Skip to content

Category Archives: technical

Technical topics.

UNIX timezone database shut down

Friday, October 7, 2011

The UNIX time zone database has been shut down because of copyright complaints! Overthrow the DCMA! http://blog.joda.org/2011/10/today-time-zone-database-was-closed.html

Also filed in business, infrastructure and frameworks, rants | Tagged , , , | Comments Off

if this then that

Thursday, September 22, 2011

I have recently been using “if this then that” to integrate my Google Reader with this blog and other places, like Facebook, Flickr, Twitter, and tumblr (I have a Classics-related tumblr). It’s a great way to do simple integration between these services but one annoyance is that it lacks any way to discriminate actions. For [...]

Also filed in apps, rants | Tagged , , , | Comments Off

blog link: Who Owns the Risk?

Thursday, September 22, 2011

Who Owns the Risk? by Mike Cottmeyer at LeadingAgile. Published September 20, 2011 at 08:30PM Back in my late 20′s I was a project manager in a pretty good sized IT shop. I worked under a great VP that put me in situations that were really beyond my abilities.  He fundamentally believed that I’d do [...]

Also filed in | | Comments Off

REST-based architectural style, a big winner

Thursday, September 15, 2011

Recently been deeply stuck in building software (apart from starting my PhD part-time). A long time ago I wrote about dynamically loading Spring contexts and component discovery – this system I’ve been building is an evolution of that one. We decided to adopt an most REST-based style to integrate between our components. Now, “run-time” discovery [...]

Also filed in architecture, infrastructure and frameworks | Tagged , , , , , | Comments Off

quick link: The value of stable teams.

Thursday, September 15, 2011

http://www.allaboutagile.com/the-value-of-stable-teams/

Also filed in business, professional practice | | Comments Off

Instructions: first open the box then read the instructions

Monday, June 6, 2011

I’m using Scrivener to organise my PhD research, and it will end up being used for the first draft of the actual PhD as well. But Scrivener does not have an iPad app, which make a bit of sense. So I have been looking for an editor that will work with Dropbox (even though its quite [...]

Also filed in apps, rants | Tagged , , , | Comments Off

Busted-arse Apple Mobile Me Calendar forced onto me.com users

Wednesday, March 16, 2011

Got this email from Apple’s Me.com service today; from MobileMe <MobileMe@insideapple.apple.com> date Wed, Mar 16, 2011 at 13:02 subject Upgrade to the new MobileMe Calendar by May 5, 2011 Upgrade to the new MobileMe Calendar by May 5, 2011 Dear MobileMe member: On May 5, 2011, MobileMe will transition completely to the new Calendar service [...]

Also filed in professional practice, rants | Tagged , , , , , | Comments (1)

A terrible, terrible Eclipse bug

Thursday, March 10, 2011

I found a massive bug in Eclipse – it has a copy and paste function. In Eclipse’s defence, Intellij IDEA and Netbeans also exhibit identical broken functionality.

Also filed in programming, rants, tools and techniques | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments (3)

Broken Weblogic JMS “clustering”

Friday, March 4, 2011

I’ve ranted before that Weblogic 11g clustering/distribution technology of its messaging is fundamentally broken. Despite what Oracle claims, JMS in Weblogic is not clustered. Load balanced is a better description. It’s architectural – if any other technology (e.g. SOA Suite, EDN, etc) uses Weblogic JMS as its underlying messaging implementation, it will be broken too. [...]

Also filed in infrastructure and frameworks | Tagged , , , , | Comments (2)

Come back Gavin King, all is forgiven (Spring is the new EJB 2.1)

Wednesday, February 16, 2011

I’ve just spent the past two days trying to make Spring transaction management work with JPA-annotated Hibernate-backed persistence classes that need to have multiple persistence units with transaction propagation REQUIRES_NEW between the two. For a start, the documentation is merely a series of outlines of brief hints. One measly section.The laughably short Spring 3 doco [...]

Also filed in infrastructure and frameworks, programming, rants, tools and techniques | Tagged , , , , , , | Comments (15)