Archive

The following are several tips you can use to avoid iPhone data overage charges. Turn Wi-Fi on. To turn Wi-Fi on, tap Settings -> Wi-Fi (turn this on). When Wi-Fi is turned on,...

Ever wanted to run a web server from the current directory with no setup and no fuss? Here's how: python -m SimpleHTTPServer 8888

If you have an app that sends email and you want to test it without a mail server, I recently found an elegant solution. The solution involves using the Spring framework and an...

I recently decided to install Apache Maven 3.0.1 via my favorite packaging system for Mac (Homebrew). This presented a couple of issues that I worked to resolve and documented here for others. Problem...

I've recently done a proof of concept using RabbitMQ, Spring AMQP and Spring Integration. This post will describe how each of these open source technologies along with some enterprise integration patterns were used...

In over ten years of experience building software, there are patterns and nuances that you pick up on in terms of building effective software systems. Three areas where I believe any software project...

I set out to find an elegant solution to providing growl notifications for a JRuby application. Here are my findings: gems growl - nice simple code but requires Growlnotify extra to be installed....

I've started playing around with Heroku lately and ran into an issue when I created my app on one machine and cloned from Git on another. After some digging, I found that I...

I've been meaning to investigate something that came to mind a while back and just now got around to it while researching a bug. My feeling was that there may be a faster...

Ever wanted to apply some CSS formatting based on the content? Here's an example how to do it using jQuery. Here's the resulting table with the rows delineated based on the content of...

750 is roughly the number of hours I've gained in the three years of working from home full-time by not commuting to work. In these times when the economy is bad companies are...

I rarely read books cover to cover in four hours. I rarely pre-order books six months in advance. I very rarely write reviews about the books I read. Rework by Jason Fried and...

I recently worked on a project that used Struts 2.1 and the Spring framework integration plug-in. There are sporadic examples of how to test Struts actions in this context but none of them...

For a few years my team has been happily using Ruby and JRuby in our work for a big international bank. Suddenly, we could no longer install or update gems from behind the...

Need a quick and dirty way to upload some photos or other files via command prompt? Have Ruby? First, install the Amazon S3 gem: sudo gem i aws-s3 Then, edit the following to...

I've just completed moving this blog from WordPress to a static site generated using Jekyll. Why the move? Here are a few reasons why I decided to make the move: minimalism - I...

In response to Rubyists - what are your "tools of the trade"? Hardware Mac Pro: 4 core, 2 x 2.66GHz Dual-core Intel Xeon, 7GB RAM Dell 24" LCD Monitor: primary display Samsung 19"...

If your using Apache Buildr for building your projects one of the best ways to gain performance is to run Buildr with JRuby and Nailgun. Nailgun vastly improves the startup time for the...

Since Google App Engine for Java came out several months ago I've been learning how it works. Since it's launch there's been a few releases and for some reason Google only made the...

AbstractTransactionalJUnit4SpringContextTests is a pretty long class name but it makes easy work of testing a Spring application which uses a database. This post will walk through a quick example of how to use...

I've recently been intrigued by RabbitMQ which is an implementation of AMPQ (Advanced Message Queuing Protocol) written in Erlang. Here's the short and sweet installation instructions for Erlang on Mac OS X: Download...

During the setup of testing some RESTful integration tests by extending org.jboss.resteasy.test.BaseResourceTest, I received the following error: java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError: Acme/Serve/Serve Not a very helpful error message is it? This means you're missing the Tiny...

IntelliJ IDEA is my IDE of choice and sometimes it's helpful to view certain files associated with IDEA. The location of these files are not completely obvious when running on Mac OS X...

If you're looking for a dead simple web-based tool for inspecting HTTP requests, look no further. HURL has an easy-to-use interface where you can submit URLs with headers and parameters then view both...

A while back I setup a script to create backups and store them on Amazon S3. Until recently, this has worked great. The script kept bombing with the following error when it actually...

Yahoo's deal with Microsoft recently sparked a lot of interest but perhaps the most interesting events are yet to come. Already, Yahoo has lost top talent like Doug Cutting and have now started...

For a project I was working on recently I had snippets of plain text with links embedded but without the actual HTML code. Here's some code to get the job done:

In a prior post, I provided and introduction to GAE for Java including getting your local development environment setup and uploading your application to Google's servers. For this post, I will outline how...

I've been reading up on running JRuby on GAE (Google App Engine) for Java. Here are some helpful resources for future reference and for others seeking information about this exciting mix. appengine-jruby -...

If your JSTL expressions aren't working with GAE for Java, try this quick fix. In your page directive, add isELIgnored="false". For example:

A couple of days ago, Google announced that Java was now available to run on Google App Engine (GAE for short). Currently, they are only letting the first 10,000 developers who sign up...

Amazon has announced Elastic MapReduce, the latest product under it's web services umbrella starting at $0.10 per hour. This latest offering leverages two of it's existing products EC2 (cloud computing) and S3 (simple...

As a solo developer myself I've come to use these tools and techniques to help save me time and be more efficient. I prefer tools which are both cheap and simple so the...

While configuring some Ubuntu servers to have a static IP address recently, I came across this error when I attempted to restart the network interfaces: SIOCADDRT: no such process I realized that I...

Here's a quick and dirty on installing the latest (version 6.5.0-0 as of this writing) ImageMagick on Ubuntu 8.04. Start by removing any old versions previously installed via apt-get: sudo apt-get remove imagemagick...

For the last couple of years I've dabbled with Ruby and JRuby coming from a Java background. Until recently, the only IDE that has had a decent JRuby debugger was NetBeans. Now, with...

To restrict access to a standalone Tomcat instance by IP address: The above will restrict access to the surrounding Engine, Host, or Context element in TOMCAT_HOME/conf/server.xml. You may also specify a comma separated...

Timothy O'Brien of O'Reilly sat down with Jason Fried, a "managing member" of 37 Signals and asked a lot of great questions about the philosophy of running a small tech company. Much of...

While trying for the first time to build a very simple Cocoa project using XCode 3.1, I ran into the following error: At first glance, the error message suggests that the copystrings file...

I'm a Java and Ruby developer and I'm interested in starting development on an idea I have which would work great as an iPhone application. Naturally, instead of learning Objective-C I started doing...

As of earlier today, JetBrains made version 2.0 of the Ruby plug-in available for IntelliJ IDEA, a popular Java IDE. For those like myself that dabble in Java and Ruby this is a...

Although the price of fuel has gone back down in the United States after peaking earlier this summer, the momentum behind striving for better fuel efficiency continues to grow. No doubt, a lot...

Earlier today it was leaked and later confirmed that Google is releasing it's own browser called Google Chrome. The news has spread like a wild fire today and the source of most of...

Some suggestions for open source hosting and project management sites and software: CodePlex (Microsoft) Freshmeat.net GForge GitHub Gitorious Google Code Launchpad Mozdev.org RubyForge Sourceforge Unfuddle

A while back I did a bit of research on how much it would cost to run a modest application on each of the following services: Amazon EC2 - elastic compute cloud, provides...

If you need to download a file or view an http page source through a proxy, something like the following one-liner will help:

While using Oracle's SQL Loader utility the other day, I ran into a subtlety which wasn't obvious. Most of the documentation out there describes the userid param as just taking user/pass. But it...

My development on a photo sharing site has ground to a halt in the wake of an outage that's lasted since this morning. Amazon S3 and Simple Queue Service are affected according to...

The newest album from Nine Inch Nails, "The Slip", is a fresh downward spiral into the musical mind of Trent Reznor. This album continues a great new trend since Trent has freed himself...

Based on the output from the following command you can easily determine if a Linux machine has 32 bit or 64 bit kernel: uname -a If you see something like x86_64, then your...

Change the Log on credentials for a windows service: sc.exe config "YourServiceName" obj= "yourusername" password= "yourpassword" Bring up services: services.msc Copy a directory structure: xcopy G:\foo*.* D:\bin\bar /E /D /Y Copy a directory...

This week I had a requirement for scripting the installation of the Java 5 JDK and JRE. These instructions require separate install files for the JDK and JRE but will get the job...

On the old server: svnadmin dump /path/to/repository > repo_name.svn_dump On the new server: svnadmin create /path/to/repository move repo_name.svn_dump to your new server svnadmin load /path/to/repository < repo_name.svn_dump

Marissa Mayer gives some insight into how Google flourishes with innovation in a Forbes article. Number five caught my eye: 5. SHARE AS MUCH INFORMATION AS YOU CAN "People are blown away by...

Finder in OS X seems to be retarded at finding hidden files and folders. In my case, I wanted to recursively remove all .svn folders from a directory. To do this, it's command...

I'm totally stoked that NIN has another album out called Ghosts I-IV. Don't worry. Even though it has 36 (count 'em!), it's only five bucks available from nin.com or amazon. I haven't actually...

I read Paul Graham off and on and find most of what he writes about interesting even if I don't agree with all of what he has to say. His latest essay, "Six...

Sun has launched a project called the Da Vinci Machine, also being described "a multi-language renaissance for the Java Virtual Machine architecture." The project includes prototype JVM extensions to run non-Java lanugages on...

If you've tried installing the rjb 1.1.x gem on Mac OS X Leopard, you will probably end up with an error like: lipo: can't open input file: /var/tmp//ccpyNy8b.out (No such file or directory)...

After battling with several different configurations when it comes to logging and Tomcat 5.5.x, I decided to put together this guide for a simplistic approach. This assumes that you would like to use...

The hits keep on coming with technology acquisitions lately. First Oracle snatches BEA and now this. This was a bit of a shocker considering MySQL was talking about an IPO. Then bam, Sun...

In a press release yesterday: Oracle Corporation (NASDAQ: ORCL) and BEA Systems (NASDAQ: BEAS) announced today they have entered into a definitive agreement under which Oracle will acquire all outstanding shares of BEA...

iA (Information Architects) out of Tokyo, Japan have unveiled some sneak peaks of their annual trend map. The inspiration this year is Swiss train station maps which makes for an isometric twist on...

There's an interesting article in the NY Times about the PlentyOfFish.com and Craigslist sites. The article explains that the sites have little or no customer service functions because they're either automated (no humans...

There are parallels between the organization and operational philosophies of companies and what is considered "good" software design. Attributes that immediately come to mind about good software design that can be applied to...

So as part of a pet project I decided to write a Ruby client for the Technorati API. There are several available requests that can be made and each has it's own options...

I don't have many vices...but the BMW M3 is one of them. I owned a 2004 M3 but the new "upgraded" version has me salivating.

This may be old news but I think little tidbits like this are important to document. If you're running Ruby on Leopard (Mac OS) and you're running into issues with your gems, try...

During those long sessions of coding music plays a crucial role in keeping the momentum going for me. With all that music I listen to I'm always on the lookout for new and...

If you're running the Leopard Mac OS, you'll need the following command to properly install the MySQL gem: sudo env ARCHFLAGS="-arch i386" gem install mysql -- \ --with-mysql-config=/usr/local/mysql/bin/mysql_config This page also has some...

There is a gotchya related to how you require ActiveRecord. Apparently, in older versions of Ruby (eg. the version packaged with Leopard) something like the following will NOT work: require 'activerecord' with something...

I've read some blog posts and saw some video about BugLabs recently and I'm really blown away. Imagine being able to do your own hardware mashups. Well now you can via an open...

Divide and conquer: break down large, complex problem into smaller, solvable problems Hill-climbing strategy, (or - rephrased - gradient descent/ascent, difference reduction) - attempting at every step to move closer to the goal...

So I just finished updating OS X Leopard to 10.5.1 and found my default user account, which was an administrator, is now a standard user. After some Googling, I found a solution on...

Oracle Mix is a joint effort between the folks at Thoughtworks and Oracle to provide a community for Oracle clients to exchange ideas and network with each other and Oracle.

If you want to start playing with the latest features of Ruby on Rails (2.0 due out very soon), you can install from source with something like the following: sudo gem install rails...

If you get something like the following error: when you try to execute something like this: sudo apt-get remove nginx -yf Then you need to add exit 0 to the second line of...

If you run into this error: ERROR: While executing gem ... (Gem::GemNotFoundException) Could not find rails (> 0) in any repository while running the command: sudo gem install rails --include-dependencies just run the...

If you get the following error: ERROR: While executing gem ... (OpenURI::HTTPError) 404 Not Found when running the following: sudo gem install mongrel Then run it again. Sometimes it takes running the command...

Exciting news for those of you that are following the break-neck pace of JRuby. Thomas Enebo has announced that the JRuby 1.1 beta (released this past weekend) is faster than the original implementation....

37Signals just posted a description for adding another person to their team. Why can't more job descriptions (and more importantly more jobs) be like this one? "37signals is searching for another full-time Rails...

I recently read a post about a gym called Gym Jones. What caught my interest is that I recently saw the movie "300", in which the Spartans had near perfect human physiques. I've...

I have to say I'm impressed unimpressed with this new eclipse-based IDE, 3rdRail, from CodeGear. Update: As I've actually started to use the editor I've encountered several exceptions that seem to be related...

Google recently announced the first beta release of Ganeti, an open source virtual server management software built on top of Xen and other open source software. Naturally, since I've been using VMWare for...

I don't generally write about music but I think this will be the first of more mini reviews to come. I've listened to techno music pretty much since I moved to Orlando. At...

One of my obsessions (I have many) surrounding software development is the environment that I develop in. Naturally, whenever I start a new gig or begin work for a new company, I tend...

Oleg Shpynov, the lead for the IntelliJ IDEA Ruby plugin, announced JRuby support will be available as part of a public beta version due out in early September. New Features will include: Scope...

Background What do I mean by externalizing? I really mean addressing separation of concerns and making an application more portable. If you think about it, a configuration is a module that other modules...

During my latest Apache configuration change I ran into an issue where I wasn't able to restart/start. This was the first time I encountered this and I was fairly positive the issue wasn't...

I've been working with Apache Tomcat for years and always seem to stumble upon new information related to the proper setup and configuration for a production environment. I've decided to put the instructions...

OK, so this is a slightly off the path most traveled but still technical nonetheless. It's time for me to purchase another pair of running shoes and it occurred to me that I...

Since there are several variations of docs on this (some of which are out of date) I figured I'd document this. Download and install the Ruby interface from http://rubyforge.org/projects/ruby-oci8/ Then, in your config/database.yml...

Getting right down to business... Download the Instant Client Packages (4 files) Unzip the files into instantclient10_1 unzip instantclient-basic-macosx-10.1.0.3.zip unzip instantclient-sqlplus-macosx-10.1.0.3.zip unzip instantclient-sdk-macosx-10.1.0.3.zip unzip instantclient-jdbc-macosx-10.1.0.3.zip Create two symbolic links for the files that...

Here we need to use the Bean Scripting Framework (BSF) since Java 5 doesn't have the built-in scripting support that Java 6 has. I will also use 2 helper classes (JRubyHelper.java and BSFHelper.java)...

This is a brief tutorial on how to get a simple Ruby on Rails application up and running on Tomcat. What you will need subversion client Java 5 JDK Tomcat 5.5.x JRuby 1.0...

What is JRuby? JRuby is simply a Java implementation of the Ruby programming language. Why Should I Use JRuby? Leverage both Java and Ruby libraries (gems) Use existing Java platform to deploy Ruby...

I've started putting together some resources related to JRuby and the Spring framework. There is a lot of interest in being able to write a Rails application and deploy it to an existing...

Using OmniGraffle, a neat app for putting together snazzy diagrams, I decided to try to visualize the most popular desktop GUI options based on language and platform. Here's the result: Download the PDF...

My latest interest is looking at an API called OFX or Open Financial Exchange. OFX exists to allow clients to connect directly to financial institutions and download transactions. An example is downloading the...

I've decided to put together a post of bad development environment practices that I've witnessed in companies I've worked for. For each bad practice there's usually an easy fix to although the hard...

So this was a new one for me. After I successfully imported a couple projects on a Windows XP subversion repository I received the error: svn: Not authorized to open root of edit...

Once in a while I create bash scripts to do various things on a Linux box. I'm by no means a bash scripting guru so I rely on various references: An in-depth exploration...

Being a software developer, it's easy to recognize the importance of having a great environment to work in. Most of the time I spend tends to be 80% or more on thought and...

This is a very brief outline of how to run the Apache Tomcat servlet container on port 80 (the standard web server port) on a Linux operating system. The steps illustrated here are...

For those of you using MySQL, I just found this great Google Tech Ed video on Performance Tuning Best Practices for MySQL from the co-author of the book Pro MySQL (Expert's Voice in...

Several excellent resources for people crazy over Ubuntu: UbuntuHQ ArsGeek (Ubuntu Category) The Perfect Setup - Ubuntu 6.10 Server (Edgy Eft) Install Subversion 1.4 in Dapper with SSL and Berkeley DB Support Ubuntu...

The name may not be sexy but I just found this really cool system monitor app called Conky. To install on Ubuntu: sudo apt-get install conky It may not be obvious from the...

If you get an error like this one on Ubuntu, it means the library isn't available and you need to install it. Although the Ubuntu package which contains this library isn't obvious. You...

I went to Blogger.com today to check out the newest features and noticed when I navigated there my system slowed to a crawl. I quickly realized it was the Blogger.com site! You can...

I've just start fooling around with the initial (0.1) release of the Ruby plugin for JetBrains's IntelliJ IDEA IDE. I'm pretty impressed with the initial release since it has some code completion and...

So you have ruby installed and now you want to start putting together some web applications. There are several options when it comes to what web server you actually run your app on....

The basic syntax for dd is: dd if=INPUT-FILE-NAME of=OUTPUT-FILE-NAME To make an ISO from your CD/DVD, place the media in your drive but do not mount it. If it automounts, unmount it. dd...

Here's a quick and dirty guide for compiling the latest recommended version of Ruby from source on Ubuntu 6.10: Download ruby-1.8.5-p12.tar.gz and unzip the contents to a temporary directory I'll call INSTALL_DIR. Make...

Introduction This is the first post of many to come documenting my progress of porting an existing e-commerce web application from Java to Ruby on Rails. Background on the Java Application The Java...

As an exercise using a great new open source (free as in beer) tool I discovered called FreeMind, I put together this quick outline of my standard directory structure for Java web applications....

It seems like I always forget the magic combination for being able to get away with not reloading Tomcat for each class change/compilation. If for nothing else than to document it for myself...

In my research to find an interesting niche market for my next project, I began reading about Modernist, avant-gard, and Futurist movements. What I read pertained mostly to music, architecture and art. As...

In this video, Sergey attempts to talk about "Search, Google, and Life". The video is one of several UC Berkeley classroom lectures made available to the public through it's dedicated page on Google...

There seems to be a new push in the build server space to move to a distributed model. Here's a quick run down of some server choices and why they should be a...

Using nothing more than Digg.com's search feature you can research the best keywords to use your next story title. Today, I decided to put together some rudimentary statistics on some keywords to find...

If you just want a strong cup of coffee and you don't feel like cleaning your drip coffee maker or firing up your espresso machine here's a quick how-to. I know what you're...

John Markoff of the New York Times writes: "The Department of Energy said Wednesday that it had awarded I.B.M. a contract to build a supercomputer capable of 1,000 trillion calculations a second, using...

Joel Spolsky has just written a great post about what top developers want from an employer. Joel goes through several topics that make for a more efficient and symbiotic relationship.

While the promising new build server and version 6 of their IntelliJ IDEA IDE is in beta, the folks over at JetBrains have decided to launch a new contest with total prizes valued...

In this NY Times article by John Markoff, the frantic cry from Microsoft to over a million beta testers to give the new Vista operating system "an urgent shakedown" is evident and quite...

Rod Coffin over at Devx.com has just published an article which is focused on helping you choose between Spring and EJB 3.0. I didn't know that decision was necessarily mutually exclusive and the...

I just happened to come across this most excellent top 10 apps/hacks for the Ubuntu linux distro from LifeHacker. Check it out...Hack Attack: Top 10 Ubuntu apps and tweaks

Recently, one of my favorite ways of goofing off is to watch recent posted videos of Google Tech Talks. These are interesting technical topics that sometimes give an interesting perspective of Google's technology...

Excellent news. JetBrains announced today that they will be giving away their new continuous integration server with the next release of IntelliJ IDEA. I've been playing with the recent EAP releases of both...

I'm a huge fan of Google because it helps me in so many ways and the fact that they continue to churn out FREE applications and API's for almost anyone to use. I've...

Ruby for serious work... Is what Martin Fowler has to say regarding Ruby. Personally, I've had Ruby on my "cool languages to check out" list for some time but haven't set aside that...

It's been over two weeks now since I've started my latest job hunt. I call it a hunt because the truly ideal jobs are hard to find. There are those jobs that pay...

For those of you (like me) that have been using IntelliJ IDEA religiously for years, this brief but helpful explaination of the VM options is a nice treat. Among the tips are options...

I'm half way through this easy to read and sometimes comical book for entrepreneurial souls like myself. I highly recommend this to anyone considering starting their own software company or already managing a...

I have recently been introduced to StringTemplate, "...a java template engine (with ports for C# and Python) for generating source code, web pages, emails, or any other formatted text output." Having used Velocity...

I have recently been very inspired and intrigued by Paul Graham's book Hackers and Painters. Several essays including How to Start a Startup and How to Make Wealth give great insight and advice...

As of March 11th I'm married and as of today I'm officially working for a new employer using a new platform. The transition from Java to .Net should be interesting. I have 5...