hit of the search party

This blog is dead now, please go to www.robsanheim.com. I am slowly porting old entries to there as I have time, and will remove this blog once I have them all ported. Thank you and drive through.

This is for all my loyal reader(s) (all 2 of them). I‘m moving this blog to its own server powered by Wordpress. My own domain, robsanheim.com, which previous redirected to here, is being setup for my own server. BTW, that domain just goes to a temporary godaddy.com page for now, as the name server stuff hasn‘t propragated yet for my own host. So after the shakedown the jroller blog will be dead, robsanheim.com will have the new blog, and I hope to have at least some of the archived posts migrated.

I‘m sure this question has been asked before, but I‘m looking at learning Linux and eventually switching to it completely for my home use. My current experience level is as follows:

I need a setup that can do:

I‘ve done the Knoppix from cd thing, which seemed to go fine. I don‘t have any hardware that should present problems. Right now it seems Ubunto or Fedora would be a good choice, but I‘m not sure how they are with Java. Anyone else have suggestions?

Audio interview with Chuck Palahniuk where he discusses his latest novel, Haunted, among other things. He discusses how over 60 people have fainted worldwide at readings of his story “Guts”, among other things.

Note: some mature content discussed, NSFW.

Because every point haired boss is going to be demanding that its in their next web app after they see the next Information Week (full article here. :

Here are some tips for how to drive your fellow developers nuts using your favorite change management system:

If you put at least a few of these handy hints into practice, I guarantee that your team members will love you with all their heart and soul.

Jim and I have been given the go head to do our presentation at No Fluff Just Stuff in Chicago in September. We are also presenting at the Fox Valley JUG later this month, and I‘m really going to get the a web site set up to make our presentation “live”, so there will be much coffee and even less sleep then normal.

I‘ve been doing some brainstorming for getting a second presentation put together to present on my own, and I‘d like to go in a completely different direction and talk about the convergence between patterns and agile development. It will draw from Joshua Kerievsky‘s excellent book Refactoring to Patterns. For the cliff notes version of the book, check out the older paper he wrote on the issue of Patterns and XP (pdf) which seemed to be the starting point for the book. I‘d like to expand on the themes Kerievsky laid out and add some new examples to make sure its more then a book summary.

Random stuff:
Ben's new homepage is sweet, but will be cooler when its a real interactive command line like webcmd.

Jim Halberg, who is some guy I present on Ajax with, has two (count‘em, 2) blogs now: the personal blog, Dooga Dooga, and the nerd blog with a much less clever name - James Halberg.

Erich Gamma talks about Eclipse's Culture of Shipping and goes into detail in the release cycle of Eclipse. Gamma mentions 20,000 unit tests, which just boggles the mind...and that number may even be out of date. Eclipse 3.1 By The Numbers lists 30,000 unit tests and almost 400 tests for performance alone.

I am the walrus.

I‘ve been having some strange crashes with the wonderful WSAD lately. Doing a simple

log.debug("adapters are: " + adapters.toString());

where adapters are a HashSet results in a complete pc freak out. My machine freezes, beeps, and then the monitor goes from my normal 1600×1200 resolution to 640×480. Consistently. Here‘s the screen shot post-crash:

I checked the toString that gets called on the component objects, and it doesn‘t have any crazy circular references or anything. Strange.

Google Maps official API is released. You need to get a key and sign an agreement to use it, of course. It will be interesting to see if all the different Google Map hacks can switch seamlessly to the api – and if not, if Google will crack down. This is all beta, of course, so don‘t expect the api to be stable for awhile yet.

I‘m forever amazed at how difficult deployment seems to be at shops I‘ve worked at. A previous employer handled deployment through a third party tool that failed on a regular basis and required manual intervention almost daily. I remember having to login at 2 am after the servers restarted to make sure my deployments propagated correctly – it was that fragile. This deployment tool also handled change management, though its “unusual” interface and pessimistic locking really wasn‘t much better then manual control. I think there wasn‘t even a standard process for retrieving old versions without a huge hassle.

Another shop I have experience with also uses an expensive third party tool. Like the first shop, developers dread working with the tool due to the constant struggles. Thank goodness they use CVS for version control, so at least some work can be done. The deployment tool uses pessimistic locking (of course), and the Eclipse/WSAD plugin seems to be a constant problem. Some of the problems could be due to the administration, as it seems everything is setup as restrictively as possible to stop people from getting actual work.

Honestly, if you are handling Java, what is wrong Ant + CVS? Maybe throw in some plain text (open source!) scripts if need be. Get everything automated and tested first, so you can type one command and the compile, test, backup, and deploy happens without any error-prone gui work or manual intervention.

Both of these shops use Websphere, so I suppose part of the problem may come from that. I assume getting ant to deploy to Websphere is quite a different animal then tomcat. Still, putting the time and effort in up front to do it right would far outweigh the constant struggles down the road with these expensive, universally hated tools. There has to be some large organizations that are doing this right…

"They're living in the tropics. They're well fed. They've got everything they could possibly want," the vice president said. From an interview with Cheney over at __cnn__.

Is that a joke? Can he be serious? Honestly, I don‘t know what is scarier – that the administration says things like this, or the possibility that they might actually believe them.

Joe Walker has been hard at work pounding out DWR – he just put out 1.0RC1 with numerous fixes and enhancements. I‘m quite impressed by the turn around on bug fixes and enhancements. Apparently Joe is a cyborg who is bent on java ajax domination. Now we just need to get some standard integration between DWR and taglibs and/or web frameworks to really get ajax going in Java.

Eclipse‘s junit generation thingy automatically declares your test methods as final. I can see some benefits of this, as I can‘t think of a valid case for overriding test methods – though there must be some case where that would be useful. The standard so far we‘ve been using is just to leave them non final, so I always end up deleting the final anyways. Does anyone really keep all test methods as final?

Author and noted peak oil speaker James Howard Kunstler is on a book tour for his new book about life after the oil peak, the Long Emergency. He recently spoke at Google headquarters in Mountain View, California, and I his report of the typical Google reaction is funny in the typically bitter Kunstler fashion.

I gave my spiel about the global oil problem and the unlikelihood that "alternative energy" would even fractionally replace it, and quite a few of the Googlers became incensed. "Yo, Dude, you're so, like, wrong! We've got, like, technology!"??

For more info check out the cliff note's version of The Long Emergency for the Rolling Stone.

Tim O‘Reilly posted a very interesting graph showing book sales on his latest blog entry. The most striking thing is that sales for Java has remained basically static, despite the release of 1.5 last year and the continued growth of open source Java. Perhaps that just indicates a relatively saturated market, or maybe Java has reached its peak and can only start heading down? Note that Python sales slowly picked up in the last year, while Ruby is still barely visible at the bottom. I'm guessing that will change with the release of Robby's book, The Developer's Notebook by Tate, and all the others.

The graph above should be click-able for a larger version, if that breaks try here.