Java

It’s insidious. It lurks in damp, dark corners and often goes undetected until it is too late. The symptoms are obvious to those that have encountered it before but a lack of communication often allows it to fester for years right under the nose of upper management. It’s the status quo. Preview Text:  If you take anything away from this...

DDoSaaS Miiiight Be a Little Sketchy Surprise! If you PayPal someone to conduct a DDoS attack, things might get a little shady. Brian Krebs investigates Ragebooter, and finds a one-man operation running out of Memphis, Tennessee, possibly with the authorities’ blessing. Preview Text:  Today: The sketchy world of DDoSaaS, Apple's taxes,...

 A few days ago I was going through a project's Maven dependencies, removing unused junk, checking jar file version numbers adding a little dependency management and generally tidying up (yes, I know that this isn't something we often get time to do, but even Maven dependencies can be a form of technical debt). After recompiling and running the unit tests I ran some end to end tests only to...

A new feature of Lucene 4 – pluggable codecs – allows for the modification of Lucene’s underlying storage engine. Working with codecs and examining their output yields fascinating insights into how exactly Lucene’s search works in its most fundamental form. Preview Text:  A new feature of Lucene 4 – pluggable codecs – allows for the...

Files can be added, committed and removed from git repositories using one or more of the following commands: Adding a file named "testFile.xml" to the index. git add testFile.xml Testing to view differences between the index and HEAD git diff --cached produces something like the following: Preview Text:  Files can be added, committed...

Anyone that has used DevKit to write a Mule extension and then wanted to add it to Studio, may have notice that the extension will appear under the Cloud Legacy Sponsored:  unsponsored

I’m at the Much Ado About Agile conference this week, in beautiful Vancouver. During lunch one day, one of the conference participants started talking about premature optimization of code. Preview Text:  I’m at the Much Ado About Agile conference this week, in beautiful Vancouver. During lunch one day, one of the conference participants started...

I attended the SATURN 2013 conference in Minneapolis a couple of weeks ago, which is an annual practitioner conference about software architecture, organised by the Software Engineering Institute (SEI) of Carnegie Mellon University. The conference is in its 9th year now, but it's not something that's been on my radar to be honest, partly because it's in the US and partly because I've not heard...

Several posts and articles, this week, starting with this nice Preview Text:  Arthur Charpentier's regular data link roundup explores quantified consensus on anthropogenic global warming, compares SAS and R for business analysts, and much more. Plus: zombies (with R). Legacy Sponsored:  ...

At the annual IOUC (International Oracle User Community) Summit, held January 14–16, 2013, at Oracle headquarters in Redwood Shores, California, more than 100 top user group leaders from around the world gathered to share best practices, provide feedback, and receive updates from leading Oracle developers. Preview Text:  Oracle Java...

I have worked on ActiveMQ for quite a while, and there’s one annoying exception that I see all the time – java.io.IOException: Too many open files – which we see time to time. Preview Text:  I have worked on ActiveMQ for quite a while, and there’s one annoying exception that I see all the time – java.io.IOException: Too many open files...

My colleague Arthur Arts has written a blog post Tasty Test Tip: Using ArgumentCaptor for generic collections with Mockito. This inspired me to do the same in Spock. Preview Text:  In Spock we can get a hold on the arguments that are passed to method call of a mock and we can write assertions to check the parameters for certain conditions. ...

Chet Haase and Romain Guy from Google's Android UI team share some tips and tricks for getting the most out of Android graphics: Preview Text:  Chet Haase and Romain Guy from Google's Android UI team share some tips and tricks for getting the most out of Android graphics. Legacy Sponsored:  ...

Here’s an often held conversation between concerned website user and site owner: User: “Hey mate, your website isn’t using SSL when I enter my password, what gives?!” Owner: “Ah, but it posts to HTTPS so your password is secure! We take security seriously. Our measures are robust.” (and other random, unquantifiable claims) Preview Text:  ...

As a die hard refactorer, but also pragmatic programmer, I often have a tough time articulating to other developers when a refactor is important and when it is gratuitous. I can imagine many people look at decisions I've made about when it is and isn't appropriate and think it's simply a whim or "when I feel like it". To clarify this for both myself and any future victims/co workers...

Although I started with ColdFusion for application development, I did plenty brochureware sites with HTML. I believe the version was HTML 2.0 for IE 2.0. I lived in the browser world for years doing ColdFusion, ASP, and HTML sites. When winforms and Smart Client with web services emerged I changed my religion. Since then I have been avoiding the browser whenever possible since. For the past couple of years I have used HTML/JavaScript/CSS a lot as a byproduct of building ASP.NET and ASP.NET MVC applications for public consumption. Internal enterprise applications I will still push for using WPF and web services over ASP.NET or ASP.NET MVC, but I lose that battle a lot, especially when the developers have never learned WPF (XAML) and have no interest in learning anything new. When it comes to Mobile Apps my first choice will always be native applications using Objective-C, XAML with C# or C++, and Java using the ASP.NET Web API for the services. The problem is I am going to end up fighting the same battle with the web developers that don't like learning anything new. They are going to turn to HTML/JavaScript/CSS to build their mobile applications as a mobile web site or hybrid application.

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Github has a nice API for inspecting repositories – it lets you read gists, issues, commit history, files and so on. Git repository data lends itself to demonstrating the power of combining full text and faceted search, as there is a mix of free text fields (commit messages, code) and enumerable fields (committers, dates, committer employers). Github APIs return JSON, which has the nice...

In a previous post, a few weeks ago, I mentioned that I will be in Las Vegas by the end of July. And I took the opportunity to write a post on roulette(s). Since some colleagues told me I should take some time to play poker there, I guess I have to understand how to play poker… so I went back to basics on cards, and shuffling techniques. Preview Text:  ...

Chris and I were looking at the neo4j log files of a client earlier in the week and wanted to do some processing of the file so we could ask the client to send us some further information.The log file was over 10,000 lines long but the bit of the file we were interesting in was only a few hundred lines.I usually use Vim and the ‘:set number’ when I want to refer to line numbers in a file...

 Finally, the pattern that is now called Navigation Drawer has got official guidelines from Google. This pattern has become very popular in apps but the implementation has been very different due to lack of official support. Preview Text:  Finally, the pattern that is now called Navigation Drawer has got official guidelines from Google. ...