To invent, you need a good imagination and a pile of junk.
— Thomas Edison
This is what is so facinating about programming. Your “pile of junk” consists of digital assest instead of physical matterial, so the raw materials are not limited by the normal laws of supply and demand. In software, you are limited […]
Yahoo and Google are trying to one up each other on whose database contains more pages. Does it really matter? Isn’t relevancy more important? It depends on who your user is.
If most of your queries on search engines return hundreds or thousands of results, then it probably doesn’t matter who has the biggest […]
Subversion is great, but like any data repository, it must be backed up regularly. Many people have tried to implement version control without really understanding how it works, only to later discover that their backup strategy wasn’t working.
The backup script I use is run every night as part of a cron job. Each […]
Here is an interesting discussion about the dangers of design patterns. Design patterns can be a great way to solve problems, but many times they become an excuse to over-architect solutions. Design patterns should reduce complexity. If they introduce more complexity, you are doing something wrong.
The myth of design patterns is that they […]
Practice. Expect to practice with your version control system before you go live. This means you need to have a copy of your data. If you are exporting data from CVS to Subversion, it is probably a good idea to keep the import files around for a while in case you […]
Here is a scary scenario for a programmer. Unfortunately it is probably not too uncommon. Imagine you are starting a new job. Before accepting the position you ask all the right questions, but on your first day you discover the following:
The lead programer left two months ago. (You already knew this.) […]
Cobertura is a fork of jCoverage. It runs reports to let you see how much of your code is being tested by unit tests. This is incredibly useful to find areas of your code where a bug would go undetected.
It looks like there is a plugin for Maven already, so I’m […]
One of the things I need to do at my new job is get an issue tracking system in place. At Reslife, we put in Cerberus for tracking help desk request. Coming into a place that doesn’t have any type of system to track issues made me realize how much I took Cerberus […]
When using maven to generate a multi project I’ve run into an error where it says that it reached the “entity expansion limit” of 64,000. This appears to be coming from the SAX parser which is validating all the HTML pages. I’ve looked for a way to turn this parsing off, but so […]
Maven 1.0 has some problems with memory leaks. Most of the time these aren’t issues, but if you are trying to compile a multiproject you might run into problems. By default Maven tells java to let it have up to 256MB of ram. If you need to increase this you’ll need to […]
One of the major purposes of software design is to avoid making mistakes. You design your software so you don’t get halfway into the project and say “Oh yeah I didn’t think about that” and have to start over again or continue with a weak foundation. Unfortunatley don’t know exatly what type of […]
I have been hosting this site at www.redwoodvirtual.com. The offer some inexpensive virtual private servers and most of the time everything runs well. Unfortunately their server decided that I had gone over my 40 GB of monthly bandwidth and throttled everything down to a very low level. Pages were taking 30 to […]
It is probably too early to tell if it is true, but there are some rumors going around that there is a bit torrent of a version of OS X that runs on regular intel hardware. There is even an image of a Compaq running the operating system. Some people have the opinion […]
If you want to access svn over ssh, you need to make sure that everyone has the correct file permissions. In the following steps we create a directory named svn-repo and change it’s ownership to a group called svn. Then we create the repository and change the security to allow access by people […]
OS X does a great job of integraging blogs with LDAP authentecation. Unfortunately it doesn’t provide an easy way to go in and delete blogs. It appears that actual blog content is kept in /Library/Application Support/Weblogs. However deleting a blog from this directory will only erase the blog entries. Any blogs […]
A high school student decides to go undercover to see how far army recruiters will go to meet their quotas.
How far will the Army Go?
The premise was simple: McSwane would try to join the Army as a high school dropout with an insatiable fondness for marijuana and psychedelic mushrooms. No matter how stoned […]
Microsoft finally gave the world a look at its next generation video game system the Xbox 360 on a special MTV broadcast hosted by Lord of the Rings star Elijah Wood.
The new console features a 20-gigabyte hard drive and three 3.2-gigahertz PowerPC microprocessors that will enable high-definition graphics and six-channel surround sound.
Link
It is interesting to […]
From eWeek:
America Online is moving into the Web-based e-mail market on Wednesday by tying e-mail into its popular AOL Instant Messenger service.
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The free service will feature 2GB of storage, spam and anti-virus protection, and an interface that lets users drag and drop messages to organize and save them in folders, AOL is announcing.
AIM Mail will […]
IT Conversations has a very interesting session posted with Malcolm Gladwell. I’m currently reading his book Blink, but this recording is a great way to see if you’d be interested in the book. Blink deals with the ways we make snap decisions and points out the ways we can be right and the […]