Archive for the ‘Software’ Category

New Job!

Saturday, November 24th, 2007

Looks like I have a new job in Melbourne! I start on the 2nd of January at Stock Software.. They are a small contracting / consultancy type place, and it sounds like I’ll be working on some cool J2EE stuff as well as some Ruby on Rails, which I should have some fun learning. Windows based desktops though.. I might end up having to use…… Vista.. Ergh.

I should be heading over just after Christmas, so there’s a little bit of time for me to get myself all packed and organised. I’ll probably typically leave everything until the last minute :)

Got a new Nokia N95, mainly for the GPS feature so I don’t get too lost… Oh how I do like the new toys :)

Going to see Muse tomorrow night, that should be awesome.

An update Redux, Electric Boogaloo

Saturday, September 8th, 2007

Ok, neglected things here for a while….

Holidays photos are here. I had an awesome time on holiday, did a bunch of cool things, like sailing a catamaran, and scuba diving on the Great Barrier Reef. Damn, that was just too awesome. Also got to see a bit of what Australia is like, and has cemented in my mind, that I need to move over there (Melbourne specifically) to live.

Relatedly, everyone is leaving Chrischurch. Two of my friends are about to go to Auckland, one is  off to Melbourne herself on, um Monday, One has pretty much decided to shift to Wellington at the end of the year, another thinking about Dunedin, one is considering study in the US, my flatmates want to travel through Europe soon. ABANDON SHIP, LAST PERSON OUT PLEASE TURN OFF THE LIGHTS!

Just had a very stressful day, where things were very uncertain about my work situation, and it was looking like I was going to be unemployed just as I need to be saving money for the move to Oz.. but thankfully it looks like things have worked out perfectly, and I’ll be finishing up at my current place just as I’m looking to move. *whew*

Having hardware troubles with my PC. Very inconvenient timing. Decided that the motherboard is toast, which means a big upgrade in the pipeline as I can’t get a replacement part :( Not a welcome expense, but I’ll take the new machine over to Oz instead of building a new one over there. Swings and roundabouts I suppose.

Also the app I’ve built isn’t fast enough. I expect it will handle a large concurrent client load, but the individual request/response time is too long. Had a play with a profiling tool for the first time. Kind of cool. Decided that lookups/calls to EJBs, even “local” ones is really damn expensive and probably isn’t helping things. Hmm

Nasty haxors

Tuesday, July 17th, 2007

Well it seems I’m back on the air after some nasty haxors (probably script kiddies) managed to root the box :( Prime suspect #1 is somebody’s insecure PHP code (not mine, of course ;) ). It’s times like this that really cements my recently found hatred for PHP. I’m thinking if I need to do any new sites that aren’t big enough to warrant Java, then I’ll have to look into something else. Python? Ruby? Hmm, there’s always too much new stuff to learn in this line of business….

Different way of teaching programming

Wednesday, May 16th, 2007

I saw this link on Digg, and was immediately interested. I have a friend, who is bright enough, but has never really been able to ‘get’ programming. This is because she learns in a aural/kinetic way, which is pretty much the exact opposite of the way programming is traditionally taught.

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On Lindon Puffin and Eric Raymond’s dating tips

Sunday, May 6th, 2007

On Friday, I cruised along to Al’s Bar (next the Pak n’ Save of all places) to see Lindon Puffin play a show for the release of his new (and very long awaited) CD, “Show Pony”. As always, Lindon was very entertaining, and was in fine form… the stories were very funny – I feel sorry for “Emily Archer” for whom he wrote clever little song about only meeting someone a couple of times and forming an obsession over it. Turns out a few people at the gig know Emily Archer.. and someone called her on his cell and was like “Yeah, Emily… yeah.. he totally did the song…. yeah….” (and then walked off outside). It’s a darn shame it’s not on the album. Was a little sad that he didn’t do more songs from “Stuff like that”, but the new material is very good, as were the cover songs he did, including unforgettable moments such as Snoop Dogg’s “Bitches ain’t shit” done on the Ukelele. He’s touring soon, so if you get a chance to see Lindon Play, do…

By some total random chance, I ended up going to the Christchurch Symphony on Saturday night.. one of Liz’s friends ended up with a spare ticket, and a few frantic last-minute txts, and a hurried jog to my car later, I was in the town hall listening to Grieg’s Piano Concerto, which was actually pretty enjoyable – the last time I’d sat down to listen to classical music was probably in my first year at university…

A google search for ‘geek dating’ turned up these three pages, which seems to offer some pretty sound advice, but the most disturbing thing, is that they appear to have been written by none other than Eric Raymond. Yes, this Eric Raymond:

Eric Raymond.. doing.. something

Of course, one cannot mention him without mentioning the excellent Everybody Loves Eric Raymond webcomic.

Oh, I solved my async JMS callback problem, using a fairly in-elegant hack, where I have a singleton object which maps the session bean instances to a reference ID, which I then pass in via the JMS message. It’s ugly, but it works :-/