Just a Blog

This blog is moved to www.yellowbluebus.com/blog

2006-02-15T09:02:00.000Z

Starting from February 15th, 2006 this blog is no longer updated. It was moved to www.yellowbluebus.com/blog.

New gadget

2006-02-09T11:23:00.000Z

Remote control with WiFi support - the way to go. The remote control should understand modern devices and be able to sense all of them and get useful metadata: song names, volumes, etc...

Layers

2006-01-30T12:45:00.000Z

Layers
Originally uploaded by CTPEKO3A.

This is one of my best photos. I made it more than two years ago, 11th October 2003, on Lincoln road, Miami.

I like that this image has at least three layers of reflections and still is not that messy.

Insecure Screen Saver

2006-01-25T16:07:00.000Z

The corporate policy setting on my work notebook always sets the screen saver to 15 minutes and require login password. I don't mind to have a screen save 15 minutes, but that login requirement... I just hate it! And I hate it mostly because the screen saver tab in the Display Properties dialog is disabled by the same policy!

Now I found the way to cheat on corporate policy - I created a simple .reg file, which will change one DWORD value:

HKCU\Software\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\Control Panel\Desktop\ScreenSaverIsSecure = "0"

Ahh, back to work...

annoyance, windows, registry, hack

Struts is finished. Who is the next King?

2005-01-31T13:04:00.000Z

According to this, and that classic Struts will not be extended anymore and there will not be a Struts 2.0. But what is the next big thing? Tapestry? JSF? Cocoon?

Zeroing out counters

2005-01-18T10:26:00.000Z

Yesterday project manager on my project asked me about what would happen if count of registered users on our production website would go over 10,000. Now we have something aroung 8900 users and she is wondering is our database counter would be zeroed if more users would register.

It was an obvious awe on my face, but I answered that we can have almost undefinite number of users in our database.

I wonder why somebody who is working with somebody who has more that 14 years of experience building various databases (me ;o)) would be evere concerned about that kind of topic?

Blogger client

2005-01-09T11:57:00.000Z

Yesterday, while searching for a good blogger.com client, I tried at least five different ones - all of them ranges from crap, which works, but only sometimes, to an utter uber crap, which looks like it was created by a madman.

Compared to a clients for a LiveJournal, where I have my Russian language blog, blogger clients are nothing. I wonder - why nobody created any good ones?

JBoss transaction management

2005-01-08T17:38:00.000Z

Couple of the months ago an architect from offshore development team suggested a new (to me at least!) way of handling nested SQL transactions in J2EE applications: create connection in Stateless Session bean and pass it to all DAO code. Being an J2EE architect myself I rejected that approach mainly due to the fact that I don't like to keep connection open for a long time in J2EE apps - it's reduces concurrency and it's a bad thing to do in general. I also have told offshore guys that J2EE App server is going to handle transactions a proper way.

Today I decided to look into JBoss source code to find out how transaction management is done inside. At first I have looked into transaction management itself. The code there is very simple: if, for example, commit is required to be executed - execute commit on all resources and collect results. But to which resources commit can be executed? Connection, probably... So I started looking for a methods and classes responsible to create and manage connections. And this is what I found in JBossManagedConnectionPool.java:


    public ConnectionListener getConnection(Transaction transaction, Subject subject, ConnectionRequestInfo cri)

       throws ResourceException

    {

       // Determine the pool key for this request

       boolean separateNoTx = false;

       if (noTxSeparatePools)

          separateNoTx = clf.isTransactional();

       Object key = getKey(subject, cri, separateNoTx);

       InternalManagedConnectionPool mcp = getPool(key, subject, cri);

    

       // Are we doing track by connection?

       TransactionLocal trackByTx = null;

       if (transaction != null)

          trackByTx = (TransactionLocal) trackByTxPools.get(key);

    

       // Do we have a previous connection in this transaction?

       if (trackByTx != null)

       {

          ConnectionListener cl = (ConnectionListener) trackByTx.get(transaction);

          if (cl != null)

          {

             if (traceEnabled)

                dump("Getting connection tracked by transaction " + cl);

             return cl;

          }

       }

.....

}

That piece of code answers my question: if code requests a new Connection object while inside transaction - it will be given the same connection as to the other objects inside that transaction. There is no need to pass the same connection object to all nested DAO methods, it's done automatically by JBoss.

Now I know that for sure!

Test picture posting

2004-12-12T11:51:00.000Z

Test picture posting
Originally uploaded by CTPEKO3A.

New interesting blog

2004-12-12T09:50:00.000Z

Just added new blog: Sniptools to my favorite aggregator

The name of the guy, who created Google suggest

2004-12-12T09:37:00.000Z

...is Kevin Gibbs. He announced a latest Google addition in the Google Blog Live. Now this giy from SlashDot can send him a cash donation.

Google and a market

2004-12-11T21:56:00.000Z

Google launched Google suggest service. It's one of the Google's enchancements to overall web user interface experience. Here is an article about how is it done.

I remember how boring Yahoo mail was last year and three years before that. And now Yahoo supports all the fun that only Gmail had half a year ago.

Here is my list of daily must read blogs

2004-12-11T21:34:00.000Z

The Daily WTF - Best code daily!
Dilbert - Dilbert
Gizmodo and Engadget - everything about latest tech toys
My LiveJournal friends and russian tech blog: Cooler

Huh, first post...

2004-12-11T21:19:00.000Z

Went looking for a few interesting technology blogs to read daily.