home://nimret

History of the World in 6 Glasses

My buddy Will Iverson had recommended this book to me a while back and I really enjoyed reading it. Each chapter goes best with your favorite drink, ideally the one that the chapter is talking about :)

http://tomstandage.wordpress.com/books/a-history-of-the-world-in-six-glasses/

Inventing on Principle

Saw this talk which was forwarded on STS .. simple brilliant! Make sure you watch till the end- it's not all about programming.

http://vimeo.com/36579366

OneJar To Rule them all

I've been working on a command line java app at work which is part of a cron based batch process which updates some data between systems. Using maven, spring and mybatis means that I had the framework up and running within a couple of hours to pull data from backend DBs and output a file with some data.

Then I ran into a problem when I wanted to package it all up as a jar file which could be run directly from the command line via cron. The tricky part is in packaging up all the jars that are included as part of spring, mybatis, etc. and be able to run them in a way that they are all available on the classpath without munging each other.

Well, OneJar to the rescue! Everything packaged up all nice and neat. Just run 'mvn package' to get the jar and then use the usual 'java -jar app.jar' to run it. Works like a charm. Even has a Maven plugin to minimize the work needed to get it up and running.

Sneaky Sound System

Somedays just feel like ... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l_8MMDBXh4k

enjoy!

Snowmageddon it - Day 2

Looks like a couple more inches fell last night. We're upto almost a foot now methinks. Here's a couple of snapshots. Time to stay indoors, drink hot drinks and prep for that major software release tomorrow :)

Snowmageddon it!

Day 1 of the snowmageddon. Around 8" so far outside with more expected tomorrow. Supposed to be as bad as '96 - I remember snow drifts as tall as the house back then when we lived further up north :)

This is what the yard looks like so far. Let's see how much gets dumped tomorrow. As Def Leppard would say 'Snowmageddon it!'

Continuous Delivery

We practice Continous Delivery at Dynacron. That's the main reason why we've been able to push out a lot of new functionality for the last few months at a major local healthcare customer at a steady clip via a fairly automated deployment process which enables deployments anytime.

Dynacron has a free seminar if you're interested in learning more:

http://www.dynacrongroup.com/2012/01/seminar-292012-introduction-to-continuous-delivery/

SOPA + PIPA == DOA?!

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2012/01/how-pipa-and-sopa-violate-white-house-principles-supporting-free-speech

Here's the facts on them:

http://www.pcworld.com/article/248298/sopa_and_pipa_just_the_facts.html

TeamCity Eclipse plug-in and remote runs

We've been using TeamCity at work for a while now and it's working out as well as Hudson, etc. It has some really nifty integration features available via an eclipse plugin ( netbeans, idea, etc are also supported I believe). Love the remote run functionality!

http://www.jetbrains.com/teamcity/features/continuous_integration.html

That's why I love her!

Happy 2012!

Happy New Year!!!

I hope the new year brings you lots of joy & happiness! 2011 certainly brought us a lovely bundle of joy =)

JavaZone X : The Streaming

awesome geeky video! :)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5U1_KW6ww7Y

back to the regularly scheduled programming …

boy the last few months have been a blur! baby + work == no time for other things. It's been a very busy & productive year so far. Gonna try to find the time to post random things on here.

Speaking of which, read a really cool book recently - Rogue Warrior, who was the founder of seal team 6.

http://goo.gl/6L6fP

Interesting new Java CMS

http://www.jease.org/

I should look into it one of these days. Hopefully it's better than http://www.opencms.org/ for which it was really hard to find documentation and expertise when I worked with OpenCMS.

Excellent article on memory leaks

Read an excellent article on memory leaks in Java. Yes Toto, Java can have memory leaks even though it has GC.

http://blog.dynatrace.com/2011/04/20/the-top-java-memory-problems-part-1/

I've been dealing with the PermGen issues lately. It's quite interesting how a couple of wars with each containing a spring stack & a couple of other libraries thrown in can very quickly cause PermGen issues.

Jython, SSH etc etc

I am doing some automation stuff these days. This involves remotely interacting with servers via SSH. Ideally I would like to automate some of the processes so I was looking around for ways of doing that with Python or Java.

First I looked into Python which appears to have a couple of solutions:
http://wiki.python.org/moin/SecureShell

kinda banged my head against setting up the various libs before I gave up. So I looked into the Java alternatives. The best options appear to be:

http://www.jcraft.com/jsch/ - popular but docs are a little hard to find/read
http://www.ganymed.ethz.ch/ssh2/ - better docs than jsch

So I decided to download my favorite environment for playing around with Java - jython and was up & running a cmd on a remote box in around 5 mins and piping it's output.

While I agree that a dev is most productive with the tools that the person is most familiar with, once again I find jython to be quite awesome when it comes to just trying out a library.

There's a very nice plugin for Eclipse too.

Sometimes IE just makes you wanna …

… go like Xena the warrior princess - IEIEIEIEIEEIEIEIEIEIEIE!

It took some really nifty but tricky debugging to determine that if you have a flash embedded within an HTML page which is hosted on a different server from your HTML content, IE will send the site which hosts the flash content in the HTTP 'REFERER' header rather than the site serving up the HTML which contains the flash content. Aaarrghhhh! Why doesn't IE follow the standard: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTP_referrer

grumble grumble .. another evening wasted on browser specific inconsistencies :(

Change mysql root password

fyi, in case you need to change the root password for your mysql database ( such as when you get a dump of test data for example):

http://www.cyberciti.biz/tips/recover-mysql-root-password.html

Widgetbox

I have to make a special mention of this neat little tool called Widgetbox. It lets you easily create redistributable widgets for lots of custom sites like facebook, igoogle, etc apart from plain old HTML/flash widgets. I am leveraging it to send folks who use these widgets to landing pages within a web application via simple HTTP services in one of the projects that I am working on. Works like a charm and integrates quite nicely so props to the Widgetbox guys.

Tips for Bash power users

Bashy folks might find this useful :)

http://www.tuxradar.com/content/bash-tips-power-users