Thoughts For Beans

Kindle media converter Windows script

2010-05-18T18:30:00.000-07:00

So a while back I got an Amazon Kindle as a birthday gift from my brother-in-law (many thanks Junior!). Coincidentally, I also got from my lovely wife a book with 20 years of Dilbert - that's funny, even though I read it for years I had no idea there were 20 years of Dilbert! The book, which is pretty huge by the way, thankfully came with a CD with images of all its pages. Needless to say

Quest to find the best Linux for slow computers, Fedora 12 LXDE upgrade to 13

2010-05-10T18:35:00.000-07:00

I replaced Kubuntu Netbook Remix (KNR) on my netbook with the LXDE spin of Fedora 12. KNR looks nice and has many nice features for devices with small screens but it was just painfully slow on my netbook. LXDE is (in theory) a more crappy-hardware-friendly Linux flavor, so I decided to give it a try. LXDE's UI looks uglier and less flexible than KNR's, but performance is indeed better. With that

NFJS 2010 - Northern Virginia Software Symposium II

2010-05-05T09:28:00.000-07:00

This is my last post about the No Fluff Just Stuff Software Symposium here in Reston, VA. Sad to say I didn't get any of the 3 iPads! I did see my name scrolling down for the last iPad (the most expensive model!) but the system had to pick someone else's name just 2 or 3 positions from mine! Oh well... guess I am not destined to get one, since I am not gonna buy one and my luck isn't gonna get me

NFJS 2010 - Northern Virginia Software Symposium

2010-04-30T20:33:00.000-07:00

I am attending the No Fluff Just Stuff Software Symposium here in Reston, VA. The schedule this year is really good, with names like Neil Ford, Jeff Brown, Matthew McCullough and so many other experienced speakers and book authors discussing things like REST, polyglot development with languages like Ruby, Clojure etc, cloud computing, testing, Agile development etc. Many of these guys are either

Quick web app prototyping with AppFuse

2010-04-10T07:39:00.000-07:00

Quick web app prototyping with AppFuse Sometimes we just need to put together a quick web app for prototyping, discuss screen flows, design layouts, create web services etc. I found AppFuse to be a pretty good option for this purpose. You can follow the steps in this article to setup your environment and create a new web application with AppFuse. The best thing is that once your environment has

J2EE Performance Tuning

2010-03-17T08:00:00.000-07:00

Found a very good overview on "How to Diagnose a Performance Problem in a J2EE System" written by John Bley: http://weblogic.sys-con.com/node/43024 Even though this article was written in 2003 somehow it is still pretty up to date. Guess the ways we build our systems are not changing so fast afterall.

Virtual Machines - managing virtual drives

2010-03-10T16:33:00.000-08:00

From time to time I have to expand the disks on my virtual machines. Or convert disks from preallocated 9+GBs into sets of 2GB files (so they fit in FAT32 USB sticks, for example). I found this tool vmware-vdiskmanager to be the best way to manage these tasks, but it does not come bundled with VMWare Player. It does come, however, in the also free-as-in-beer VMWare Server. So if you need it,

Solid State Drives - Part 2

2010-03-06T08:59:00.000-08:00

On my previous post I tried to convince you that it makes sense to buy an overpriced storage device called SSD if you use computers for a living. Now, to conclude my discussion on SSDs I will go into more low-level details such as: 1. Why I bought specifically Intel's I-25M? 2. How I installed it, and why I cloned my old drive instead of starting it "fresh"? 3. What are the tweaks one needs to

Solid State Drives - Part 1

2010-02-21T00:05:00.000-08:00

I have been reading a lot about Solid State Drives (SSDs) for quite some time. SSDs are storage devices we can use to replace standard Hard Disk Drives (HDDs), but offer less space and cost much much more. HDDs are based on mature (i.e. old) technology, basically consistinting of multiple spinning magnetic disks read and written by moving heads. Suppose you want to read a part of a certain file

Java magic with AspectJ

2010-02-04T07:10:00.000-08:00

Sometimes in our programming projects we can start things from scratch and implement them exactly how we want them. In these happy and creative times we so much have control of everything, if we don't like some of our own designs, APIs or mechanisms we can just go and change it, simple like that. Bad thing oftentimes we aren't so lucky, and we have to work on more constrained settings, using

Black friday madness

2009-12-18T18:30:00.000-08:00

November, sweet november... month of the most important of holidays on Earth - the Black Friday! When all geeks can join in a mad rat race for the best deals, from clothing to electronic gadgets. For about 3 days people get in lines throughout the night, take enough red bull and 5 hour energetic drinks to glow green in the dark just to save some dough for the holidays. This kind of sacrifice may

Setup Oracle's SGA size

2009-12-13T18:00:00.000-08:00

I always work with Oracle databases on my laptop. I prefer to install them myself so I can tune it to run without using all my memory. Also, instead of installing Oracle directly on my laptop I always do so on virtual machines because this way it is easier to share my environments with my colleagues and to setup individual sandboxes for each project I am working on. When I have to work with

UML diagram editors

2009-12-11T23:07:00.000-08:00

From time to time people ask me to write UML diagrams. Sometimes it makes sense, but oftentimes I could be better off using my time on something else, like writing code, prototyping etc. Please don't get me wrong, I am not against good documentation or UML per se, but many people like to focus too much time on pretty documents with beautiful colorful diagrams while others, more pragmatic ones,

Setting up a Maven repository proxy with Nexus

2009-11-21T15:22:00.000-08:00

BackgroundHey, quick hint: if you need quick get-to-the-point instructions on how to setup a free Maven repository proxy you can skip this section and scroll down to the next one. But, if you have some time to spare and are curious to know why one would need to setup his own Maven repository proxy, please bear with me a little and keep reading...It should be a bit more than 3 years since I

Oracle database quick reference

2009-11-06T11:35:00.000-08:00

Similar to the Unix/Linux quick reference post, this one lists multiple snippets about the Oracle database. Feel free to drop a comment with your own Oracle "gems".# how to list all triggers affecting a tableselect * from all_triggers where triggering_event like '%INSERT%' and table_name='PUT_TABLE_NAME_HERE'; # if you get error ORA-24170 when dropping an user see the article belowdrop user

UNIX / LINUX quick reference

2009-11-04T11:26:00.000-08:00

I have compiled the Unix/Linux code snippets below as a quick reference covering the "how to" on various topics. Please feel free to leave a comment with your own "gems". How to: # list top memory processes on a Linux machine: ps aux | awk '{print $4"\t"$11}' | sort | uniq -c | awk '{print $2" "$1" "$3}' | sort -nr # show how many CPUs on a Linux machine: cat /proc/cpuinfo # create a symbolic

Automated handling of header notices in source files

2009-11-03T07:22:00.000-08:00

I recently implemented a web-based application that grew from a proof-of-concept into a real solution for a telecom operator, and it has also been offered to other potential clients. And, since it uses only open technologies such as JSF, Spring and Hibernate, it is pretty easy for other developers to reuse it for demos and prototypes without training on proprietary technologies. It is so that

Super Frameworks - develop Java web apps at lightning speeds

2009-10-25T17:00:00.000-07:00

In the early days of J2EE (that's how we used to call Java Enterprise Development back then) we had fewer alternatives of technologies, frameworks and reusable components. Web application development was then far simpler than it is today - there was no need for developers to learn a bunch of different things like Spring, Hibernate, JSTL, JSF etc - and things were much simpler to learn and

Tools for an efficient development environment

2009-10-24T14:26:00.001-07:00

Most of us, if not all of us, want to do more things in less time. This way we can either move up in our careers, simply to go home earlier or why not do both? Likewise, no one like being frequently late on code deliveries or having to debug code until midnight day in and day out. If (almost) everybody can agree with that then this is an obvious idea, why am I bringing this up?Because it amazes

Greetings and my own "get rich" scheme plan

2009-10-24T09:00:00.000-07:00

Greetings to you all. Yeah, I know by ALL I meant my still-zero followers, but before I start with my ramblings on Java development and technology I think I should first introduce myself and describe why I think the Internet needs another tech blog.First, as my personal description states (and where you can find more info about me - though I don't know why you would bother), I am a technology