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A coworker and I were recently having conversations over employee compensation. We covered the gambit around employee feedback, evals, and compensation. He mentioned Joel Spolsky, and his format of being very open about where individuals were ranked. He also pointed me to: http://alumnit.ca/~apenwarr/log/?m=200904#05 which provided good insight, though I most like his final point. The end goal with evaluating your employees and compensati....
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A coworker and I were recently having conversations over employee compensation. We covered the gambit around employee feedback, evals, and compensation. He mentioned Joel Spolsky, and his format of being very open about where individuals were ranked. He also pointed me to: http://alumnit.ca/~apenwarr/log/?m=200904#05 which provided good insight, though I most like his final point. The end goal with evaluating your employees and compensati....
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I am preparing to conduct a retrospective for my team at my current client site. To guide me, I have been reviewing notes from previous retrospectives I have either attended or led. In doing so, I have noticed an emerging pattern of behavior that can significantly impact the success of a retrospective. Here are a few key factors that I believe are most important: Retrospective Belongs to the Team Possibly the most important observation I’ve..
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Tuesday night I gave a talk at a local Java User Group (that’s four JUG appearances this year, hoorah!) on RabbitMQ and demonstrated not just using it communicate between two java processes, but also as a way of communicating asynchronously between a node.js application and a java application… I have to say it was pretty awesome and I really think it opens the doors for integrating node.js applications seemlessly into an existing java infra..
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6.033, MIT’s class on computer systems, has as one of its catchphrases, “Complex systems fail for complex reasons”. As a class about designing and building complex systems, it’s a reminder that failure modes are subtle and often involve strange interactions between multiple parts of a system. In my own experience, I’ve concluded that they’re often wrong. I like to say that complex systems don’t usually fail for complex reasons, but for the ..
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6.033, MIT’s class on computer systems, has as one of its catchphrases, “Complex systems fail for complex reasons”. As a class about designing and building complex systems, it’s a reminder that failure modes are subtle and often involve strange interactions between multiple parts of a system. In my own experience, I’ve concluded that they’re often wrong. I like to say that complex systems don’t usually fail for complex reasons, but for the ..
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Through the last years developing websites for various types of clients - from small start ups, retailers, organizations to bigger companies - I've come to realize one thing pretty clearly. Everybody loves Flash. Well, almost everybody...
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Through the last years developing websites for various types of clients - from small start ups, retailers, organizations to bigger companies - I've come to realize one thing pretty clearly. Everybody loves Flash. Well, almost everybody...
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I’ve recently started trialling JRebel at work. JRebel is a piece of software that hot-swaps your code so that changes made in your IDE are reflected in your application server without requiring a restart. The benefits of this idea are fairly obvious. I no longer have to wait 1 - 2 minutes for JBoss to restart each time I correct a spelling mistake etc. The time saved by not restarting probably make the product worth the $US149 licens..
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When picking iteration length for an agile project, there are mainly two forces that you have to balance: The rate of learning is proportional with the number of iterations, rather than the length of the project. This means that shorter iterations help you get better faster. But each iteration has some overhead with sprint reviews, retrospectives and planning. You don’t want this overhead to dominate the effort spent on the project.
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Intro People want to start working on apps in Rails 3.0. Rails 3 is supporting ruby 1.8.7 and ruby 1.9.2. These instructions will assist you with getting Rails 3 and ruby 1.9.2 installed. I’m tossing this up here to have something to point people to when they have questions. I’m making a few assumptions: You’re on OS X Snow Leopard (x86_64) (Most of these instructions will work on any *nix box. Leave a comment if you have trouble.) Yo....
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Now I've been collecting spam for a little over a year on spambotlove.com. The purpose of which I do not know, yet. I kind of forgot about the project until just recently, so I started harvesting some stats from the database. Currently we have 729,255 records in the database. That's 3 MB of data.
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Now I've been collecting spam for a little over a year on spambotlove.com. The purpose of which I do not know, yet. I kind of forgot about the project until just recently, so I started harvesting some stats from the database. Currently we have 729,255 records in the database. That's 3 MB of data.
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since i do much research on the internets, i often find myself in a web browser. my favourite of the lot is epiphany . this post isn’t about its merits or failures, but about the awesome way to make my location bar be exactly how i like it: monospaced. just add the following into your ~/.gtkrc-2.0 file and then restart epiphany. feel free to modify as you wish. # ~/.gtkrc-2.0 style "Epiphany_Locationbar" { # leave out the fon..
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since i do much research on the internets, i often find myself in a web browser. my favourite of the lot is epiphany . this post isn’t about its merits or failures, but about the awesome way to make my location bar be exactly how i like it: monospaced. just add the following into your ~/.gtkrc-2.0 file and then restart epiphany. feel free to modify as you wish. # ~/.gtkrc-2.0 style "Epiphany_Locationbar" { # leave out the fon..
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So, you may have noticed that I suddenly started updating this blog for the first time in a while. The reason is that I’ve recently started an ongoing event with a whole bunch of friends around here to encourage us to blog more. Like so many good ideas, it all started with a fundamentally simple premise. On December 21, I sent the following message to Zephyr (MIT’s internal IM system – like Twitter crossed with IRC, except older than either..
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So, you may have noticed that I suddenly started updating this blog for the first time in a while. The reason is that I’ve recently started an ongoing event with a whole bunch of friends around here to encourage us to blog more. Like so many good ideas, it all started with a fundamentally simple premise. On December 21, I sent the following message to Zephyr (MIT’s internal IM system – like Twitter crossed with IRC, except older than either..
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Networking has received yet another performance boost. I discarded Panda3D's network classes in favor of Python's sockets. I also switched to a single-threaded, non-blocking system that performs significantly better and clears up the messy Panda3D threads that were acting very strangely. I also improved the connection process; both the client and server now send packets to each other while connecting, in an attempt to punch through even the..
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At approx 6:30am on Monday 21st Feb 2000 my boss, my colleague and I took the first version of Uboot online. It certainly didn’t have all the features it needed back then, it took us one extra week to add an address book to the messaging functionality, for example. And it didn’t have any photo sharing, video sharing, blogging, or the e-commerce functions that it has now. It’s actually amazing how fast we did develop the first version: a..
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First post Then I imported the blog entries from the SpamBotLove blog (it was a tumblr blog), so there are older entries here
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_Ok, this is my first blog post here, so it probably sucks. If you value your time, don't read this._ When writing code these days, I keep running into these dilemmas. With the way the web a...
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PHP Sourcecode so that a non CodeIgniter PHP script can access data stored in the users CodeIgniter session.
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First post Then I imported the blog entries from the SpamBotLove blog (it was a tumblr blog), so there are older entries here
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_Ok, this is my first blog post here, so it probably sucks. If you value your time, don't read this._ When writing code these days, I keep running into these dilemmas. With the way the web a...
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Haha... Not that it's on topic, but I just wanted to share another one of the great names that occur in code. We run a web tv site based on ASP.NET MVC. And every time I come across our "RandomController" I get that special feeling of awesomeness. Apart from us, only God (and Chuck Norris, some may add) controls randomness.
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Haha... Not that it's on topic, but I just wanted to share another one of the great names that occur in code. We run a web tv site based on ASP.NET MVC. And every time I come across our "RandomController" I get that special feeling of awesomeness. Apart from us, only God (and Chuck Norris, some may add) controls randomness.
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If you wonder why this blog has been so quiet lately, it not (just) that I’m getting lazier. Together with several of my colleagues at Steria Norway, I’ve started up a blog at http://sterkblanding.no. “Sterk blanding” is Norwegian for “potent mix”, and we hope that as representatives for several disciplines, we will be able to give a broad perspective on IT and management issues. I’ve not yet decided what posts to publish here and what post..
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I’ve pair programmed the Java EE spike kata in Eclipse with a number of people, I’ve found that a number of keyboard short cuts and preference settings recur as useful new information. I’ve compiled the most popular ones in this article. The article is subject to change, but I won’t change the number of shortcuts. Top five shortcuts There are some keyboard short cuts that everyone who uses Eclipse should know:
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Here’s an article of mine, explaining some of the Oracle internals and the OS touch point. It actually goes beyond explaining just commands for canceling SQL. I have written a couple of updates into the beginning of this article about SQL cancellation commands, but if you want to learn the internals, scroll down to The original article section. Update 1: As the beginning says, this article was meant as something interesting about ..
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Here’s an article of mine, explaining some of the Oracle internals and the OS touch point. It actually goes beyond explaining just commands for canceling SQL. I have written a couple of updates into the beginning of this article about SQL cancellation commands, but if you want to learn the internals, scroll down to The original article section. Update 1: As the beginning says, this article was meant as something interesting about ..
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When it comes to working in the software industry, I believe I can best summarize what the majority of developers and teams do by quoting Pink Floyd’s song “Breathe”: Run, rabbit run Dig that hole, forget the sun And when at last the work is done Don’t sit downIt’s time to dig another one I think that the verse goes quite well with the default behavior of developers when faced with an overwhelming amount of work on a project.
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Java conversions and 7 Golden rules of widening, boxing & varargs
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studiofreya.org
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16 years ago
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eng
Here is a very useful java conversion table that I’ve created while preparing for the Certified SE Java Programmer exam. Read also: What is and how to use Java varargs .
And here is a complete overview of the Java Golden rules of widening, boxing & varargs:
1. Primitive Widening > Boxing > Varargs. 2. Widening and Boxing (WB) not allowed. 3. Boxing and Widening (BW) allowed. 4. While overloading Widening +..
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New versions of LatchProf and LatchProfX for latch contention troubleshooting and tuning
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tanelpoder.com
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16 years ago
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eng
The LatchProf and LatchProfX scripts allow you to be more systematic with latch contention troubleshooting and tuning. No more guesswork is needed as these scripts give you exact session IDs and in this version also SQLIDs of the troublemaking applications. You can download the new versions here: LatchProf (reads V$ views) LatchProfX (reads X$ tables, but gives better info, run as SYS) Example output (with SQLID info) is below: S....
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New versions of LatchProf and LatchProfX for latch contention troubleshooting and tuning
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tanelpoder.com
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16 years ago
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eng
The LatchProf and LatchProfX scripts allow you to be more systematic with latch contention troubleshooting and tuning. No more guesswork is needed as these scripts give you exact session IDs and in this version also SQLIDs of the troublemaking applications. You can download the new versions here: LatchProf (reads V$ views) LatchProfX (reads X$ tables, but gives better info, run as SYS) Example output (with SQLID info) is below: S....
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In user-interface design, always address the user as "you" (and never "me")
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www.databasesandlife.com
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16 years ago
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eng
Computers, if they are addressing the user, should address the user as "you", not as "me". Computers need, from time to time, to address the user, for example “You have updated your setting successfully”. Some programs use the word “you” to address the user, some use the word “me” on the grounds that the user is reading it, and to them, they are “me”. However, using “me” to address someone is ridiculous! That’s as logical as a human u..
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I just finished reading Mountains Beyond Mountains: The Quest of Dr. Paul Farmer, a Man Who Would Cure the World . I’ve known of the book for a couple years but never quite got around to reading it, likely because I knew it would challenge me. After the Haitian earthquake about a month ago, I remembered the book, decided I must read it, and then Barnes & Noble had it on sale. So here I am. Read More
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I just finished reading Mountains Beyond Mountains: The Quest of Dr. Paul Farmer, a Man Who Would Cure the World . I’ve known of the book for a couple years but never quite got around to reading it, likely because I knew it would challenge me. After the Haitian earthquake about a month ago, I remembered the book, decided I must read it, and then Barnes & Noble had it on sale. So here I am. Read More
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I’ve been looking for a good solution for versioning and synchronizing my dotfiles between machines for some time. I experimented with keeping all of ~ in subversion for a while, but it never worked out well for me. I’ve finally settled on a solution that I like using git, and so this is a writeup of my workflows for working with my dotfiles in git, in the hopes that someone else might find it useful.
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I’ve been looking for a good solution for versioning and synchronizing my dotfiles between machines for some time. I experimented with keeping all of ~ in subversion for a while, but it never worked out well for me. I’ve finally settled on a solution that I like using git, and so this is a writeup of my workflows for working with my dotfiles in git, in the hopes that someone else might find it useful.
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Oracle Troubleshooting: How to read Oracle ERRORSTACK output?!
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tanelpoder.com
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16 years ago
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eng
I have written the first article to the troubleshooting section of my new website tech.E2SN.com: It’s about a very valuable Oracle troubleshooting tool -> ERRORSTACK trace. I cover 4 frequently asked questions there: Reading the current executing SQL statement text from errorstack trace Reading the current executing PL/SQL package and PL/SQL source code line number from errorstack trace Reading the current bind variable values from er..
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Oracle Troubleshooting: How to read Oracle ERRORSTACK output?!
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tanelpoder.com
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16 years ago
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eng
I have written the first article to the troubleshooting section of my new website tech.E2SN.com: It’s about a very valuable Oracle troubleshooting tool -> ERRORSTACK trace. I cover 4 frequently asked questions there: Reading the current executing SQL statement text from errorstack trace Reading the current executing PL/SQL package and PL/SQL source code line number from errorstack trace Reading the current bind variable values from er..
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Why in the world do some programming languages include optional syntax? To a true type A engineer, this is incomprehensible and unacceptable. For example, in Adobe's ActionScript, statements may optionally be terminated with a semicolon. Usually this is not required, except in a few situations you need it. Evil. The statement that our number one job as software engineers is to manage complexitity really resonates with me, and willy nilly al....
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Many projects reference environment variables at either build time, install time, or run time to handle configuration that can't be made to work across all of the target environments. It is better to use plain text simple configuration files for the reasons that follow. First, let's quickly review common usage of environment variables. Directory path to supporting tools and libraries (JAVA_HOME, LD_LIBRARY_PATH, CATALINA_HOME, etc) Cust....
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