tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-69531022024-03-08T09:29:52.686-05:00A blog about Ben's stuff. The stuff I work on, the stuff I do, just stuff...BenChttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11955680310830733267noreply@blogger.comBlogger23125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6953102.post-1136387992928389092006-01-04T09:57:00.000-05:002006-01-04T10:19:52.966-05:00

Where's my convergence? I want my Apple iPod to make phone calls for me, play video's for me, play J2ME games for me, be WiFi enabled so it can login to my corporate network and check my email on Exchange, take 5MP pictures for me, allow me to IM people and surf the net, and play MP3's all in an iPod-like fit and finish. Why is this so hard? I DO NOT WANT to have an mp3 player, a cell phone,

BenChttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11955680310830733267noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6953102.post-1112879716636287312005-04-07T09:01:00.000-04:002005-04-07T09:21:21.346-04:00

There are a lot of books out there that I need to read. But there are a couple that always seem to make my list but never seem to get bought. I have a nagging need to read some books on design patterns. I've done well enough reading articles on the web, but I need some books now.The first book is the standard which I believe every good developer has read at some point, Martin Fowler's excellent

BenChttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11955680310830733267noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6953102.post-1110558620108218452005-03-11T11:28:00.000-05:002005-03-11T11:30:20.110-05:00

Factory Design PatternMore patterns

BenChttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11955680310830733267noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6953102.post-1109621678506361202005-02-28T15:08:00.000-05:002005-02-28T15:14:38.506-05:00

yeah, so I've been putting off unit testing my code for quite a while. I don't know why, laziness probably. I've always tested it manually using copious logging and having some other eyes look at the code. But at my new job we HAVE to have unit test written for everything we deploy. It's not a test driven development shop, but unit tests are taken seriously. So after a bit of grumbling (

BenChttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11955680310830733267noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6953102.post-1108868810063844212005-02-19T21:51:00.000-05:002005-02-19T22:06:50.066-05:00

Well I got me a new job. It's with a small company in the Triangle that does mobile content delivery. THey have a couple big time customers and are growing rapidly. It was the hardest interview I've ever been on though. First they screen out potential candidates by making them take a technical test. It consisted of a couple programming questions, dealing with refactoring and some basic Java

BenChttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11955680310830733267noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6953102.post-1105643966129262162005-01-13T14:14:00.000-05:002005-01-13T14:19:26.130-05:00

Job hunting is so stressful. Just today I had a recruiter call me on my cellphone asking a bunch of questions that could have been answered had he looked at my resume. Then he asks me if I know such and such skill. DUH! If I knew it, don't you think it'd be on my resume? Then he acts all apologetic and I can tell he wants to get off the phone as quickly as possible. EXCUUUUSE ME, Mr.

BenChttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11955680310830733267noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6953102.post-1105564641182019662005-01-12T16:14:00.000-05:002005-01-12T16:17:21.183-05:00

Ok, so I went out and bought some cheap webhosting at www.1and1.com. I got their free 6 month "BusinessPro" package and I want to blog on that site instead of this one. Do I need to have 1&1 install some blogging software for me? I didn't see it as an included application. I wonder if I can install my own. I know there are tons of people out there that have done this. Anyone have any clues?

BenChttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11955680310830733267noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6953102.post-1102517111646531182004-12-08T09:36:00.000-05:002004-12-08T09:45:28.263-05:00

Well according to this article, IBM is selling their PC/Laptop business to Lenovo, a Chinese PC manufacturer. I think I'm going to miss IBM. Their laptops were distinct and practically every tech person I know swears by them. I never owned one sadly, but they were unique. I wonder now if HP will pick up the slack. I've had several Dell's and yes, they are cheap, but they don't even

BenChttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11955680310830733267noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6953102.post-1098365947598531852004-10-21T09:34:00.000-04:002004-10-21T09:39:07.600-04:00

Since I use Firefox as my default browser, I'm a little concerned about this spoofing technique. That link takes you to secunia.com which has more information about it. It seems to affect any browser that uses tabs. Not that I'd fall for such an obvious hack, but my family might, or other people who I've told to use Firefox.

BenChttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11955680310830733267noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6953102.post-1097675370027119742004-10-13T09:47:00.000-04:002004-10-14T09:31:43.473-04:00

Found some good links on Spring for beginners from Erik's site. http://www.devx.com/Java/Article/21665 and http://www.devx.com/Java/Article/22134?trk=DXRSS_JAVA edit:And here's another one from Matt Raible's site: http://www.ociweb.com/jnb/jnbOct2004.html

BenChttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11955680310830733267noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6953102.post-1095177037136402572004-09-14T11:41:00.000-04:002004-09-14T11:50:37.136-04:00

If only I searched better before posting my previous message. Just perusing the OReilly site gave me lots of good info on EJB's. Business Logic, Part 1 Business Logic, Part 2 Business Logic, Part 3 J2EE Application Deployment Considerations I now realize the fullness of my ignorance of EJB's. From skimming those articles I probably need to architect a whole system instead of just using a

BenChttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11955680310830733267noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6953102.post-1095171588091403682004-09-14T07:05:00.000-04:002004-09-14T10:21:36.203-04:00

Sorry for the Kid Rock ref ;) I am tired though, of not knowing EJB's. I've just not had the exposure to them. Some people would consider me lucky in that respect (i.e. Spring supporters). But it would be nice to fill in that area of my knowledge of J2EE. I know servlets, JSPs, MVC frameworks, some design patterns, and all that stuff, but never got a chance to use EJB's. Seeing as how my

BenChttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11955680310830733267noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6953102.post-1093981818995510202004-08-31T15:45:00.000-04:002004-08-31T15:52:07.516-04:00

This Javaranch article is a decent tutorial on bit shifting. I do have a question for some people that have used this stuff. Lets say I have a ten character field that can be either Y or N. I suppose you could think of them as 1 and 0 as well. Anyways, what would be the best way to read these into a set of 10 boolean values? Right now I just use the following simple code:

BenChttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11955680310830733267noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6953102.post-1093978941341476602004-08-31T14:53:00.000-04:002004-08-31T15:02:21.340-04:00

Lately I've been wondering if I should take the Sun Certified Java Programmer exam. I've been coding in Java for the past 4 years, most of it server side. I know I will pass, but I'll probably do poorly because I don't have any experience with applets or Swing or any client side stuff. Most of my programming has been servlets, JSP's and the like. I've heard that there is a lot of stuff about

BenChttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11955680310830733267noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6953102.post-1089380228920086252004-07-09T09:23:00.000-04:002004-07-09T09:37:08.920-04:00

I was googling something about lightweight remoting of Hessian and Burlap (after reading this article) and found this wonderful post on Javaranch about Spring. It's cleared some things up for me. Here is a quick overview of the various parts of Spring... Spring-AOP Spring includes a full AOP implementation (that uses Dynamic Proxies or CGLIB). Unfortunately, the mistake that most people

BenChttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11955680310830733267noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6953102.post-1087999162858503292004-06-23T09:49:00.000-04:002004-06-23T09:59:22.856-04:00

I've been using the IBMHttpServer version 1.3.26 for a while on my Windows XP machine and it seems to like to crash a lot. And I'm not talking about a mild crash, I'm talking BSOD, crash and burn, go out and install Linux cuz Windows sucks, type crash. I finally got fed up with it and installed Apache 2.0.48 and tried to make it work with WAS. Here are my instructions in case anyone finds them

BenChttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11955680310830733267noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6953102.post-1087997601189384362004-06-23T09:32:00.000-04:002004-06-23T09:33:21.190-04:00

Just bookmarking this blog entry: XSL - Best Practices

BenChttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11955680310830733267noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6953102.post-1087482101511178512004-06-17T10:17:00.000-04:002004-06-17T10:53:34.250-04:00

I was looking at this Javaranch journal entry about shifting bits and it got me thinking. I remember having to do that stuff in Assembly and later in C back when I was in school, but I have yet to find a practical use for it in my daily work. What do people use bit shifting for in the real world? As a Java web developer, why would I shift any bits around?

BenChttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11955680310830733267noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6953102.post-1085684461039131522004-05-27T14:52:00.000-04:002004-05-27T15:01:36.643-04:00

I have never seen a more user unfriendly API in my life. How the heck does Sun expect us to use it? For instance, to create a TIFF image from a byte array, I saw in an example that you use JAI.create("tiff", params). What are the options for the first parameter? Who knows, it's not documented anywhere. What about the second parameter? Again, who knows? You may be thinking, well look at the

BenChttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11955680310830733267noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6953102.post-1084460440098601262004-05-13T10:54:00.000-04:002004-05-13T11:00:40.096-04:00

I'm not obsessed with logging, really I'm not. But our current logging system, while ahead of it's time when first written in 1998, is becoming antiquated. I'd love to replace it with log4j but that would be un-possible ;) for the time I have left at this company (more on that later). Anyways, the article below talks about asynchronous logging using JMS (and Hibernate too, which I couldn't

BenChttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11955680310830733267noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6953102.post-1084459963942980422004-05-13T10:47:00.000-04:002004-05-13T10:53:33.220-04:00

Performance Analysis of J2EE Applications Using AOP Techniques I have been thinking about using AOP to add some stuff to my portal project. One of the ideas I and my boss have had for quite a while is allowing admins to emulate a customer for troubleshooting purposes. However I need a way to provide an audit trail for security purposes. Using AOP, I could add aspects to write a log message

BenChttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11955680310830733267noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6953102.post-1084458824854124212004-05-13T10:21:00.000-04:002004-05-13T10:33:57.886-04:00

What am I going to use this blog for? That seems to be the question thats keeping me from being active in it. So lets see...I want to talk about Java programming, my job (or soon to be unemployment), my life, my wife, and my kats. Mostly I'll be talking about Java since that's what I do for a living. I may use this spot initially as a link repository. Then I'll come back and talk to myself

BenChttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11955680310830733267noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6953102.post-1084299440969013922004-05-11T14:12:00.000-04:002004-05-11T14:17:20.970-04:00

Well this is my first blog and my first personal webpage since 1995. Ah...but don't let that fool you, I've been a web developer for many years now. Anyways, I'll update this as I have time to and hopefully you'll learn a little about me as we go along...

BenChttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11955680310830733267noreply@blogger.com0