Regen MY Toolkit

Moved Tech Blog

noreply@blogger.com (Benjamin P Lee) — Sun, 01 Mar 2009 05:54:00 +0000

I know I haven't posted much recently, mainly due to being busy at work and thinking I needed my posts to be well thought out and interesting. I have come to the conclusion that they need not be either if they help me or might help someone else someday.

To that end, I have started a new tech blog with a friend over at http://twoguysarguing.wordpress.com/

If anyone still reads this blog or has it in there feed reader, please adjust your links accordingly.

Thank you,
The Management.

Cold Sholder

noreply@blogger.com (Benjamin P Lee) — Tue, 13 Jan 2009 20:45:00 +0000

This is a VERY quick and dirty script I threw together to see if the conditions were right to go skating on a local pond (based on a friends best guess).

Simply, it checks an online weather service for the overnight temperatures of the past 10 days and if every night maintained temperatures below freezing, tells you to go skating. Otherwise, no skating for you.


require 'rubygems'
require 'simplehttp'
require 'time'

class TimedWeather
 attr_accessor :date_time, :temp
 
 def initialize(date_time_string, temp_string)
  @date_time = DateTime.strptime(date_time_string, '%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S')
  @temp = temp_string.to_f
 end
 
 def to_s
  "[(#{@date_time})-(#{@temp})"
 end
end

def build_daily_url(date)
 "http://www.wunderground.com/weatherstation/WXDailyHistory.asp?ID=KMOSTLOU11&day=#{date.day}&year=#{date.year}&month=#{date.month}&format=1"
end

def find_timed_weather_for_date(date = Date.today)
 response = SimpleHttp.get(build_daily_url(date))
 records = response.gsub(/\n<br>/, '').gsub(/<br>/, '').split(/\n/)[2...-1]
 records.map do |text_record|
  split = text_record.split(/,/)
  TimedWeather.new(split[0], split[1])
 end
end

def conducive_day?(daily_temps)
 not daily_temps.select { |time| conducive_time?(time) }.map { |temp| conducive_temp?(temp) }.include?(false)
end

def conducive_time?(time)
 time.date_time.hour > 17 or time.date_time.hour < 6
end

def conducive_temp?(temp)
 temp.temp < 32.0
end

conducive = true

(0..9).each do |offset|
 if not conducive_day?(find_timed_weather_for_date(Date.today - offset))
  conducive = false
  break
 end
end

if conducive
 puts "GO SKATE! ...... maybe"
else
 puts "NO SKATING TODAY!"
end

Maven and TweetPublisher

noreply@blogger.com (Benjamin P Lee) — Tue, 13 Jan 2009 20:04:00 +0000

One of my recent clients used Maven for builds, dependency management, and packaging so I figured I would give it real try and build something with it. Over the years I have hear numerous good things about Maven (really nice dependency management, consistent builds that don't require a huge ant file to work, simplicity) along with many bad things (complex when you try to do anything that is not standard, annoyance with the dictated conventions, difficulties managing the things managing your dependencies, etc). After trying it out on a couple very small and simple projects, I very much like the good points and am not convinced that the bad ones won't happen on a larger project.

For small stuff though, it is very nice.

If you follow the conventions, you can easily get a small project structure built out along with the ability to easily compile, test, and package/install without having to tell the build too anything about HOW to do it, just where/when.

One issue I did run into was related to packaging my app. My first test app was a simple CruiseControl plugin called TweetPublisher. A coworker wanted his Cruise server to tweet the status of each build ... so I set to work. After googling a while about how to write a publisher plugin for CruiseControl and finding a suitable Twitter API (Twitter4J) I was pretty much done.

** The latest versions have a much nicer interface and a very simple configuration than what I remember. :-)

The most basic maven project type produces a simple project which builds to a single jar. Perfect. With Eclipse's maven support it was dead simple to search for the cruise control api and twitter4j libraries, add them as dependencies, hack together some code and I was done. A short "mvn package" later and I had a jar with my code.

Only 1 problem.

Maven knows about my dependencies. It keeps them up to date (depending on how you configure them), downloads them when needed, uses them at compile and/or test time, etc. However, it does nothing out of the box to give them to you when you package. More simply, after a package goal is executed I have a jar with my code, which was compiled against my dependencies, but I have no clue what version it was compiled against or know where they are. This does not leave me in the situation I wanted: package should leave you with everything packaged so you could go use it in production. Not so.

After much googling and asking of coworkers no one could show me how to work with maven and dependencies short of writing my own archetype to do what I wanted.

Finally, I stumbed upon the assemble plugin bywhich I could define an "assembly" which would move my code around and copy all of its dependencies flattened into my code's .jar file. "mvn assembly:assembly" Viola! Done.

The very simplistic and untested code for tweetpublisher can be found here on github.

** The maven integration with NetBeans is also very nice.

Computational Mind Teaser

noreply@blogger.com (Benjamin P Lee) — Tue, 13 Jan 2009 16:15:00 +0000

Via GoogleReader and DZone ... I came across this post yesterday: http://blogs.digitss.com/programming/a-mind-teaser-good-one/

Of course I couldn't pass up the challenge and spent all of my free random moments yesterday afternoon trying things out. I was able to see how the subtract function was easily related to decrement and had several promising ideas on how decrement could work but nothing right. This morning a coworker and I sat down and finished all three in under 30 minutes. I post my solutions here b/c I feel the need to justify the time wasted ;-)


DEC(b) :=
  a = 0
  loop(b)
    b = a++

SUB(a,b) :=
  loop(b)
    DEC(a)

DIV(a,b) :=
  q = 0
  loop(a)
    SUB(a,b)
    c = a
    DEC(c)
    loop(a)
      q++
    SUB(q,c)
  a = q

* all functions leave the result in the first variable and assume the operator presents itself between the two parameters (e.g. SUB(a,b) == (a=a-b) ... prefix notation)

** I like my DIV better than those posted as of the writing of this article but still feel like it could be shortened / cleaner. I am happy to say that the hack of reducing the second loop to only a single increment while using the loop(0) as the "conditional" to stop working was my idea :-)

The coworker I figured this out with then tried to explain y-combinators in lambda calculus and how they might relate to functional technique he was trying in JavaScript ..... my head hurts ... in a good way.

List-It

noreply@blogger.com (Benjamin P Lee) — Mon, 03 Nov 2008 02:20:00 +0000

In an effort to maintain a side-project, learn more Python (which is getting damn confusing with the Ruby I was learning a few months ago), and finally have a clean app to keep my To-Do list online .... I present List-It.

** Its still in super-alpha at the moment **

Myself along with a coworker are tinkering around with producing a simple to-do application utilizing Google AppEngine, Google Code (link to our project), and JQuery.

At the moment a VERY basic interface is available and some simple back-end plumbing has been done for the main model (ToDo objects).

I am fairly proud of my simple Actionizer code. Basically, since AppEngine doesn't use a DB but really uses Big Table ... I wanted to expose some simple actions for each of my models so that AJAX calls could easily update the models, delete, and add. Not wanting to bolt on a larger framework which would already have the functionality but not teach me nearly as much Python, I decided to roll my own.

Thus the Actionizer class. Create an instance with the actions you want to give your models and then actionize any/all of your model objects. The Actionizer will produce the appropriately named URL actions and piping along with functions to produce request handlers to handle each model's actions.

Not ground breaking stuff, but not bad for just a couple of hours tinkering around with Python.

If you have any suggestions/thoughts/criticism/would like to help
... please let me know.

** In working on this side project ... I realized it would be nice for our purposes to have AppEngine monitor our Google Code poject for commits and when one is sent, to redeploy the app directly from the repository. Allass I can't find a way to do this yet, its not formally supported and no one on StackOverflow knows how to either.

Selenium - Chemistry for your UATs

noreply@blogger.com (Benjamin P Lee) — Mon, 03 Nov 2008 01:57:00 +0000

Off and on for the past few weeks I have been working on migrating my current project's suite of user acceptance tests (UATs) from WatiN to Selenium.

Why you ask? Several reasons.

Our current WatiN tests are slow and brittle. Some of this is WatiN's fault, some our own
WatiN doesn't have great support for AJAX testing
WatiN only works in IE on Windows. It does this well, but our app needs to work in 7 browsers at the moment (IE 6 & 7, FF 2 & 3 on Mac & Win, Safari on Mac) soon to be 10 (Safari on Win, Chrome, IE 8).
Our company is going to be creating a Selenium Grid with remote control nodes of various browsers on different platforms for all projects to be able to use.
Currently the UATs don't run as part of any automated build

Thus, we are slowly trying to see what kind of effort it will take to convert our tests, rewrite/fix/upgrade where we can and need to, and automate as much as we can.

The really nice thing is the Selenium Grid and the ability to have a large number of RC's standing by in VMs for any project that wants to run tests. If you don't know about Selenium Grid, read about it here.

In our initial efforts to convert the tests we have found a few things to be true:

Selenium has some built in checks that help with testing/action on AJAX calls, but they aren't perfect and primarily rely on built in check-wait loops on elements being on the page or Javascript functions changing values.
Firefox 3 is not yet fully supported. A simple hack allows it to be used, however not all of the integrations and XPath work correctly
I had a fair bit of trouble getting Safari to work on the Mac with Selenium. Evidently there are some architectural issues the team is battling with related to proxies and libraries ... but I was able to get it to work eventually
The Grid/Remote Control environment works well but still has some bugs. Closing the window for a running RC on windows doesn't unregister the RC from the grid.
Selenium seems to be a small but noticeable amount faster than WatiN
Converting tests is hard when trying to ensure that the same exact thing is being tested before and after

Other than these issues, things are progressing. Three larger problems we are seeing and havn't come up with solutions for yet are:

How can we automate the UATs running on the continuous integration server to run all browsers in parallel (e.g. running each test against all browsers at the same time, then moving on to the next one) while still maintaining one build/failure point?
Is it possible to integrate the running of UATs against multiple browsers to the developer's work flow? Possible tooling support?
Is it possible to rework a test-runner to run all of our tests in parallel depending on the number of RC's of a particular type that are available (e.g. if we have a ton of FF 3 RCs, run several tests all at once instead of waiting for each other)

It looks like we are going to be in between contracts for about a week so we are hoping to come up with some solutions to these. I will post back if we do.

** If you have any suggestions on how to automate or parallelize the Selenium tests, check our my StackOverflow question.

Lunch n' Learn - Shoes

noreply@blogger.com (Benjamin P Lee) — Sun, 19 Oct 2008 21:05:00 +0000

Two weeks ago I did a Lunch-n-Learn at work on the simple Ruby GUI toolkit, Shoes. Here is a quick overview of what I talked about ....

In working on a side project of mine I came to the realization that I needed a GUI frontend to my app in order to keep moving forward. I had been working in Ruby and found that there is not a standardized GUI toolkit. There are >10 toolkits around that boast a variety of features and pros/cons but none that was universally accepted. My criteria were that whatever I chose, it needed to be multi-platform and easy to work with for simple things. Enter Shoes.

Shoes is the creation of why the lucky stiff, or _why as he is known. If you have never seen/heard/read anything of _why's, I very much suggest you do. Just Google him. Between his talks, his blogs, his books (one on Shoes and another on learning Ruby), and anything else you will learn a deep appreciation for what is obviously a very passionate and sometimes strange being. :-)

Shoes is designed to be simple and small. The main website at Shoooes.net demonstrates a simple GUI with a single buttons as:

Shoes.app { button "PUSH!" }

Most of the constructs have origins in how the web works and/or how modern browsers display elements so nothing is too complicated. You can easily display images, draw 2d shapes on the canvas, add buttons/text/text boxes/progress bars/etc, link to the web or to other windows, and show any of several built in dialog boxes. Much of Shoes features come from its integration with native components ... there are seperate Windows/OS X/Linux GTK installs.

While the framework isn't yet production ready by my accounts, it is rapidly evolving through _why's efforts and a surpisingly dedicated mailing-list. Would I write a complicated IDE in it? No. Would I consider it if I needed a simple user interface or data visualization for a small program? Yes.

If you considering checking it out, look at the main website first, peruse the help area which has gotten drastically better in the last couple months, and check out some of the user submited demo apps at the ShoeBox. Finally, check out _why's online (and print) PDF book on Shoes - Nobody Knows Shoes. If you have never tried drugs, or would like to relive the experience, flip through its pages. Along with good information on using Shoes are some crazy graphics and entertaining side-bantor.

If your interested in my LnL presentation or my thoughts on Shoes drop me a comment. The main code portion of my presentation (done in Shoes of course) can be found here. Please no comments on code style or my Ruby abilities ... I am still learning and put it together to show people what Shoes could do, not to prove myself. ;-)

Helpful Scripts For Work

noreply@blogger.com (Benjamin P Lee) — Sun, 19 Oct 2008 15:41:00 +0000

I can be pretty lazy at times ... but in a good way, I think. I am a firm believer in the philosophy heard numerous times in various forms: "If you have to do something more than twice, have a computer do it". While I don't strive to find tons of little shortcuts to daily life, I do enjoy them.

At work in the past week, two scripts have saved me countless seconds maybe even minutes, and I figured I would share them here:

DZone RSS Links Streamliner

I use Google Reader to peruse the zillions of RSS feeds I am subscribed to and find the many articles I want to read and the fewer that I actually find time to. DZone.com is a really nice article aggregator centered on tech and programming news from around the web (think Digg before it got way overcrowded and full of celebrity gossip posts and links to fark ... not that there isn't a need for them).

Often I will find several DZone links I want to read at once and will open them all into new tabs from Google Reader and then read them one by one ... only one small problem ... when the link opens its to the DZone page. This is fine except that I currently don't have a DZone account so I don't vote on storries and I rarely read the comments ... I just want the article (e.g. here). Obviously having to click twice is at least 1 too much ;-)

Thus, here is a GreaseMonkey script I added so that I don't have to click through that extra time:

// ==UserScript==
// @name DZone Forward
// @namespace yardspoon
// @description Forwards user past DZone rss link page
// @include http://www.dzone.com/links/rss/*
// ==/UserScript==

window.location = document.evaluate("//div[@class='ldTitle']/a/@href", document, null, XPathResult.STRING_TYPE, null).stringValue;

It uses FF's built in XPath evaluator to find a link to the real article and forward the browser on to the page. It might be overkill for 1 click, but I like it. I don't have anything agains't DZone, I just don't like clicking more than I need to.

User-Agent Check Cheater

Most of my career has been working on networked systems and applications ... most of which have had a web frontend. Despite the best laid plans, often I am left with a situation where I really need to see whats actually being sent back between the server and the browser/client/web service and that can be difficult to do depending on the information you want to see. FF plugins like FireBug, XPather, and LiveHTTPHeaders give you tons of good information but can't give you the whole picture of whats being sent over the wire.

Enter WebScarab. I found this Java based personal web proxy right out of college while at my first client and am still finding uses for it frequently. After starting up a listener in WebScarab and configuring your browser to use it as a web proxy, it can easily monitor and display information about every single request and response sent (HTTP headers, redirects, content over the wire, additional resource requests, timing, etc ... great of AJAX debugging). Along with viewing the content it has numerous other features that allow you to simulate network conditions, manually intercept requests/responses before they are sent, do security fuzzy logic tests, test web services and much more.

One of the less used features but very important this week was the ability to act on requests and responses directly in a scripting language (BeanShell). This past week I was trying to install an application that for whatever reason, during the install process, needed to download additional information from the company's website. Only one problem: the installer uses IE not the default browser to do this, and the company blocks IE for external use for security reasons (FF installed on every desktop). This meant the installer failed. I could put in a support request for a temporary hole in the network to allow IE to access this site but since it was such a small thing I figured I would try to solve the problem directly.

It turns out outgoing requests are simply filtered by their user-agent HTTP header value (effective for IE blocking and simple) but also simply circumvented.

Queue WebScarab, the following script overrites the user-agent header of all requests with the value for FF ... meaning IE works and I was able to install the software. I turned the script back off when I was done so as to not risk any security issues and not piss off the admins ... but it worked none the less.

import org.owasp.webscarab.model.Request;
import org.owasp.webscarab.model.Response;
import org.owasp.webscarab.httpclient.HTTPClient;
import java.io.IOException;

public Response fetchResponse(HTTPClient nextPlugin, Request request) throws IOException {
request.setHeader("User-Agent", "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9.0.3) Gecko/2008092417 Firefox/3.0.3");
response = nextPlugin.fetchResponse(request);
return response;
}

One other great feature of WebScarab is that if you set IE to use the web proxy, your really setting the default proxy for connections by other Windows applications that use the defaults ... meaning you can suddenly see all of the traffic that random applications are sending without you knowing ... apps phoning home, checking for updates, reporting usage statistics, etc. Kinda scarry.

Also ... watch-out ... the request and responses can be seen in plain text and/or Base64 Encoded text can be converted .... so don't send your password through it unless your paying attention :-) and realize how much of your web interactions are sent unencrypted over the wire for anyone who wants to listen to find.

Probably Fun - Baseball Stats

noreply@blogger.com (Benjamin P Lee) — Sun, 19 Oct 2008 14:50:00 +0000

The other day a coworker who is very interested/involved in baseball statistics posed an interesting question to me just before I left work:

What is the probability of a team playing in a 5 game series to win the series on a streak of 3 wins?
(e.g. team A sweeps team B and wins the first 3, A loses 1 and then wins 3, or A loses 2 and wins final 3)

I quickly had flash backs of college to my statistics, discrete mathematics, number theory and finite automata courses (all favorites other than statistics). We quickly worked through some of the simpler aspects of it and came up with an answer that seemed well reasoned but not quite right. Of course I couldn't stop thinking about why it was wrong and went home and did further calculations, searched for my old statistics book, and even consulted Big Red. I eventually found the right answer but couldn't give myself the proof of why it was right.

The next day, after consulting with several other coworkers (at one point at least 15 people were busy discussing the problem and getting zero work done) and getting a well timed email from Big Red with his thoughts we were settled on a right answer.

I still can't put together a very clever or clear proof of why this solution is true, and I feel that there is probably a much succinct formula I am confident that it is correct .... a Monte Carlo simulation produces the exact same probability. :-)

Our answer, abstracted a bit:

The probability of a particular team winning a standard playoff series (where once a team wins more than half the games, the series is over) where the probability of the team winning each game is P and the number of games needed to win are X is:

P^X * ( (1-p)⁰ + (1-p)¹ + (1-p)² + ... + (1-p)^(X-1) )

so for a 5 game series where the odds are even:

0.5³ * ( (1-0.5)⁰ + (1-0.5)¹ + (1-0.5)² )

0.125 * ( (0.5)⁰ + (0.5)¹ + (0.5)² )

0.125 * ( 1 + 0.5 + 0.25 )

0.125 * 1.75

0.21875

The probability of a particular team winning 3 games in a row in a 5 game series is 21.875% assuming each game is a 50/50 shot.

Without going into even more detail, the confusion was the result of trying to simplify the problem into "There are X outcomes possible and Y of them are the ones we want and since there is even probability of the games the total probability is Y/X" However, since various possible outcomes involve a different number of games, they are actually weighted differently and thus its not 30% but noticeably less at ~ 22%.

I have to thank Pip for the shout-out (see comment) on Fungoes.net (the STL SABR chapter blog).
Pip is a coworker who posed the original question.

First App Engine Application - Static Map Maker

noreply@blogger.com (Benjamin P Lee) — Thu, 04 Sep 2008 03:42:00 +0000

Over the past couple weeks I have been "working" on a newer project idea related to geo/gis data and mapping. In working on and thinking about the project it became clear that it would be useful to be able to generate static map images for specific lat/long coordinates on Earth. Basically, I wanted Google Maps images without Google Maps so that I could use the map images as references in my app (to be outlined in future posts).

Thus ... I bring you Static Map Maker!
(the link goes to the live app which anyone can currently try after logging into their Google Account)

Being my first real venture into the land of Google App Engine applications and something that I was proud of and able to throw together in about an hour of work (plus a bit more research prior) ... I present to you this quick rundown of what I did and how I did it:

After a small bit of research I found that Google had opened up some of its mapping data in the form of a Static Map API which allows for the retrieval of specific static map images based on the given http url. Perfect. The only things needed were a Google Maps API Key (free with registration) and the specifics of the map you want.

I had downloaded the Mac GoogleAppEngineLauncher previously but needed to updated to the latest SDK version before I could upload any code. With the launcher's GUI, its quite simple to create a new app and get something very fast and dirty running in no time. After a few minutes of flipping through the Getting Started tutorial I had a index page which showed my desired form, a result page, and a couple controllers to do the heavy lifting.

After a bit of testing where the map key for localhost came in very handy, I had a very limited but working none-the-less application that would allow me to enter new parameters and see the resulting map. The current app has no data validation and lacks any sort of formal tests or great coding standards but its functional (I am not a Python man by trade).

I then registered the application on the app engine site (SMS verification of your intent to create a new application) and used the launcher to one-click upload my code. Viola! Finished!

** I will probably post the code either on code.google.com or github, but that can wait until tomorrow **

Project Euler

noreply@blogger.com (Benjamin P Lee) — Mon, 25 Aug 2008 00:54:00 +0000

Some days I feel dumb

Well, no dumb ... just not as smart as I did in college ... learning new things and pushing my brain everyday.

Queue Project Euler.

The site has a couple hundred math/computational problems to solve. All (that I have read) are math based but don't require just mathematical proofs to solve. Most can be simplified through mathematical reasoning, but will require you to write an algorithm to solve (ideally under a minute). If you find an answer you can check it online and if its right (and maybe even if it isn't) see someone's real solution and a forum to discuss the problem.

I have done several of these over the past week or so and give me a nice problem for my brain to munch on in the background while I am at work or mowing the lawn.

**I have posted some of my solutions/thoughts about the problems in a Google Notebooke here if anyone is interested.

Synergy

noreply@blogger.com (Benjamin P Lee) — Fri, 22 Aug 2008 15:09:00 +0000

Back in college I was a nerd. Honestly, I am still a nerd, but that's beside the point.

In college I had a Windows XP box as my main computer with two monitors. I also had a linux box with its own monitor. Not being one to want to have to switch back and forth between keyboards I quickly devised a complex KVM setup that might give me what I want (using multiple KVMS and crazy logic). After a roommate convinced me a it was a lost cause, another roomate or a random forum post somewhere (I honestly can't remember which) turned me on to Synergy. Voila! Problem solved.

This small opensource app allows two computers, each with their own monitors, to share a single keyboard and mouse. The setup is simple:

install the server on one machine
setup "screens" for each computer you want to connect
configure how the screens connect (e.g. the left side of my windows machine connects to my linux machine and the right side of the linux machine connects to windows)
press start
install the client on the other machine and tell it to connect to the first machine
enjoy

6 simple steps and I could sweet my mouse from one side of my dual monitor setup across to the other monitor and all the way onto the linux machine. Keyboard focus changing as I go.

The setup isn't without its drawbacks (it appears that the Mac client isn't totally complete including copy and paste and invariably you will attempt to drag a window off its host OS and wonder why the mouse stops moving) but for free its great.

Right now I am using it at work to make my testing of our app in Safari easier. Check it out.

Netbeans observations/complaints

noreply@blogger.com (Benjamin P Lee) — Wed, 28 May 2008 18:32:00 +0000

I have been meaning to do a detailed writeup of my recent use of Netbeans and how I find that it compares with Eclipse, Intellij, and my admitedly limited use of Visual Studio .Net 2005 .... however I have a problem with big posts like that ... they never get done.

So instead, here are a few of my recent observations

Along with Elcipse ... given that these IDEs are free and have the quality they do is amazing.
The Netbeans community has produced tons of great walkthroughs and tutorials for how to get up and running with various technologies/languages using Netbeans. Granted most are understandably heavily dependent on using Netbeans, they are full of good general content as well. They are great at giving you a starting point for something new
The overall user experience is cleaner than Eclipse/IntelliJ for most things. However, this is somewhat due to it lacking features the other two have.
As a platform for learning Ruby coming from a Java background, its really nice. I love that it comes with Rub support built in with a lot of great features/tutorials/wizards/help. Also, the fact that it leverages JRuby out of the box so that its self contained and doesn't require a ruby installation is a credit to the people working on JRuby.
Netbeans lacks in the refactoring/editing department when compared to Eclipse and IntelliJ. Not horrible, but not nearly as good.
Built-in support and packaging with Tomcat 6 and Glassfish v2 servers plus its support for JEE 5 specs and tools is great
The projects view is a nice feature (compared to the files view) which gives you a more logical view of your project independent of where things are on the system ... however its not as customizable as IntelliJ's and I have had numerous re-indexing/refreshing issues where it didn't find new files for a while.
Netbeans indexes TONS of stuff when it starts up and when you add new files to its workspace ... which means normal work is faster than Eclipse is (or was in the past) but it takes longer than IntelliJ and seemingly reindexes lots of files that haven't changed since I installed them.
Netbeans has some really nice editors/wizards which include a graphical drag-and-drop interface for creating JSF pages (and Swing forms?).
Evidently there is a bug in Netbean's file search b/c yesterday I tried to case-sensatively search for a particular phrase in my project and the Netbeans file search found 4 results. However there were aprox 6 files with the text. To be fair, I don't know exactly what the problem was and when I did a similar search from Windows .. it found only 2 matches so I am not sure what was going on. But irregardless it should have found them all. (if you did a search in the editor I had open, which was to a file in the same project, it found 2 references in the file, but it wasn't in the results list)

Overall its a very nice IDE with growing support for different languages. Its free which is nicer than IntelliJ's not free and cleaner than Eclipse which is less and less an IDE and more a platform (for better or worse).

Problems and Solutions

noreply@blogger.com (Benjamin P Lee) — Sat, 24 May 2008 01:40:00 +0000

Each of the following things has come to bite me in the back side over the past few days...

Ruby / Rails dates:

Since Ruby (and other languages like it) allows you to dynamically add new methods to classes after they are originally defines, AND everything is an object (including numbers) you can do things like these:

6.months
3.weeks.from_now
1.year.ago

which leads to easily read and understood code and is pretty clever. Only one problem .... there is a subtle nuance here that can be easily missed (as was by me the other day) that can lead to trouble (this same problem is inherant to many languages and DB's concept of time/dates) as is demonstrated by the following statements:

60.days == 2.months
60.days.ago != 2.months.ago

Some of you may pick up on the reason why this is true (and false) but given that I haven't worked in Ruby long and the implementation of the .months method apears to define it as self.days *30 lead me to some confusion.

The reason for the difference is a matter of context. Without the context of a particular point in real time, 2.months is really an abstract duration which the developers decided to define as 30 days / month. When you say .ago you are really saying Time.now - XXX which puts it into context of today and now months.ago means take today's day of the month and move the months number back 2. So as was the case the other day, 2.months.ago == 61.days.ago .... thus the problem.

NDoc

Recently I was documenting some C# code and my pair suggested we use a tool called NDoc which he had used in the past to produce nice Windows help files similar to JavaDocs ... great.

Only problem is that NDoc apears to only work with Visual Studio 2k3 and older ... and someone's port for 2005 has a few bugs. The first being that there is evidently a problem with some of the binaries which means you can only use it if you download the source and rebuild (not a big problem). The second was that it doesn't handle dependencies very well and won't know where to look for your referenced .dlls unless you explicitly tell it where to look for them. This wouldn't be too bad if the feature worked ... which it doesn't. Well, it DOES work if you know the special handshake. In this case the hand shake is to change the property saying to use fixe paths from false (default) to true. And then back again (false x2). Then everything magically works. Thank you random comments poster for this insight and thank you NDoc2005 for producing some decent documentation.

Google Maps API

The google maps api requires a key to be accessed, which can be generated for a given URL you want to use it on by their website. Simple enough, but I have had trouble when doing development work on other sites which didn't have the same key. Luckily I stumbled upon this yesterday. It says its the key for localhost and it works so I am not complaining. :)

SVN + Cygwin + SSH + Capistrano

This one was today. While trying to get our Rails app to be deployable via Capistrano, we decided it would be easier to work on it locally before bothering to set it up on one of our dev servers ... oh how we were wrong. Capistrano attempts to SSH to the server you are deploying to and export the latest code for your project with Subversion. One of the commands it tries to execute looks something like this:

svn update -s -r1234 https://svn.xxxxxx.com /www/apps/myproject/20050523042212/ && (echo 1234 /www/apps/myproject/20050523042212/RELEASE

Thats not quite it but its close enough. Basically via an SSH session it tries to export the latest revision to a new time stamped directory (creating it if necessary) and echoing out the version number to a file called RELEASE. Thats all fine and dandy if your server is running a *nix, but if you are trying to test it locally on a windows box and your SSH server is being run via Cygwin .. then your in for a world of hurt.

Basically, the path you passed into SVN ends up having its slashes switched and is mapped relative to the drive root while the other is mapped POSIX style relative to your Cygwin root which unless you went against the big warning box that pops up, is NOT the drive root. Thus it doesn't work.

I don't have a great solution to that one ... it was just a pain and caused me to lose 45 minutes of my life I will never get back. Tuesday we skip the local testing and get it working on the dev box which is Fedora Core.

Long time update

noreply@blogger.com (Benjamin P Lee) — Fri, 23 May 2008 01:49:00 +0000

A lot has gone on in my life during the 2 months between the last post and this ... but I won't go into it all. Basically, I started a new job that is a ton more exciting and which I love ... but which doesn't leave me with tons of free time during the day to surf the web and write up posts (which I am great full for). The only problem is that now I have much less time to post and much more interesting tech stuff to write about.

I am going to try and actually post semi-reguarially about the stuff I am doing at work and in my free time.

That being said .....

At work I am currently in a holding pattern on my primary project (waiting on the client). For the past several weeks we have been developing a pair of web service implementations and server code for a government contract to aid the National Sex Offender Public Registry. Its been some very interesting work:

learning more about web services
TDD+pairing every day
comparing our Java and .Net implementations
getting to work in .Net for the first time
writing our test harness code in Ruby
trying to code in C#, Java, and Ruby within the span of 5 minutes and having semi-colons in the right places

While we wait on some decisions by the client and find out what they think of our work so far, my pair and I are helping out another group update some internal application code written in Ruby on Rails. I did some very similar work my first couple weeks before the NSOPR project started up and its going well.

Other than work I am working on a small personal project related to word searching and an online game, bouncing ideas around and trying to help out the Brain Trust (you know who you are) and as of today trying out Google's AppEngine framework as I work through their tutorial and consider writing up an app to try and solve the problem we discussed here.

Wish me luck

Test Driven Development By Example - Kent Beck

noreply@blogger.com (Benjamin P Lee) — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 00:37:00 +0000

After hearing about TDD and going through a class on TDD I was very eager to see what this book could offer. After finishing it this past week, I can honestly say it was a very good book ... but I still need experience more than anything.

The book is broken up into 3 main parts: 1) straightforward TDD example involving currency conversion code in Java, 2) a much more thought provoking example writing a xUnit testing framework from scratch in Python and using it to test itself, and 3) a large collection of "patterns" for development, design, testing, etc.

Overall I thought the book was very good and presented a lot of topics in a straight forward and engaging manor. The only problem I had with the book, really with the topic, is that it is hard to follow the examples without sitting with a person while they do it. Numerous times, if the author had been sitting with me as he types, I would have asked simple questions about what just happened, why we did something, or what some bit of code looked like from a few pages back ... all of which can and were answered in the book, but not without flipping many pages and trying to keep the whole code base straight in my head.

I especially enjoyed the example in Python since its a language I am currently trying to learn, and it showed some of the constructs that Python has to offer over other static languages like Java in an easy to digest manor.

All in all a definite recommended read .... although I can tell that experience is what is going to drive this particular skill (as is the case most of the time). I can follow along with the author's decisions and understand his logic for the most part ... but I don't feel confident I could or would come to the same ones given the chance.

IntelliJ IDEA Tips

noreply@blogger.com (Benjamin P Lee) — Wed, 12 Mar 2008 15:14:00 +0000

This past week I found two new* features for working in IntelliJ .....

1) Shelves

IntelliJ 7.0 brings the idea of Shelves to its version control and local history features. Basically, by "shelving" local changes, IntelliJ gives you a nice interface to creating a patch for your current work and automatically rolls back the changes to the current VCS version. This makes it easy to experiment with some changes or begin working on something, stop and go back to a previous version to handle some other situation (like a bug fix) and then bring your local changes back. Normally I would just commit my changes to the VCS, but if I am only partially done and they are not complete, I might not want to.

In trying to learn a little bit more about this feature, I noticed a few entries on the interwebs about problems people were having with IntelliJ losing site of their patches or being unable to apply them back. In my limited practice I haven't had any problems and IntelliJ was able to easily add back my changes even when I had modified one of the files in the meantime.

2) Tomcat Plugin Debugging

In the past I have had limited success with application server plugins for Eclipse (they didn't always work, required strange configurations, had memory issues, etc) but they often claimed many great features also (ability to restart from with the IDE, automatic deployment of changes, monitoring, and DEBUGGING).

When I moved to my current employer and began working with IntelliJ instead of Eclipse, and no one I worked with used the built in plugins, I reverted back to the normal command line tools.

The other day we ran into a very strange bug in our development environment which we were able to duplicate locally, but unable to understand with the code's existing level of logging and lack of monitoring features. IntelliJ to the RESCUE!

After ~15 minutes of playing around, figuring out why my compiled classes didn't contain the right debug information, and spending some time trying to figure out where IntelliJ's version of Tomcat wrote it's log files ... I was up and running and able to fully debug my applications code while running it locally in Tomcat.

If anyone is interested in some of the steps I took to get it working, I have uploaded a copy of the quick documentation I created for work here. I wrote the page in word and foolishly saved it as HTML ... which produced tons of crap HTML full of Word specific tags .... luckily I found this tool which removes them. Funny how MS had to release a tool to removed stuff that their tool added in the first place (and probably no one ever used). Its also funny that their link to other advantages for using the tools is name: Use Office HTML Filter to Create Web Pages that Download Faster. Never mind, it only installs if you have Office 2000 installed and we have 2002. :-(

* new to me, which is sad on the second one.

Too many ideas, too little time

noreply@blogger.com (Benjamin P Lee) — Tue, 04 Mar 2008 16:28:00 +0000

I feel like I haven't been able to work on any of my many tech-related projects lately ... or at the very least haven't been able to make much headway on any of them.

Project Spedini - on hold. this still interests me, but I was having to spend a lot of time trying to figure out how to interface with the UI as a human, and not on the part I really cared about ... the algorithms to decipher what was going on and predict what was happening next.
TDD project - I have been slowly working through a demo project for myself to try and get a little bit more experience in TDD and testing habits (since my current work doesn't use them) but this is going slowly.
Delicious Blogger Python Script - no real work on this since my last post :-(
AJAX Framework Testing - I did some initial work with Python but not much else b/c the use I had for it at work fizzled when we decided to solve the problem another way.
RoboCode - I have to thank some Cincinnati friends for this one. They are all trying their hand at creating some robot AI for the RoboCode environment and of course, I got interested and had to start one too. This is a really neat idea and a nice way to try things out and get some immediate results (having the whole graphical testbed and environment already written is the key). I have a very simple bot coded up .... which find it hard to hit another dummy bot that just drives in a circle ... but at least its a start. If anyone is interested in writing a bot or talking about ideas, let me know!

Like I said, too many ideas, too little time.

If the weather holds up,
I am planning to go to the Gateway JUG meeting tonight
for the Adobe Flex presentation ...
but its snowing pretty hard at the moment.

Random Web Links for 2008-02-22

noreply@blogger.com (Benjamin P Lee) — Fri, 22 Feb 2008 15:43:00 +0000

From CRUD to Domain-Driven Fluency - another nice example of programming toward the domain, ala DSL work, so that your code more directly reflects the need and not the how
Moserware: Does Your Code Pass The Turkey Test? - localization is one of those very difficult and often overlooked non-functional requirements
Defensive programming is so groovy - Groovy is on my list of dynamic languages to check out ... this is a nice, clean, syntax trick
Why Your Development is Crazy - Leaning Into Windows - that is a lot to keep in mind ;-)
InfoQ: Scrum and XP from the Trenches - free ebook
60+ Killer Open Courseware Collections for Web Designers - College Degree.com - good collection of web-design related free online courses
John Resig - Partial Application in JavaScript - Interesting use of dynamic language, currying.
In The Zone - Great cartoon, if only I could keep it up for a good amount of time. Sooner or later Google Reader starts telepathically calling my name

A Proud Sun Certified Enterprise Architect

noreply@blogger.com (Benjamin P Lee) — Tue, 19 Feb 2008 20:15:00 +0000

Today I found out that I passed parts II and III of the Sun Certified Enterprise Architect (JEE 5.0 edition) exam ... meaning that I am now fully SCEA certified! I have been waiting almost two months for the last parts to be graded and results sent out. Going into it, I didn't think I had a chance ... but after a lot of studying and a ton of time spent trying to figure out if I did the project portion correct .. I am proud to say I passed.

Do I feel any different now that I am a SCEA? Nope.
Am I glad that I got the certification? Yes.
Will I put it on my resume? Yes
Do I think this certification proves that I can do X, Y, or Z? No, but its a good start.
Do I think recruiters/hiring managers should use them as a hiring requirement? No.

Coming out of college I didn't know much. Period. I knew there were lots of professional certifications out there and that "I should have some" because ...... other people do. Working as a consultant right out of school, I was pushed to get at least one basic certification in either the .NET or Java side of things. Obviously I chose Java. This was done, primarily, so that the consulting company could put it in my profile for perspective clients ... as a way of proving I had some level of experience.

I don't fully agree with this.

I have come to the conclusion that certifications don't mean anything out of context. It should be understood that they only "prove" that I could do well on a test, the day I took the test. They don't prove I know "the stuff", they don't mean I will be a good employee, and they don't mean I will do well when I try and write software for you. They don't even get you the ladies (or at least the ladies who go for a guy wearing a SCJP pin, aren't the ladies I would be after).

So what are certifications good for?

Well, if you talk to a guy and he can explain why he got a particular certification, what he found difficult and easy about it, how he thinks it could be improved, and how he has related the stuff he learned to his day to day work (citing specific examples) ... thats a great thing. If you can talk about your experience in the area and how studying all the crazy edge-cases and unused syntax has helped you on a project ... way to go.

If not, its just proves you tested well.

I am proud of my certifications. I am proud of the time I spent studying for them and proud of the instances where I knew something another developer didn't that I learned while studying. I am even more proud of the crazy problems I couldn't solve despite being certified in the technology ... but remembered how to tackle the problem because of it. I am most proud because I got them without anyone bugging me to .... many notable leaders in the field will say that the majority of programmers don't read blogs, write pet programs, or constantly think about problems. They don't get certifications to force themselves to learn something beyond what they know today, just for themselves. I am most proud of the fact that I am not like that.

At least most of the time.

What are your thoughts/experiences with professional certifications?

My Computing Past

noreply@blogger.com (Benjamin P Lee) — Mon, 18 Feb 2008 17:10:00 +0000

Scudder's recent post recounting his march from young computer nerd, to professional computer nerd, has inspired me to do the same. Here is an outline of my computing past: projects I remember, things that inspired me, languages I played around in ...

Early School Years

The first memory I can think of that involves me making a computer do something interesting, was in early grade school when we would go to the "computer lab" and drew pictures with LogoWriter. I loved making that crazy little turtle draw spin 'round and 'round, drawing lines all over those ~256 color screens. I didn't really have much of an idea of what I was doing, but man it was cool to send him off drawing with his little pen in a random direction, for some huge number units. Lines-galore!
At some point near the end of elementary school my dad showed me some very basic things in QuickBASIC and I was off (I am still trying to prove Dijkstra wrong). I can remember spending large amounts of time, trying to remember the few things he had taught me, trying my darnedest to create a password protection program. The thing didn't really protect anything in particular and I am sure the password was in the code in plain text .... but if you didn't type it perfectly the first time and/or do it in a short amount of time .... all hell would break loose. The program would start playing random musical notes and flash the screen bright colors until you hit Esc or Ctrl+Q.

High School

My freshman year of HS I took a class in BASIC. I learned a lot more during this class, with very little of it coming from the curriculum.

Most of my new knowledge came from working on a "large" casino simulation game that a few of my classmates and I cooked up. With BASIC's inherently simple graphics drawing capabilities (gotta love screen 12), some random code downloaded off the internet and a TON of hacking together, we actually ended up with a decent game. The first screen showed the outside of the casino including flashing neon lights. When you entered the casino you had to "walk" down a "3D" hall to get to the game rooms (this took me several days to figure out). I think we had simplified versions of poker, roulette, and some dice game. Not bad for a total n00b.
My second crowning achievement was a program which displayed zillions of ASCII characters to look like the BASIC editor. When you typed, the text showed up in the right window and if you hit Alt+F, etc ... the drop down menus popped up. However, the best part was when you hit "Run". At that point the program played some freaky random noise generator out the PC's internal speaker, showed a blank screen with a pulsing cursor and wouldn't let you do anything (unless you hit Ctrl+Break). The teacher thought it was hilarious and suggested I leave it running for the next class. Well, the next day I found out that the girl who sat in my seat next typed in a bit of her program for the day and tried to run it .... at which point the computer "freaked-out" and she began to cry b/c she thought she broke the machine. ;-) Blame the teacher, not me. :-)

UNetIt.com - To try and make a long story short, a HS friend of mine got it into his head that tons of money could be made if we could put together an online web directory of just programming tutorials, scripts, hosts, links, etc. www.UNetIt.com was the answer. The site was backed by some crazy VB-esque code, a horrible Access DB and ran on IIS .... but it worked. I spent countless hours surfing the web finding links to hosts, tutorials and scripts written in PHP, ASP, and JSP before I had any clue what they really did. The site actually was getting some decent traffic at the time and he was able to sell some banner adds to random companies netting us 10's of dollars!!!! While the site never really took off, given our experience it was a huge success. If you Google around for it you can still find some random broken links from back in its heyday.
AP Computer Science brought C++ into my sphere of knowledge. Granted it took me a few weeks to have any clue what all those #include lines were doing and it took me until college to fully realize that people didn't use APString in the real world ... but I learned a lot. I got a 5.
My senior year my parents didn't think I should take a study hall ... so instead I took a new class on VisualBasic which replaced my original one in BASIC. The teacher told me that he didn't want me bugging him about too many "advanced" questions since I already knew the stuff he was going to teach ... so he had me fill out the final exam in the first week and told me that if helped out the other kids and didn't bug him too much, I would get an A without doing any homework. :-D

College

Most of the early classes were taught with C++
We had to take a file manipulation and storage class that used COBOL
Reverend Thomas Schoen taught a very interesting class with C and Assembly
Numerous DB classes with SQL and PL/SQL
In a projects class on Genetic Algorithms and Evolutionary Computing, we wrote programs that tried to match facial photos by "evolving" better matching algorithms with Matlab.
Out later classes were mainly taught in Java including one where we wrote an assembler and virtual processor to handle a subset of some Motorola chip's instruction set.
Our research was mainly done in very naive Java using Aglets
I also did random web design work for on-campus jobs and FlyerWebDesign in HTML/JavaScript/Flash/PHP (neither contain my code anymore, thankfully).

Professional Career

The vast majority of my professional work experience has been on the JVM doing J2EE web applications and client applications in Java.
Lately I have taken an interesting in dynamic languages and have started playing around with Python and am intending to look more into Groovy and Ruby in the upcoming months.

Anyone else have some interesting old-school computing stories to tell? I re-found an interesting diagram of programming language time lines here.

Random Web Links for 2008-02-13

noreply@blogger.com (Benjamin P Lee) — Wed, 13 Feb 2008 21:17:00 +0000

Why I Love being a Software Developer - Derik Whittaker - true dat
The Naive Approach to Hiring People - very interesting article
IDEA is Now Enterprisey - compared to many IDEs, $600 is still cheap, but compared to free, its expensive. Its is really nice though.
TrueCrypt released for OS X (TUAW) - gonna have to use this with my USB drive
Source Control HOWTO - Eric.Weblog() - good set of articles about HOW to use source control and not WHAT or IF

Shortcut Keys in Windows ...

noreply@blogger.com (Benjamin P Lee) — Mon, 11 Feb 2008 18:18:00 +0000

... are frustrating.

Here a few things I learned today at work:

IntelliJ IDEA has a built in refactoring for creating a new constant from an expression mapped to Ctrl+Alt+C by default.
At some point prior to me using my current PC, another user installed Lotus Sametime Client and mapped its shortcut to Ctrl+Alt+C
When I try to run the refactoring in IntelliJ IDEA, Sametime starts instead.
Since I never user Sametime, I went to Add/Remove Programs and attempted to uninstall it. Despite acting like it uninstalled the program, it remains, shortcut key and all.
After some searching I finally found the renegade program on the disk and found that there was a custom program shortcut hidden away in Programs>Accessories>Communication which had the offending shortcut-key set.
After deleting the program files and the shortcut, I still couldn't call the refactor.
It turns out that if you delete a shortcut file (with a shortcut-key set), the binding doesn't get removed right away (presumably this happens at some other point, like when you restart or log-in)
The only way I have found to truly remove the binding is to create another shortcut with the same binding, change the binding to another key (or better yet, nothing), apply this change, and then delete the shortcut. This seems to effectively unbind the key.
Finally now I can use the shortcuts in the program I care about.

Seems a little limiting. All those restrictions, but no way to find out if it DOES conflict.

Despite a decent amount of searching I was unable to find anything on Google that helped the situation. I found plenty of sites showing me default Windows shortcut-key bindings, and several more posts from people frustrated with similar problems, but nothing to help. As far as I can tell, Windows doesn't have the ability to show you what key bindings are currently used and for what (this would be immensely helpful).

To be honest, I don't know how Mac OS X handles these situations but in my 1+ years of working on it I have never had the problem. I don't have this problem often in Windows, but have had it several times now.

I guess the real problem is one of scopes. There needs to be a clearly defined logic for how key-bindings get set/reset and how they cascade down scopes. If bindings are going to cascade into more specialized scopes, they need to have rules about what they can start with or something (e.g. have all Windows level ones start with the Windows key) and if something is allowed to be reset at a more specialized level, have only the closest scope take effect. It looks like Visual Studio does this along with other programs ... why not between programs and the OS.

Anyone run into similar problems? Or know of a way to see all of the bindings currently set?

Gateway JUG - Feb 2008: Buildling DSLs

noreply@blogger.com (Benjamin P Lee) — Sat, 09 Feb 2008 17:28:00 +0000

Despite the crazy weather and torrential downpour of rain, I was able to make it to the Gateway JUG meeting on Monday night. The talk wasn't what I was expecting and was very interesting. I knew the talk was on DSLs (Domain Specific Languages) but I was expecting the talk to be about how a developer can write applications that present DSLs to the end user, allowing them to describe business processes and what they want in a manor much more akin to their business training and actual representations. Neal, instead, focused on approaches developers can use to model DSLs and domain specific information in static and dynamic general purpose languages where the developer is the primary beneficiary. I liked his focus better.

The presentation outlined how we as developers can design our APIs and usage patterns in such a way that the code shifts from being a hodgepodge of declarative and imperative code, to primarily declarative. A coworker of mine pointed out that this can be done with good refactoring and encapsulation, which is true, but Neal's presentation took this even further. His examples started with business rules/processes that we needed to model in code, wrote the code in the way we wanted to express it (target syntax), and then modeled the API around that. The difference sounds subtle but resulted in code that expressed the true desire of the business rule with a minimum of extra syntax noise.

In doing so covered some good design patterns which he said were named after those that Martin Fowler is going to be using in an upcoming book he is working on all about DSL patterns. Also, he demonstrated how some of the syntactical and dynamic features of languages like Groovy and Rube allow DSLs to be composed much more fluently and expressively. The fact that you can boil down your code to something that looks like this in Groove/Ruby is pretty nice:

def recipe = new Recipe("Smoky Flour")
recipe.add 1.pound.of("Flour")
recipe.add 2.grams.of("Nutmeg")
assertThat 2, is(recipe.ingredients.size)
[chunk of code taken from Neal Ford's presentation, written in Groovy]

All in all I thought it was a great talk and gave me some ideas on how I can remodel my code to be much more exacting which will allow me to write the code to match the requirements a ton easier and allow me to test specific business rules without a ton of extra junk to get in the way of what I am really doing.

If none of that made sense, it may not have, check out the presentation here. The PDF handout for his presentation at CodeMash is the same as far as I can tell

JUG Tonight

noreply@blogger.com (Benjamin P Lee) — Tue, 05 Feb 2008 17:46:00 +0000

Tonight I am planning on attending the Gatway JUG meeting where Neal Ford will be speaking on "Building DSLs in Static & Dynamic Languages". Sounds like a good talk and is on my way home from work :)

I had the pleasure of hearing Neal talk at NFJS in Cinci a couple of years back and am looking forward to tonight; especially since I don't think I will be able to make it to the STL NFJS in March.

This will be my second JUG meeting of the year, surpassing last year's total by 2 as well as my New Year's resolution of 1.