlocks are a bane to

A Developer's Journal: Solaris #11

2007-06-26T13:11:00.000-04:00

CTRL+BACKSPACE has bitten me for the last time. I've been trying to make OpenSolaris/JDS my work environment for the last week and time and time again my desktop restarts itself because of CTRL+BACKSPACE. 99% of the time I swear I didn't press the key combination! Fixing it has solved one of the many things about JDS that annoy the crap out of me (I'll tell those stories another day). The

A Developer's Journal: Solaris #10

2007-06-18T11:28:00.001-04:00

I've solved the font problem. It was a font rendering issue. I have dual 20 inch LCD monitors and the default font rendering settings just wasn't cutting it. A quick visit to the "Font" dialog box under "Preferences" made all the difference. The fuzz is gone. Yeah! I've also completed configuring my bash environment ala Gentoo so Solaris is starting to feel a lot less foreign to me than it did

A Developer's Journal: Solaris #9

2007-06-16T12:05:00.001-04:00

Installation complete! Yeah! Initial Reactions The fonts look like crap! At this point, I'm not sure if the problem is the default set of fonts or if font rendering just sucks. Every bit of text everywhere is fuzzy. Text is my life! I am a programmer and sometimes blogger, after all. Solving this issue is at the top of my todo list. The default configuration for the root user account is just

A Developer's Journal: Solaris #8

2007-06-16T09:08:00.001-04:00

I am returning to the world of Solaris. My original foray into the land of (the) Sun didn't go so well. It was a try and buy 60 day trial of a T1000 that just didn't go a well as I had hoped. Some of the problems were Sun's fault but most of them where mine. One of the big issues was proximity. The T1000 was hosted in an off site data center which required several layers of indirection to get to

I'm A Real Programmer Because ...

2007-05-10T13:02:00.000-04:00

David Miller says I'm a real programmer. Are you?

A Great Hot Dog

2007-03-28T13:56:00.000-04:00

Hebrew National Franks really does make the best hot dogs I've ever eaten. At this point if it ain't Hebrew National I ain't eatin' it. After all, it's kosher. So if it's good enough for Jesus it's good enough for me. But then again Jesus was something of a radical. Maybe he bucked Jewish law and ate non kosher beef. If he did and was trying to spite the establishment and was still around, he

Getting IDEAs Flowing

2006-11-18T16:46:00.000-05:00

This is a story about starting IDEA 6 on my Gentoo GNU/Linux machine. IDEA 6 has been out a while now, but I'm not the kind of person to buy the first release of a new version of software. I like to wait until the more adventurous types take it for a spin and shake the first few waves of bugs out. So now that it's at maintenace release 2 I'm taking it out for a spin. Getting it running was a

A Developer's Journal: Solaris/CMT #7

2006-10-06T10:07:00.000-04:00

I got the answers I was looking for: Solaris has major releases every 2 - 3 years and minor releases every 3 - 6 months S10 is the current major release. ... The updates have major features integrated. To move from Update to Update you usually re-install the OS. You download the CD image or put it on your install server. You can opt for a Upgrade option as well. In between updates there are

A Developer's Journal: Solaris/CMT #6

2006-10-06T00:21:00.000-04:00

I'm back in Solaris mode and I've hit a wall. Solaris 10 is Unix and that's great because visa-vi GNU/Linux I am very comfortable with Unix. Before I got my hands on my box I made the decision not for force my GNU/Linux habits onto Solaris because its probably a recipe for pointless frustration. So I'm very interested in learning the Solaris way of doing things. The issue I'm struggling with

Throw more threads at it

2006-10-05T17:23:00.000-04:00

Why Events Are A Bad Idea (for high-concurrency servers) An interesting position paper on why parallel programming using threads are better for highly concurrent servers compared to event based approaches. Even though the paper is 3+ years old its more applicable now than it was then in large part because threads have gotten cheaper. How so? High performance thread libraries are part of the

OpenBSD needs our help

2006-10-01T14:14:00.000-04:00

Dear Reader, I hope to appeal to your sense of decency and fairness in requesting that you support OpenBSD's ongoing campaign to get Intel to provide open access to the documentation (and in some cases binary blobs) behind their wireless chipsets [full story here]. This access will not only benefit OpenBSD but all FLOSS operating systems and strengthen the ecosystem by giving us (you and me) more

Java Keeps Keeping On

2006-09-30T16:10:00.000-04:00

The real motives why industry analysts love to predict Java fall... and why they will spend another 10+ years being proven wrong. A very good entry discussing some of the reasons why Java continues to defy the doomsday predictions of so-called "industry experts". Java not being the new kid on the block is not news it's an achievement that every professional (state of mind not state of

Concurrent Javadoc

2006-09-13T21:49:00.000-04:00

Writing correct concurrent code is hard and what I'm finding equally challenging is documenting concurrent behavior in code in prose (javadoc to be specific). Pre Java 1.5 all we had where java.lang.Thread, the Runnable interface, the synchronized keyword, and volatile variables. Because synchronized was the only real mechanism for concurrency control if you wanted to reason about the thread

A Developer's Journal; Solaris/CMT #5

2006-09-09T21:27:00.000-04:00

I am feeling disingenuous about my "A Developer's Journal; Solaris 10 ..." title because I've made 5 entries so far and have said very little about Solaris 10. The truth of the matter is Solaris is the means and not the end. Let me explain. I have absolutely no interest in Solaris as an end to itself at this point because of Linux. And though Sun has made awesome progress with Solaris on x86

A Developer's Journal; Solaris 10 #4

2006-09-08T13:36:00.000-04:00

I brought it home. It's still in the box. It's setting in my living room steering at me and refuses to blink. I know I don't stand a chance of winning the steering game but I steer anyway eyes bloodshot I steer. It's all I can do with it at the moment. I have deadlines to meet and missing deadlines is bad for business so I can't cut into my dev time to play with the it. The clock is ticking,

A Developer's Journal; Solaris 10 #3

2006-09-04T10:50:00.000-04:00

The T1 is here. Andrew called to let me know it's at the office. It only took 6 days. I'm impressed. I guess Sun has finally got the kinks in there supply chain hammered out. I need to figure out where I'm going to put it. I can set it up at the office or take it down to the data center or set it up at home. I just don't know right now because my thoughts are elsewhere. I've got some

Latches in Java

2006-09-03T23:52:00.000-04:00

David Holmes provides an excellent description of the difference between java.util.concurrent.CountDownLatch and java.util.concurrent.CyclicBarrier on the concurrency interest mailing list. I have posted it here for those of you who don't subscribe to the list and may not have a good grasp of these classes. And since I use CountDownLatch in code I've posted in the past and in code I'm planning on

A Developer's Journal; Solaris 10 #2

2006-09-03T23:02:00.000-04:00

After 2 "Try and Buy" applications Sun Microsystems has finally shipped my T1. The thought of getting my hands on it gets my geek johnson tingling. You may be wondering "why just a tingle?" Well, when I first read about CMT coming to a server near me my geek johnson pitched a tent with enough head room for Yao Ming to enter without bending his head. But the truth of the matter is I am a cynic to

A Developer's Journal; Solaris 10 #1

2006-09-01T23:50:00.000-04:00

I'm testing the Solaris 10 waters. My plan for this journal is to record my Solaris journey in as much useful detail as possible. But before I start reporting my trials and tribulations I want to discuss why I'm taking this path (remember Linux is my OS of choice). There are 5 reasons why I'm looking at Solaris 10 now (from most to least importance):Try and BuyChip Multi-Threading (CMT)

QOTD: "I’m not writing shitty code; I’m creating refactoring opportunities."

2006-06-12T12:56:00.000-04:00

I've got nothing to add to it. It's just plain funny as hell so I thought I would share it.

"Look Ma, No Locks!"

2006-06-03T13:46:00.000-04:00

Brian Goetz has written an excellent introductory article on nonblocking algorithms and showcases some simple nonblocking data structures with code examples and pictures. The core concept you should take away from the article is the importance of CAS. It sits at the root of all nonblocking data structures in the Java platform.

Amen!

2006-04-29T17:58:00.000-04:00

Read the title. Click on the link. Read the post. "That's all folks!"

Sublime

2006-04-24T16:59:00.000-04:00

An interesting read to say the least.

New Template

2006-04-10T19:30:00.000-04:00

I've just switched my blogger template so if you are a regular visitor don't freak out. The new template makes better use of screen real estate and is more code friendly. Let me know what you think.

regex vs. XML

2006-04-08T08:35:00.000-04:00

I needed to screen-scrape wikipedia for the list of Top Level Domains for my email app so I could build an index of suffixes that would reduce the number of martian addresses the app would have to process. So I surfed over to the TLD page to have a look-see. Low and behold those beautiful wikipedians were nice enough to produce well formed XML (actually, XHTML 1.0 Transitional) content. My heart

This is truly cool

2006-04-01T14:29:00.000-05:00

You have to check it out.

Gentoo is back!

2006-03-27T11:37:00.000-05:00

I'm proud to announce my return to the Gentoo colony with my acquisition of a dual processor dual core AMD Opteron 270 box. But it is not all gravy. Normally I stay on the KDE side of the fence but my time spent in Ubuntu land has given me a new appreciation for the Gnome desktop environment. The Ubuntu team has spent a great deal of time and effort making Gnome and all the apps in the Ubuntu

Annoyances: java.sun.com

2006-02-26T13:31:00.000-05:00

Why are the people that run the java.sun.com site such idiots? Try to get to the JavaMail part of the J2EE stack from java.sun.com w/o using the search dialog box. Go ahead, try it! I'll wait ..... Can't be done huh? WTF you say? It's because they are idiots! I used to be able to get to any named Java technology 2 clicks from the home page but they changed it and change is good. Bullshit!!

QOTD: The 'f' in framework

2006-02-25T09:33:00.000-05:00

I love the English language. You can get away with saying almost anything.

The Long Way Around, An Exercise in Concurrent Programming

2006-02-15T03:00:00.000-05:00

Adopting the mindset to fully utilize the classes in java.util.concurrent can be quite challenging. One of the side effects of concurrent programming is that it can require more code than it would take to achieve the same results using mutual exclusion locking. Is concurrency worth writing more code? My current answer to the question is hell yes because I think most Java programmers need the

Matching a Backslash in Java

2006-02-14T17:39:00.000-05:00

I've done it a million times in the past but for whatever reason I keep screwing up how to properly write a backslash (\) in a regular expression. I wasted 20+ minutes yesterday trying to figure out why the character class in this [\";:()\\[\\]<>@.\\,] regular expression wouldn't match strings containing commas. I'm blogging the solution so I'll have a permanent record and hopefully, I'll once

Part 2's a come'n

2006-02-13T11:25:00.000-05:00

I've promised a part 2 to this entry and I will deliver. Granted, nobody has complained about it so far but that is probably because you and them have better things to do with your time. Losers! Just kidding. In the mean time I've fixed a minor bug in the code. The entry has been updated. It was a really D'oh! (think Homer Simpson) type of bug. The code (comments) promised to return MX records

Java too ubiquitous? (My Response)

2006-02-11T15:22:00.000-05:00

I second CJAN. I think it's long overdue. I'm sick of tired of the growing size of the SDK and it's ilk (i.e. J2EE). At the rate they are going they are going to have to release a 4 DVD box set just to get the SDK to us and then we are going to have to FedEx our customers a USB external harddrive to store the SDK and the additional libraries to run the programs we write.

Back to Gentoo

2006-02-11T05:41:00.000-05:00

I'm going back to Gentoo. As soon as my ThinkPad Z60m replacement gets here I'm putting Gentoo on it. Ubuntu/Debian is just not my bag. Even though it's GNU/Linux it feels alien to me. I think I'm just spoiled. Gentoo forces you to know your system. It's not just a black box. I feel empowered by that. I can't tell you what Gentoo has done for my sysadmin skills, though I try to avoid system

I Am Spam No More

2006-02-10T18:04:00.000-05:00

I'm no longer SPAM. Yeah! Hello, Your blog has been reviewed, verified, and whitelisted so that it will no longer appear as potential spam. If you sign out of Blogger and sign back in again, you should be able to post as normal. Thanks for your patience, and we apologize for any inconvenience this has caused. Sincerely, Blogger Support

Observations, Linking Trends

2006-02-10T09:54:00.000-05:00

Over the last year or so I've noticed that less and less of the sites I visit force new windows open or popups when I click on offsite links. The new site simply replaces the current site and a nice ordered history is maintained. This is the way it should have always been. Sometimes I get so engrossed by the content of the new site that I forget how I got there or why I'm there. So I'm really

I Am Spam

2006-02-10T03:26:00.000-05:00

blogger.com says I am spam. Now everytime I want to post an entry I have to complete Word Verification. Warning, edited to make it sound worse than it is! Spam blogs can be recognized by their irrelevant, repetitive, or nonsensical text, along with a large number of links, usually all pointing to a single site. Link to original text. God forbid hypertext (this blog) should have hyperlinks in

3 Most Annoying Things About Firefox

2006-02-10T02:45:00.000-05:00

Press F3 to bring up the search dialog but it doesn't give the search box focus. What's the point!?! And don't tell me about [CTRL-F] Why can't I search my history, not just the title but the contents of the pages. I know it caches the data so why don't they just get it over with and make the damn thing searchable!?! I don't want a hear a peep about the dman Google toolbar. Google has enough

Making Progress

2006-02-07T11:10:00.000-05:00

I'm happy to report that I'm making progress. It seems my breakthrough epiphany is bearing fruit. I still don't have the big picture breakdown like I want but thanx to my incessant note taking I have a bunch of little pictures that I can work on until I discover a way to tie it all together. In the mean time I am happy to report the DNS querying code that I posted in A Breakthrough! has

JNDI vs dnsjava

2006-02-06T18:24:00.000-05:00

I've finished the benchmarks and JNDI kicked dnsjava's ass! JNDI is approximately 4x faster than dnsjava. Since we are talking about milliseconds not microseconds or nanoseconds, JNDI is the clear winner for my needs. If you are completely confused should read my previous entry.

A Breakthrough!

2006-02-06T14:02:00.000-05:00

I've had a breakthrough! I woke up this morning with the realization that part of my (code) writer's block is centered on my (current) inability to decompose the problem into a set of objects and methods, the root of OO design. Usually I'm very good at this. It's the way I've always worked and it's never failed me (this badly) before. Anyway, my breakthrough is "screw the design!" There are

Blogger can't Spell blog

2006-02-05T22:32:00.000-05:00

Before publishing my previous post I ran it through blogger's spell checker. It complained that blog is a misspelled word for which it has no suggestions. Of all the words that blogger's dictionary doesn't know about I certainly didn't expect blog to be one of them!

(Code) Writer's Block

2006-02-05T21:03:00.000-05:00

I am supposed to be redoing a project I completed almost 3 years ago but I've caught (code) writers block. This is first time it's been this bad. I mean I'm really, really, really, mentally stuck. So far I've completed 99% of my data storage design and I've got a few notes (to self) and requirements jotted down in a text file. I've written only one class. I managed to squeeze the one class out as

Going postal

2006-01-31T23:50:00.000-05:00

Just when I thought it was safe to leave the phrase, going postal behind, a postal employee kills 6 people. I guess its time to break out the old bullet proof vest so I can check my post office box and drop of my blockbuster rentals.

studdugie moves to Design Decisions

2006-01-31T18:13:00.000-05:00

I've consolidated my studdugie blog from jroller so I'll only have one blog to worry about. Hopefully this move will translate into more entries. I have a bunch of titles and half started entries in a folder somewhere. My goal this year is to spend the time and flesh them out so stay tuned.

Too Much Cafe

2006-01-24T00:21:00.000-05:00

Elliotte Rusty Harold usually has something useful to say but every once in a while he crams his foot into his mouth. Today is one of those days.

LOLA & FLOSS

2005-12-28T19:13:00.001-05:00

If you've never heard of the Law of Leaky Abstractions (LOLA) then you ought to read Joel Spolsky's blog on the topic. So what does LOLA have to do with FLOSS? Everything, because if you cut code FLOSS makes it orders of magnitude easier to deal with LOLA and her mood swings. Case in point, what is wrong with following innocent lines of code? File destination = new File( "somedestination" );

Mustang is comming, it's time to face the Tiger

2005-10-05T16:12:00.000-04:00

So you have been waiting patiently for the the dust settle, the bugs to rear their ugly heads and get squashed, the PR machine to choke on it's own shite and die, the {tech articles, books, and blogs} written, your favorite IDE to support it and finally the name of the damn thing to stabilize. Aside: Since I've milked all the humor I can out of Sun's marketing fiasco with the naming of the

The Free Lunch is Over

2005-06-17T10:48:00.000-04:00

That's (part of) the title of an article I just finished reading describing the next revolution in computer programming. It fully supports the gist of a previous blog entry explaining the importance of parts of Java 1.5 (or Java 5.0 or whatever those marketing morons at Sun feel like calling it today). The article simply reinforces my assertion that the Java programming language is the place to

Why java.util.concurrent Kicks Ass and Takes Names

2005-02-25T06:31:00.000-05:00

There are many things that JDK 1.5 [or Java 2 version 5 or Java 5 or Java 2 version 1.5 the entire marketing department should be the ones fired in the lastest round of layoffs from Sun because of their malicious and spiteful attempt to confuse the general public with f*cked up product names Edition] got horribly wrong, (generics, static imports, etc) but there are a few things that they got

baby's first words

2004-09-11T19:16:00.000-04:00

Hello, I'm HashiDiKo, also known as studdugie. Welcome to my blog. This is my first blog and my first attempt at blogging. I'm a Java programmer, amongst other things, by trade. Thus a large part of what I hope to write will revolve around my ruminations on Java programming in general and on current and future projects specifically, which is why I named the blog Design Decisions. My hope is,