the corner office : tech blog

v2.5.3. What a mission.

In study breaks I've been tackling small tasks to get the blog app up and running again so I can make some changes. The last time I did any work on the app I was using MyEclipse, kept everything in CVS and had never touched maven. I got a bit diligent one weekend last year and made a half-hearted attempt at resurrecting the app, and least got as far as converting everything to maven and getting it to compile.

Didn't mean I could run it, though. Since I don't have MyEclipse and flat refuse to use Eclipse's IBMified web tools stuff, I decided to give the maven-jetty-plugin a bash. After getting things working a few days ago, a version bump somewhere broke absolutely everything. I was using version 7.0.0.pre5 before, which was some beastly 6/7 hybrid that sort-of worked like the jetty 6 plugin worked. The latest version 7 has a number of subtle differences causing all sorts of errors, including this beauty:

java.lang.IllegalStateException: No LoginService for org.eclipse.jetty.security.authentication.DigestAuthenticator@12a416a in org.eclipse.jetty.security.ConstraintSecurityHandler@12cb585

Top of the list of search results on how to resolve it is this blog entry, written by Max Berger, the same star of a gent who maintains the Eclipse CDT setup howto.

For now I'm sticking with 7.0.0.pre5 though.

• Jetty welcome files not working (also).

• taking tests helps learning

I started writing this over the holiday but it's already approaching the end of Jan. Without further ado, the annual techie review.

Tricky to talk about work. For a few years now I've gotten my jollies from the buzzwordy stuff - concurrency, low latency, distributed systems etc etc and this year I got about as far down that road as I'd ever imagined I'd go. Dream job, techie heaven, and doing stuff very few people get to do.

And so naturally, I started wondering 'what's next?'

What's next was the City, and when an excellent opportunity came up I took it. So now it's more of the same with the added mix of maths and finance and lots of new things to learn. And that's all I have to say about work.

On the home front, my 2010 goals were to avoid Java for hobby coding, and I said I'd give myself time to pick a project to work on.

As it turned out, there *was* no hobby coding this year. The only coding I did do was for a university project. Aaaand I ended up doing it in Java because I genuinely didn't have time to faff about with anything else. I did a bit of Python and C++ fiddling in the early stages of the project and used R for the maths bits, which turned out to be quite fun. Nothing heavy though.

The next year? Final year of this course, so it's going to be more of the same, although hopefully less pressured. I have no huge goals but plenty of small jobs and tasks I want to take care of.

I'll list some of them to keep me honest:

• do some long outstanding work on the blog app

• a small app in C# to become comfortable enough to whip up small GUIs.

• if I keep playing EVE Online (mainly just trading at the moment), then build something to maximise potential trading profit.

• find something to code up in C++ so I don't become entirely rusty.

... and I'll try to blog as much about it as possible to stay focused.

That looks achievable, let's see how the year goes.

Hackish and doesn't copy tags, but a start.

for f in *.wav; do fn=`basename "$f" .wav`; lame -V2 -h "$f" "$fn.mp3"; done

• NYT: The New Speed of Money, Reshaping Markets

• Top 50 Programming Quotes of All Time.

• Artima: Azul's Pauseless GC.

• The Irish Banking Crisis: A Parable (via)

• William F Briggs: Do not calculate correlations after smoothing data

• Square Goldfish: R, the acf function and statistical significance. How R calculates the significance level in an ACF plot. To wit:

  significance_level <- qnorm((1 + 0.95)/2)/sqrt(sum(!is.na(series)))