Unruly Rambling - nfjs tag

Gateway Software Symposium - Day 3

Mon, 21 Mar 2005 00:19:05 GMT

Java Collection Power Techniques
By: Glenn Vanderburg
Glenn's talk covered many of the methods that live on the Collection interface which many programmers end up implementing themselves. He also showed many code examples of advanced way's to utilize decorators and adapters with Collections. I've done some of this in the past so I was pretty familiar with the concepts. Unfortunately, many of the problems he solved after this seemed to be very academic in nature and I can't say that I've run across them in the real world. That's not to say I will never, but at this point I will take them for what they are worth. The best take away from this session is to look around before implementing something yourself.

Introduction to Spring
By: Bruce Tate
I'm typically not a big fan of Bruce Tate's presentations since they are very slideshow driven but since there was nothing else of interest, I attended anyway. I've been looking at Spring for sometime now so I'm fairly well versed with what it can do. My goal was to gain some insight for his presentation and apply it to one that I will be giving soon. All in all, he did a pretty good job describing the benefits of Spring. One thing that scared me was he made the comment that Spring is similar to the BASF marketing spiel "We don't make a lot of the products you buy, we make a lot of the products you buy better". I've said this very thing several times in the past couple months. Weird!

Javascript Exposed
By: Glenn Vanderburg
All I can say is Wow. I never knew Javascript was as robust a language as Glenn portrayed. The talk started off talking about how Javascript got a bad name back in the early days of Netscape and Internet Explorer. Neither did a very good job of supporting it. The other downfall was that developers were not really learning the language either. Instead of starting from the ground and working their way up, they performed copy/paste/modify routines that quickly spread bad or inferior code world wide. The next 30 minutes or so went over the language constructs followed by a demonstration of how dynamic typing works. I got pretty lost from this point forward. The one take away I had from this was that if I ever need to do anything in Javascript moving forward, there will be a learning curve. Im interested in the upcoming release of Tiger that will introduce Dashboard widgets. These are small javascript modules do quite useful things. Looks like I will be face down in the books Glenn suggested in the near future.

Gateway Software Symposium - Day 2

Sun, 20 Mar 2005 13:43:49 GMT

Cryptography for Programmers
By: Stuart Halloway
This talk focused on everything crypto and I would recommend that anyone not familiar with it attend this session. All and all this session was par for the course for Stuart. A fantastic presentation on good detailed content. Topics covered included hashes, secret key cryptography, public key cryptography and digital signatures. OpenSSL and Java Code were both used in examples. We also discussed how many products claim to have a 128 bit hash, or 256 bit encryption, or 64 bit block cipher, but the only number that really matters is the number of bits of security. This becomes basically the lowest common denominator of your security. In other words, your system is only as secure as it's weakest link. In a nutshell this talk was everything programmers should know about security.

Test First Development
By: Venkat Subramaniam
The best part of Venkat's presentation was that there was almost no presentation at all. What I mean is that when I went to grab copies of the slides, there were only two pages. This entire session was done within IDEA and coded based on user interaction. While I appreciated the energy put forth, I think I would have better spent my time elsewhere. I've presented these kinds of things in the past to groups at work. I kind of knew this ahead of time but there wasn't much else offered during this time-slot that caught my eye. I hope to catch a more advanced session by Venkat tomorrow. He is a really good speaker.

The Fallacies of Enterprise Systems(Architecture)
By: Ted Neward
Ted's talk covered the ten fallacies of distributed computing. Upon hitting each one, he shared personal experiences where he or his team may have fallen into this trap. He also encouraged group participation around the topics. All in all it was a good interactive session.

1) The network is reliable
2) Latency is zero
3) Bandwidth is infinite
4) The network is secure
5) Topology doesn't change
6) There is one administrator
7) Transport cost is zero
8) The network is homogeneous
9) The system is monolithic
10) The system is finished

Gateway Software Symposium - Day 1

Sat, 19 Mar 2005 14:01:21 GMT

As with every other year, I started off the event with a predetermined list of which sessions that I would attend. Only time will tell if this list will remain accurate. Typically I tend to stray off and see other sessions, spur of the moment.

Classloading in Java - Building Dynamic Systems Without Pain Sessions 1 & 2
By: Stuart Halloway
Part 1 of this presentation was the same one gave last year, but since there wasn't much else at this timeslot, I ended up repeating part 1. As always, Stuart's presentation was given with much energy and most importantly with IDEA on the screen half of the time. I'm not a big fan of the PowerPoint only presentations. Most of what was covered was above the virtual machine layer but below the application layer. The difference between explicit and implicit classloaders was expounded upon. The way certain applications like JUnit, ANT, and just about every application server violate the classloader delegation rule was discussed in depth. All in all it was a session all Java Programmers should see.

Ruby for Java Programmers
By: Dave Thomas
Since I've been interested in Ruby lately, I figured I'd give Dave Thomas's talk a shot. I'm glad I did and now I'm even more eager for the Ruby group to get productive. Dave was his usual entertaining self walking around in his socks and never running out of puns. In this talk, Dave covered some basic syntax that probably seemed bizarre to most people, I know it was the first time I came across it. Other things that were covered included, writing some code to pull web service data from Amazon to show book rankings. He had to mock up the Amazon web service since there was no internet connectivity. The final demonstration was storing this web service data into a mysql database using ActiveRecord.

Dinner was served around 6:30 and Dave Thomas's Keynote address followed. As with last year, there were not many food choices that were Lent aware, so I stuck with potatoes and bread. Oh well, no big deal. At Dave's keynote, the topic was the Art of Programming. Similarities between Art and Engineering were discussed. Concepts such as modularity were discussed in the context of writing software and how Michael Angelo painted the Ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. Both are made attainable by a divide and conquer mentality of breaking large tasks into small sub tasks. Other trials and tribulations of his work experience were touched upon. Several funny situations were discussed that i could not do justice for here so I won't even try. All in all, the Keynote rocked!

NoFluffJustStuff Gateway Software Symposium

Sun, 13 Mar 2005 17:01:16 GMT

Well it's that time again. Jay Zimmerman will be bringing the big dogs of software to St. Louis this coming weekend for the NoFluffJustStuff tour. I have attended every occurrence in St. Louis so far(2 to be exact) and will be attending this one as well. For those of you that find it difficult to stay current with the technology landscape, this tour has a lot to offer. With all that being said, I'm a bit disappointed with this year. First and foremost, some of my favorite speakers(Erik Hatcher, Robert Martin, and Mike Clark) are missing the St Louis offering. My impression is that every year there have been more and more local speakers and less of the traveling speakers. While I applaud the local guys participation in such an event, in many cases I could have seen their presentation for free at the local Special Interest Groups. Oh well, there is plenty to see still.

My tentative calendar can be found in HTML form here.
For those of you fortunate enough to be running OS X, an iCal feed can be found here.

One of the bright spots this year is that Dave Thomas and Stuart Halloway will be making their 3rd appearances in St. Louis. Both of them are nothing short of awesome. There won't be any heavy eyes in any of their talks. My biggest mistake to date was missing all of Stuart's presentations in 2003. What was I thinking!

Another gem for this year is that a small number of us are suppose to have dinner with Dave Thomas on Thursday night to discuss Ruby. Can't wait for this to kick off an already jam packed weekend.

Java Blogger Meetup at the Thirsty Bear

Tue, 29 Jun 2004 17:52:26 GMT

Last night a large group of geeks got together for a beer and some socializing at the Thirsty Bear. I think the event was set up by Simon Phipps, but many java bloggers attended. Heck, even Jonathan Schwartz, President and Chief Operating Officer of Sun Microsystem's showed up. Apparently, he has a blog as well.

As a side note, I would like to thank the guys from Atlassian for the java.blogs tshirt. The tshirt says, "More People read this tshirt than my blog" or something to that affect. Tshirts are top notch and have high geek appeal.

I got to meet Simon Brown and Sam Dalton while at the meetup. Although, I didn't get to buy Simon the beer I promised him. So Simon, if we meet up again, first beer is on me.

At the end of the night, Andrew and I spoke with Erik Hatcher for sometime about Struts and it's problems. Erik strongly suggests Tapestry so we may have to give it a test drive soon. I saw Erik's talk on Tapestry at the 2004 NoFluffJustStuff Gateway Java Symposium and I have to admin I was impressed. The question is, is it worth learning another framework that most people are comfortable. Regardless, a test drive is not out of the questions. If nothing else, it's a learning experience.

I made the switch

Thu, 15 Apr 2004 04:18:32 GMT

.... to Intellij Idea 4.0 that is. After using Eclipse for almost 2 years at home and WSAD for the past year at work, I've moved on to greener pastures. I had heard many good things about JetBrains product but had never really tried it out since I was rather happy with Eclipse at the time. One thing that I always try to do is use different tools and technologies at home from what I was using work.

Once my 30 day trial ran out, I contacted Jetbrains pleading that I loved their tool but couldn't justify spending $500 since I would only be using it at home. I inquired about their personal edition since it was half price($249), but to be honest I still had a hard time rationalizing that much for a tool to use just for fun. Eventually, I emailed there customer service about the dilemma and they suggested that if I had taken any courses recently, that I should buy the educational version. I have not taken any course's so I assumed this was a moot point. Just before sending the email though, I mentioned the NoFluffJustStuff symposium that I attended. Even though it was not the typical academic setting, I did learn a thing or two. Jetbrains ended up sending me an overstuffed URL that allowed me to purchase their product for the educational price $99. I was floored even though I thought this was reasonable. To make a long story short, I’m the proud owner of an educational discounted IntelliJ Idea license :)