Jakub Korab

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.

Out of a strange twist of fate, I have found myself working on two separate pieces of work that share virus scanning of uploaded files within a web application as a requirement. The gist of the use case is:

- the user uploads a file
- the system scans it
- if a virus is detected, the system presents the user with a nice error message

It’s nothing spectacular and if you want to see implementations of it, you need look no further than Gmail/Hotmail/Yahoo Mail.

Having drilled through Google, there simply doesn’t seem to be much help readily at hand. Even commercial software doesn’t seem to offer much. If you’re looking around for a solution your options are:

- take the uploaded file and pipe it through an appliance via a web service or other. Not only is this time consuming but it smells like a kludge.

- run a natively installed virus scanner on the server and parse the response. This is even worse! What happens if you develop on Windows and deploy on Unix? How do you test this?

- use a native API provided by an anti-virus vendor. Doable, if any vendors actually exposed APIs. Did some quick checking and none of the big boys have it on feature sheets.

- use an adapter API that plugs over the top. Opswat provide an API which works from a number of languages on Windows and Unix. Pricing is not advertised (I instantly look elsewhere whenever I see this sort of thing).

I don’t have a satisfactory answer just yet. There has to be an easier way. Given the pervasiveness of this type of requirement I’m surprised that a JSR for virus scanning or an Open Source Java adapter hasn’t popped up.