Did I say starting something...

So I found a draft post that said something to the effect that I was going to start working on re-learning Objective-C.  And that was dated in July 2011...  So I guess I didn't do it.   Maybe I'll give it another go.  I had updated to Xcode 4 which has enough changes in the interface that following tutorials difficult.  Xcode 4 has been out for a while now and iOS 5 is out now so we should be in much better shape to move forward.

First though, I'm going to give some iPhoto things a try.  I've found a few different suggestions on how to post to the blog directly from iPhoto.  Let's see if it works.

--Update:  Apparently I just deleted that post because the new blogger interface confused me.

But first...

How to you put pictures in this blog anyway?

I thought that hood ornaments were a lost art! Silly, right? Well, I'm just testing this. Now that I've tried this, I can help Kate out some more.

gross

So, our toilet was slowly leeching out water... We decided to replace the wax ring, but unfortunately we discovered on removal of the toilet that the floor flange that the toilet bolts to is so corroded that it had broken. Time to call a plumber...

...on a much more enjoyable note, I'm planning to start two coding projects. First, I want to make a mobile app. I'll likely start with Android due to my Java experience, but iOS is really appealing and plus I have an iPhone. Second, I want to learn to build a rich client app using the Netbeans platform. Given the possible demise of the Swing Application Framework, Netbeans recommends their RCP framework to replace it. I'd like to get an idea how crazy that is first.

Now to come up with application ideas...

Following?

I just started playing with this following thing. I have no idea what it is. Maybe after I have a few margaritas and followed a few more I'll figure it out.

Kate's pages

Watching Kate set up a cake blog. Should be fun!

Wow! This is still here... And now I can post from my phone... Oh the future.

Wow!

So sadly, I've neglected this blog for a long while. In fact, I've waited long enough now that StackOverflow has managed to be around for a whole year. If you haven't been there yet, you should go.

I've moved on to using Windows 7 RC and Fedora 11 on my laptop and my work desktop has an installation of CentOS 5.3 and the old and gross Windows XP. I hope that will end eventually.

StackOverflow

I've been using stackoverflow for a while now and I have to say that I really like it. If you are looking for programming answers, its the place to go. Free, what's not to like?

StackOverflow

Getting back to doing this, I've recently just started using stackoverflow. I just received my invite to the beta test today, so I guess I just made it. Jeff Atwood was saying in the podcast that next week might start the actual live public site.

I just asked my first question which, after it was answered, I realized was pretty dumb. I had a more complex question, but I need to retest it with code first. I just didn't ask what I meant to ask.

A new day at SDWest.

Well, today we managed to really attend sessions. There were some work things happening that really just prevented us from providing our full attention, but given that the topic of conversation was also the money source for our time, the only real problem I see is the expense of being in Santa Clara. That cost to work is much less than the cost of two days of work.

Anyway, that being said, yesterday I did attend Native XML Databases by Elliotte Rusty Harold. His presentation was pretty informative, but I really cared the most about the first half. Since, I knew nothing about XML databases and only a little more than that about relational databases, I got a lot out of it. I'll have to go back to work and re-evaluate some of the database choices I made now that I've learned a little more. Maybe, as I write more of this stuff, I'll even be able to communicate more of it back to you.

Today, I attended four whole sessions.

The first was building RESTful web services with Axis2/Java. I think I was doing fine with it at first, but I decided to sit too far from the front to read all of the slides and I can't find the presenter's slides anywhere. I'll have to update the post later with the new information.

The second was building a multi-threaded server in Java with NIO. Ron Hitchens has posted the slides and source code at the site for his book. He had a very informative presentation I thought. Ron talked about using selectors, which is something I've never taken the time to think about. I was going to spend the time but when I figured out that there was no Multicast datagram channel, I decided not to spend any more time on it. Although some of the audience sort of seemed to miss the point as far as what the topic of his talk was about. They were asking questions as if he was teaching them how to write a web server and they wanted him to tell them exactly what to write. Some the questions just seemed a little out of place. Of course, ironically, Paul Tyma was giving a presentation in the afternoon that was essentially just the opposite of Ron's.

The third presentation was by Brian Goetz and was titled Effective Java Concurrency. Based primarily on some of his Java memory model work and his book. He had lots of good information, but I suspect that if I finish reading his book, I'll get to that information again.
Some notes I took:
- Allocation is cheap - use it unless the objects are very large
- final is the new private
- Make objects immutable if at all possible
- Document as clearly as possible whether an object is thread safe or not
- Try to eliminate or shorten stretches of code that can only execute serially or basically, make synchronization code blocks as short as possible
Also, Brian, if you read this, sorry we were bad people and made so much noise at the end. We were just excited to move on to the puzzlers.

The fourth presentation was Java Puzzlers with Neal Gafter and Joshua Bloch. That was a very entertaining presentation and I think the best that can be said is to read Neal's blog. He posts puzzlers regularly.

First day of smaller talks...

I will try to write up a quick blurb about the sessions I attended yesterday tomorrow.
I also have more pictures I should post, but I just haven't yet.
I "went" to Better Test Design, Native XML Databases, Implementing RESTful Services in Java, and Java Performance Myths.

Security and defensive programming?

The first day of SDWEST, I attended tutorial on security and defensive programming by Jim DelGrosso. I'm not quite sure that I was part of the appropriate audience, but only because most of what he talked about didn't really apply directly to what I do. Since I'm primarily developing Java code for internal applications, I can generally trust the user of the application to not be malicious. It was a very interesting presentation and I would recommend it to any developer who hasn't thought much about security and personal information protection on their own machines. There were lots of little gotchas for websites that had never even occurred to me. But as part of my work, I wouldn't run into any of them generally. At the end, he had lots of good points about how to think defensively when coding and I like the recommendation to use unit tests to test security behaviors as well as correct behavior for valid inputs.
Jim provided a decent presentation that as a result of working on Java programs for internal work just doesn't apply to me most of the time.

Test Driven Development?

I attended Justin Gordon's tutorial on JUnit and Test Driven Development. After sitting through just the first half of the presentation, I definitely see how this could be a useful method to develop. I'm hoping to use it to work on my next work project only because its only me really working on it. I know almost all of the basic requirements already myself because the goal is really to build an internal library to access our data. I just need to hide the guts of the storage and unit conversions and whatnot from the rest of the team. It should be really easy to try out TDD that way. Also the other thing I'm working on is just fixing bugs in our new display/data system. That is the source of the data for the project I mentioned first.

I really like some the guidelines that Justin laid out in the session.
- Make the names describe the requirement under test.
- Test the goal of the code, not the implementation.
- Tests should be for one specific case, not a whole pile of cases.
- Don't try to write a bunch of tests at once and make them all work.
- Do not fix a bug until you have written a test that demonstrates the bug.

I think that last one is huge.

Overall, although I had to leave a little early, I thought Justin did a great job.

...more groovy

So additionally, I want to mention that I'm planning on trying out using Groovy on the next work project because its main use is to build a library to access our data that is usually in a database, but not quite always. The Groovy tutorial also seemed to lead me in a way to two other topics. First, Test Driven Development... The last lab for Groovy was to use it to test java classes. That seems to be one of the more powerful uses for Groovy, and I'll definitely be playing with that soon. Maybe I'll even use that as a way to introduce Groovy to some others at work using JUnit and Groovy to test our classes. The other presentation that I attended this morning was on Native XML databases...

Groovy 101?

I attended Andrew Glover's Groovy 101 tutorial and I have to say that I was fairly impressed at some of the stuff that you could do very easily in Groovy. I definitely do not like the name, but that aside I decided to give some Groovy coding a try.

Firstly, it is really easy to move into Groovy programming because standard Java is also Groovy. The syntax is legal. Also, the Groovy code compiles to Java byte code so you can call Groovy from Java and vice versa. Definitely go to the Groovy homepage to see what Groovy looks like. So far my favorite things are the SQL connectors and the MarkupBuilders. So much boilerplate or at least tedious code is completely taken care of by Groovy itself, so you can focus on the actual problem. That's much better.

I'm trying to replace a javascript that we use to launch some Java apps with a Groovy script. More later...

Overall, I enjoyed Andrew's tutorial. He was the first of many presenters to use a Mac at the conference. Wish I had one...

SDWest08

I've managed to make it to SDWest 08 this year and I've attended 3 tutorial sessions so far. I'll probably post a little more later, but I figured I'd try to get back to this posting thing again.

But, more importantly, I haven't been to this area before and I think its fun to drive around and see Sun Microsystems headquarters, or Google, or Yahoo. And the hotel we are staying at is across the street from Tivo. :)

Pizza

I tried to make pizza dough today. 1 1/2 cups plus 1 tablespoon of flour, 1 teaspoon of instant active yeast, 1 teaspoon of sugar, 1 teaspoon of salt, 8 tablespoons of olive oil, and 2/3 cup of water. I suspect that I did something wrong here, maybe the measurements. It didn't rise very much. Strange though... But, I also bought some pre-made bag dough, and just used that. I'll see what my creation looks like tomorrow.

Nov 16? Really?

Wow, I'm bad at this.

Anyway, I'm still toughing out Vista. I actually like the eye candy, and the IO seems better. I don't like that I can't turn off the windows indexing permanently, but if I just let the machine go for a little while so that it indexes when I'm not watching it, its not too bad.

I can't believe how hard the AI is in Supreme Commander sometimes. I just played a 2 human vs 4 computer AI battle and we were destroyed. 6 nukes total, 5 in one shot and then 1 later. I wasn't even on the third tech level yet.

As for my Vista experience, I'm really not happy that ZoneAlarm conflicts with multicast. I've spent time writing a test program to prove that the reason ZoneAlarm doesn't work with the Tivo Desktop software is because the multicast to loopback is totally blocked by it. I haven't checked in the past 20 days to see if its fixed yet, but it wasn't in the last beta a tried.

Vista and Java continued

So, after I took the time to debug my issues, it just started working. I don't know what caused it to happen but it works now. I have no idea.

Vista and Java

I got a new laptop at work and it has Vista on it. I decided to give it a go for work. After a month, I'm starting to get really irritated. I'm not going to digress too much here. What I really want to bring up is the networking in Vista. If you run "ipconfig /all" in Vista you get a list of 15 items, but in XP SP2, you only get what makes sense. You get the physical adapters and thats it. But my problem is more directly related to the what multicast packets get handled. I'm working a piece of test code that I'll probably post later. It basically creates a thread to list to a socket set to listen for multicast packets on a specific group and port. Then a second thread is created to send 8 packets out to that group and port. In Vista, the packets are never recieved but in XP they are. I discovered this because it also doesn't work in JmDNS. The Java implementation of multicast DNS uses that exact technique and it fails to work on Vista, but works on XP. I don't want to have to install XP just do work, but if I can't figure this out, then I'll have to go "backwards." I'll post the code later.