Unruly Rambling - java category

Bourre Poker Game Finally Open Source

Mon, 25 May 2009 18:34:00 GMT

After several years of sporadic work, my Bourre game has been released to open source hosted at Google Code. As it stands it is an engine only at this point. There is no user interface at this point and only a driver program to run it. I have some short term goals listed on the summary page. If anyone is interested in participating from UI standpoint, please step forward. Pie in the sky longer term goals including porting it from Java to Objective C/Cocoa and making an iPhone app. Considering it took me 2-3 years to get this far with the java version, I suspect we will be on iPhone revision 12 by the time I get around to doing anything like this.

For more information on the game, please see the wikipedia page.

Social Networking Casserole

Tue, 22 Jul 2008 17:41:00 GMT

So this blog has been basically dead for a couple years. I was average at adding new content when I wore the hat of a software developer. I used it as a place to collect my thoughts and archive interesting tidbits about what I was doing for future reference(by me or others via google). If you plug in "Spring Hibernate" without quotes into google you will still find my write ups ranking in a page or two. Since then, I've moved into managing the folks that do the things I used to write about. Part of me thinks this is a standard path for many but I see other "coders", as managers like to call them, that I have great respect for still plugging away in their IDE of choice. From time to time, I sit back and wonder if the path I've taken is the right one. Their are many perks to each path but how do you know which one is right? Unfortunately I don't think this kind of decision is black and white. I'm pretty sure that I fall into a pseudo gray gradient somewhere between light and darkness. Wow, that's pretty deep for me. I'll assume that came from being on PTO, sitting in front the 80's music channel(And we danced by The Hooters is currently playing), and just having downed my 5th cup a joe since 8am. Enough with this unruly rambling, I'll move on to the topic I wanted to write about today. I may be gone for another two years after this post :)

What added value do you all get from the cornucopia of social networking avenues? A week or two ago I joined facebook and twitter. I don't have many buds yet, but I find both very interesting. The problem is that I don't know why. I've been a linkedin person for several years collecting acquaintances. I've added every tom, dick, and harry that I've worked with over the years. I've also added friends of friends, user group people that I recognize, and many others that I probably wouldn't even talk to if I saw them at the mall. This collection seems to have as much intrinsic value as the rounded edged baseball cards from years past. Maybe they solve a problem I have stumbled on to yet, maybe they are just a way for people to feel better about themselves since they have 499 friends. I don't really know but it's quite interesting to me. Hit me with your best shot(it just started playing) in the comments of this entry. I'd love to hear why I'm wrong.

Here is my one(or 2 or 3) liner on each app.

LinkedIn - A recruiters dream. Maybe it's useful if you are looking for a job.
Facebook - Myspace for adults. A more professional place to promote your electronic personality.
Twitter - Addicting way to keep tabs on what interesting people around you are up to. Not sure I'll continue updating but I'm loving the iPhone app.

Gotta run, Air Supply just came on and the channel must be turned NOW!!!!!

Tomcat Hosting Anyone?

Sun, 16 Sep 2007 01:48:00 GMT

Can anyone out there recommend a reliable java hosting company? My requirements are as follows.

Must support tomcat 5.5
Must allow me to restart tomcat without putting in a ticket
Must have IMAP email
Need enough diskspace that I don't have to delete email constantly
Must allow mysql access

My requirements are pretty simple I think. Did I miss anything?

I'm Interviewing, Is anyone out there??? Anyone?

Sat, 09 Jun 2007 14:00:00 GMT

For the past week and half, I have been interviewing for a Senior Programmer/Analyst contract position at work. Out of 35 or so resumes, only 5 were from local candidates in St. Louis. The rest were submitting by consulting companies based on online test scores. Hmm, I wonder if cheating is possible in this paradigm... Let's just say that the answer to this question is a resounding YES! The fun begins with my first "phone interview". According to his account manager, this particular candidate did very well on his tech screen so he should be a good fit for my group. We set up a 3 way call and once connected I proceeded to ask questions and inquire about his past experience. Every single question I asked him, he repeated the question out loud and then paused for 10 seconds or so. After the pause, he began to spew back the answer in a very incoherent way and only with about 20% accuracy. My guess is that he either had someone next to him attempting to provide the answers or he was using google. Either way, could this really work? How long would it take for your potential peers to find out that the only thing you know about java is drinking it. Anyone else have similar experiences?

Of the few senior level candidates I was able to interview in person, only two have been able to explain how .equals and hashcode work with respect to the collections api. Maybe I should have listed Effective Java as a prerequisite for the interview. When asked how a collection deems an item a duplicated, I've received answers stating that those details are not exposed without going through source code and also that only hashmaps are capable of dealing with duplicates since they have a key. The latter answer was the best because I quickly responded with, "How do you know if the key is a duplicate of one that already exists". I got a blank stare and the candidate immediately changed the subject and asked out the culture. I find this one question a good litmus test for determining if someone might be a good java programmer or not. What are your go to questions when facing a potential candidate to hire? Am I being too hard? Is expecting the person to back up the details stated on the resume considered harsh?

Another humorous exchange that I had was about web frameworks. I told the candidate that they would be leading a project with a couple junior programmers and that they needed to pick a web framework. I told them there was no right or wrong answer but I wanted to know which frameworks they would consider and why. This particular candidate told me that they would pick JSF and they were pretty firm about it. I didn't remember seeing JSF on their resume so I quickly glanced over it again and sure enough, it wasn't there. I dug a bit further and asked why and the candidate told me that it was the web framework that listed most frequently on dice.com so it must be good. I then allowed the candidate to verify that they had no experience with it and also didn't have any friends or colleagues using it. I summarized with a statement similar to, "So you would pick a web framework that you don't know and also don't know anyone using it because of it's popularity on dice.com". After that the candidate got pretty quiet and the interview shortly ended.

Needless to say, the req has still not been filled and it appears that it might be open for a while. The only thing worse than being short handed is having people that need babysitting and slowing down already productive staff members.

For those of you looking, Joel has a good read on resumes and the interviewing process.

Spring Cleaning delivers a needed tutorial for OS X users.

Sun, 08 Apr 2007 20:50:01 GMT

A month or so ago, I got the keen idea that I wanted to replace a 19" boat anchor of a monitor with something flat panel to gain some desk space. This altruistic goal was accomplished after a 20" Samsung wide screen display showed up on my doorstep for less than $200. I was happy since I reclaimed a nice big corner of my desk. Even though I accomplished my original goal, the printer sitting on the end of the desk irked me too. Unlike the monitor, I'm not able to replace my printer with a smaller model. At least not one that would be significantly smaller. The best I could do was find a better location where it wasn't taking up a square foot of desktop space. My decision was to put it in the desk where two linux boxes resided. One of the linux boxes runs this site, a personal wiki, and cvs repository. The other sits mostly idle as a large backup file server. In order to maintain my current setup, I would need a new smaller computer to do these lightweight tasks. Mac Mini to the rescue! I picked up a refurbished Mac Mini from Apple for less than $500. It's a duo core 1.5ghz which is probably 8 times faster than the linux box it replaced. The good news is that it is also 10 times smaller and looks fantastic sitting out in the open. In addition to relocating the printer in the tower compartment, I also moved the spare paper, DSL modem, and various other office items. My desk looks fantastic now. Don't quit reading yet, there is a point to this entry and it has nothing to do with the neatness of my desk.

Instead of installing CVS on the new Mac Mini, I decided that I would migrate to subversion. This was not as easy of a task as I thought it would be. As I sought to find a decent tutorial online, I came up short time and time again. I never did end up finding anything that I could follow step by step and get to where I had a subversion repository front ended by Apache, using Apache authentication running on OS X. Instead I used bits and pieces of content from a half dozen sites to get everything to work. For those of you that are in search of something similar or have run into this same brick wall, the following tutorial is for you. I did my best to document every step along the way. If you run into something that is ambiguous or needs updating, please let me know. I intend to keep this up to date.

HOWTO: Installing Subversion(1.4.3) and Apache(2.0.59) on OS X(10.4.9)

Speaking of Interviewing

Sat, 11 Mar 2006 15:52:58 GMT

I've had a req open for weeks now and can't find hardly anyone qualified for basic java web development. I guess I'm not alone. Is the job market in St. Louis that hot right now or did all the talent leave and go elsewhere. What gives?