• Guardian Viral Video Chart: Facebook manners, the man who will fry anything and yes – Susan Boyle

April 24, 2009

• Get Excited and Make (Useful) Things

April 23, 2009

• Apache Mahout: Highly Scalable Machine Learning Algorithms

April 23, 2009 – This one’s big news. Plug-in intelligence into your applications without the need for a Phd in AI.

• Writing Software is Like … Writing

April 23, 2009 – I think this is one of my favourite analogies for software development. Right up there with gardening.

• Do Stand-ups Stand Up for Larger Teams?

April 22, 2009 – Working on a substantially larger project than the standard agile team, you can very much see these dynamics going on. We have tried both scrum of scrums and large scrums, and neither work particularly well. There’s a few interesting alternatives described here.

• Amazing Rube Goldberg Machine

April 22, 2009 – The Incredible Machine on steroids.

• Security flouted to ‘get the job done’

April 20, 2009 – Duh.

• Opinion: What if our tech is good enough?

April 18, 2009

• A Word Processor That Keeps Track

April 14, 2009

• In Depth: How casual gaming silently swept the world

April 12, 2009

• In Depth: 7 ways to make your Vista desktop look like Windows 7

April 13, 2009

• Investigative journalism under threat from new regulations

April 14, 2009

• Peter Noorlander: Free speech suffers for ancient precedent

April 8, 2009 – Be very careful what you blog about. It may well bite you in the future.

• A cuckoo in the stock market?

April 6, 2009

• Father of Use Cases Says Agile Needs to Get Smarter

April 4, 2009 – Very insightful.

• Ask [GAS]: Tokyoflash Concept Clock Designs

April 3, 2009

• Electronic Health Records: Lessons from the iPhone

April 3, 2009 – This has substantial potential to work as a model for large scale government projects. Contrast this with the public health records system (being?) developed in the UK, and it starts to make a lot of sense.

• Presentation: Amazon Web Services: Building Blocks for True Internet Applications

April 1, 2009

• Russell Brand: interview

April 1, 2009 – Actually seems like quite a grounded guy.

• Apache Camel switching from Java to BPEL, WSDL and RDF XML (with some XSLT)!

April 1, 2009 – Another 01/04 gem.

A couple of folks have asked me how I got my old Blogger permalinks to work on the new blog. It’s super simple.

Under Options -> Permalinks in the admin console, add the following custom structure “/%year%/%monthnum%/%postname%.html”. You can then set up the little Blogger redirect/DNS cheat method I described in the last post and everything hums just as before. Too easy.

New Year, New Home!

This blog is now moving onto a new domain – www.jakubkorab.net
If you RSS me, please update your feed to point to here.

See you on the other side!

Technology review published an article on a technology that will get new PC’s booting to a useable state in a few seconds as opposed to the couple of minutes that it currently takes – albeit with an operating system parallel to Windows.

http://www.technologyreview.com/Infotech/20072/?a=f

This has been a real pain for me, as I am in the market for a new laptop, and a quicker start up was high on my wish list. I don’t mind ditching Windows for a different OS either, having heard good things about the alternatives. However, when I did some scouting around on the net, the boot times for OSX and Linux weren’t much better. Sure you can spend ages tweaking everything to get a quicker start up, but I suffer from the classic modern ailment – being time poor. In other words, screw that. I can’t believe that somehow with all the advances in computing power, we have communally accepted our fate and have to suffer through twiddling our thumbs while waiting for the PC to start.

I want to be up and running now. And I don’t want to hear the line about the Hibernate settings. I turn my TV off. I want to do the same with my laptop, not switch it to some sort of low power setting. If anyone has a silver bullet out there for XP or another OS, I would love to hear about it.

Every once in a while I forget how to do something in UML. InformIT have a great guide on the use of the notation just for this purpose. Nice.

http://www.informit.com/articles/article.aspx?p=360441&seqNum=5&rl=1

If you are in Dublin and trying to work out what to do with yourself on a cold winter evening, why not come down to the pub for a few beers and a bit of friendly competition?

http://www.dubjug.org/events/jug/2008/quiz

I have been meaning to post lately on everything from an insight that I had into systems architecture when looking at the Sagrada Familia in Barcelona, to why JRuby is barking up the wrong tree. But I have been otherwise occupied So here’s what I term a Moment:

Stay tuned.

I hit a snag when unit testing some code that makes use of JAXB generated objects. JAXB does not generate setters for collections This means that you cannot do the following:

Parent parent = new Parent();
List<Child> children = new ArrayList<Child>();
children.add(new Child());
parent.setChildren(children); // there's no setter method!

Instead, the following will do the trick, since JAXB guarantees that getChildren() will always return a Collection:

Parent parent = new Parent();
List<Child> children = new ArrayList<Child>();
children.add(new Child());
parent.getChildren().addAll(children);

Hope this saves someone some frustration.

Andy Piper wrote an excellent blog post
(http://dev2dev.bea.com/blog/andypiper/archive/2006/07/spring_20_and_m_1
.html) about using Spring for the equivalent of EJB Message Driven
Beans. Worth checking out if you're looking at dropping EJB from your
Spring app entirely.

It’s great to see when your work finally gets up and running and people start using it. I’ve been doing some work on http://www.milkround.ie, a graduate recruitment website, for a little while now and the first draft version went up and had the kinks ironed out before Christmas. Now back from holidays, it’s good to see a substantial number of subscribers. It will be interesting to see how the project develops over the coming months.