Jakub Korab

Be a Better Developer

Jake — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 21:52:55 +0000

I came across 91 Surefire Ways to Become an Even Better Developer while loooking for programming resources similar to Project Euler (the best way to learn a new language). Dozens of links and ideas when you feel that work is not stretching the brain as much as it could. My favourite? Get your boss to get you a massage.

The Moustache is Back!

Jake — Mon, 13 Oct 2008 23:23:06 +0000

During Movember (the month formerly known as November) I’m growing a Mo. That’s right I’m bringing the moustache back, because I want to help tackle men’s health issues and fight prostate cancer.The Movember rules are simple. I start out on the 1st clean shaven, and for the rest of the month grow the most awesome moustache humanly possible within one month!Here’s where you come in. You help out with a donation to help beat the most common form of cancer among men, and in return on the 30th of October I let you vote on the shape of my upcoming soup-strainer. Here’s where it gets interesting. The higher the total, the bigger the choice. Here’s the breakdown:

£0-500 - Not bad. The tache looks respectable, even pretty good in a pastiche kind of way.
- Errol Flynn/Clark Gable
- Johnny Depp
£501-1000 - Pretty good. Serious face-caterpillar time.
- Borat
- Tom Selleck
£1001-1500 - Now we’re cooking with gas. I either get mistaken for:
- Merv Hughes
- Ron Jeremy
£1501-2000 - Smoking. Getting out the tache comb and wax for some serious swash buckling.
- Salvador Dali
- The “D’Artagnan” - complete with triangular goatee.
£2000+ Facezilla destroys Tokyo!
- General Ambrose Everett Burnside

But wait! There’s more!
Every day in Movember I’ll take a photo of the tache progression, and animate it so you can see the magic happen in internet time at the end.
As you can see, every little bit helps. So you get to have a bit of a laugh for a month and get to feel good for helping out with a great cause. “But Jake? How do I get in on this sweet deal?” I hear you say. It’s real easy…

Go to https://www.movember.com/uk/donate and donate online using your credit card or PayPal account.
Email me at jakekemail-movember at yahoo dot com dot au.

I will then add you to the “special” mailing list that lets you… Pimp My Face.
The money raised by Movember is donated to the good people at The Prostate Cancer Charity which will have an enormous impact on many men’s lives, and the awareness will help us to fight prostate cancer on every front - through research, support, information and campaigning.

Did you know…

Prostate cancer is the most common cancer in men in the UK. 35,000 men are diagnosed every year and one man dies every hour.
1 in 11 UK men will be diagnosed in their lifetime .

For those that have supported Movember in previous years you can be very proud of the impact it has had and can check out the details at:
[ Fundraising Outcomes ].

Movember culminates at the end of month Gala Partés. If you would like to be part of this great night you’ll need to purchase a [Gala Parté Ticket].

And if you want to link back to this blog, that would be cool too.

Conference organizing no more

Jake — Mon, 18 Aug 2008 21:26:51 +0000

After taking a step back to have a think about my situation, I have regretfully pulled out of organizing the IJTC conference in Dublin this year. Putting together a conference is a hugely involved activity and I just do not have the time to spare on it this year. I wish the remaining organizers the best of luck and hope the event works out to be a success.

Hibernate/JPA Ternary Relationships

Jake — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 18:43:24 +0000

After much pain and suffering trying to get ternary relationships working correctly using the JPA annotations, I finally hit upon this post. The secret sauce: it makes use of the (rather poorly documented) @CollectionOfElements Hibernate annotation to annotate the set of link objects in the primary class, and makes the link class @Embeddable. No primary key class in the link.

JPA 2.0 supposedly manages to make this cryptic nonsense, including the ability to associate additional information with a link table, much easier.

Irish Java Technologies Conference 2008

Jake — Sat, 12 Jul 2008 17:57:35 +0000

It’s that time of the year again. We are just starting to ramp up getting this year’s conference in Dublin together for November. A good few months this time, as opposed to our insane 3 month schedule last year. There are a bunch of themes that we are looking to cover in this year’s line-up, but the crux of it will be around addressing common problems and how the tools can help to support that effort, rather than being a bog-standard tech showcase. It’s kind of a reverse point of view from what other other events take.

It was a great buzz putting it all together last year, and I know this one’s going to be even more fun, both for the delegates and speakers. We already have our scheming hats on

Who reads your blog?

Jake — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 20:33:35 +0000

So, why no blog posts lately? Most of the interesting stuff that folks blog about are those issues and ideas which have currency, those at the forefront at their minds. Tech blogs too deal with the everyday. Issues that we have come across, interesting ideas, problems and techniques. However, in this day of corporate non-disclosure agreements and overly keen security departments sometimes it’s just not prudent to scratch that blogging itch, regardless of how tangential the topic might be.

On the flipside, if you didn’t know, Eclipse 3.4 aka Ganymede is out! With a whole bunch of new goodies as standard. After my first cursory test drive, the concensus is… very nice.

Teenage Knife Crime in London

admin — Sat, 05 Jul 2008 10:52:52 +0000

An unfortunately pessimistic, yet topical, post this time. You only have to walk past the news stands any given day to see the topic of the month. Knife crime is increasing, with the victims typically being teenagers. What were a couple of isolated incidents now appear to be accelerating into a sustained trend. Anyone who has read Malcom Gladwell’s Tipping Point would not be surprised to see the similarities between the case studies described, and what’s going on. Ironically, bringing media attention to the issue, and staging marches in unity against knife crime only serves to validate this behaviour as an appropriate way to resolve disputes. Seeing one’s peers behaving in a particular way serves to validate that behaviour as an acceptable form of expression. The current trend will only be stopped by applying lessons from past equivalents. In the meantime, we can unfortunately expect it to accelerate.

Surfing the information superhighway again!

Jake — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 21:45:31 +0000

After 3 months in London without having a net connection at home I am finally on that interweb thing that all the kids are into these days with their Bebos and their Facebooks and things. Yaay! It’s amazing just how disconnected you feel when you don’t have access to your email - not to mention Skype! I am working in a banking environment these days so webmail is not an option (at the threat of being fed to the angry information security people - who do a fantastic job, thanks guys). So back to blogging, organizing mad conference schemes and keeping up with friends again.

What did happen to all those old digital age terms? They really seem as twee as grandma’s tea cosy these days. I will try to throw in at least one phrase dropped from the vernacular each month into a blog post

Sucky Way to End a Great Conference

Jake — Fri, 09 May 2008 16:02:43 +0000

I just got this in the mail this morning

“The JavaOne conference team has been notified by the San Francisco Department of Public Health about an identified outbreak of a virus in the San Francisco area. Testing is still underway to identify the specific virus in question, but they believe it to be the Norovirus, a common cause of the “stomach flu”, which can cause temporary flu-like symptoms for up to 48 hours. Part of the San Francisco area impacted includes the Moscone Center, the site of the JavaOne conference which is being held this week. We are working with the appropriate San Francisco Department of Public Health and Moscone representatives to mitigate the impact this will have on the conference and steps are being taken overnight to disinfect the facility. We have not received any indication that the show should end early, so will have the full schedule of events on Friday as planned. We hope to see you then.

Please see the attached notification from the Department of Public Health.

For further information, as well as Frequently Asked Questions related to the Norovirus, please visit the San Francisco Department of Public Health website at http://sfcdcp.org/norovirus.cfm”

Well, that sucks.

Pimping Builds

Jake — Thu, 08 May 2008 23:51:31 +0000

From the Pimp My Build session by the Atlassian guys.

Use Ant imports. The imported stuff can check for preconditions and fail cleanly using the tag.
Use macros.
Don’t build stuff you don’t need using the task. Use from ant-contrib, which is even better.
You can use audio snippets to tell you when you screw it all up
You can filter messages in builds using the Unix shell to notify you of actually important stuff rather than the standard boiler plate.
Don’t be afraid to write tasks - everyone should know how the build works. Don’t be precious about it. If you have repetitive tasks, why not script it?
Use scripts. You can embed Javascript directly into your Ant build via a <[CDATA[..]]> block
Use conditional tasks (ant-contrib)
Don’t do one-off analysis. PMD, Checkstyle and Findbugs can be scripted! I found this to be particularly useful. Much easier to find issues, especially if coupled with continuous integration.
Document your build! Ant targets have descriptions. You do it with your code, why not your build artefacts? Use the -target_name convention for private targets.
Use continuous integration. This has been an absolute life changing thing for me as a developer.
Test in your builds!!! JUnit, TestNG et al.
Maven tips:
- Use a remote repository proxy - caches are good (Apache Archiva). Helps performance and stability - make sure you can run when the net goes down.
- Create a local repository for private artifacts
- Local repository for public artifacts - third party Jars or commercial stuff not available in public repositories

Oh yeah, Ivy is good when you aren’t using Maven.