a tech blog, by Colin Pretorius
A line from an interesting-as-always blog post by Robin Hanson:
Compared to designing things from scratch, there is far more work out there maintaining, repairing, and making minor modifications to devices and software. Yet engineering and software schools focus mainly on designing things from scratch.
{2014.06.20 23:29}
Based initially on this page, this is what I do to debug web apps in Eclipse when using the jetty-maven-plugin.
create a new Run Configuration
main class: org.codehaus.classworlds.Launcher
program args: jetty:run
VM args:
-Xmx512M
-Dclassworlds.conf=${M2_HOME}/bin/m2.conf
-Dmaven.home=${M2_HOME}
-Djetty.port=8082
... where I've set up M2_HOME in the list of variables available in the Arguments tab of the run config.
In the Classpath tab, Add plexus-classworlds-2.4.jar from the boot/ subdirectory of your maven app dir.
{2014.06.02 20:06}
{2014.05.30 21:15}
Have I been living under a rock? Xtend. I'm wary of 'new' languages which don't go very far, but this looks like an eminently sensible little language that has... operator overloading!
{2014.04.16 23:00}
Businessweek: What Michael Lewis Gets Wrong About High-Frequency Trading (via)
An interesting quote:
That year [2012] ... the entire speed-trading industry made about $1 billion, down from its peak of around $5 billion in 2009. That's nothing to sneeze at, but it isn't impressive once you put it into context: JPMorgan Chase (JPM) made more than $5 billion in profit in just the last quarter.
{2014.04.02 20:56}
Stephen Colebourne : Why JSR-310 isn't Joda-Time.
When Java 7 came out, I was underwhelmed. Java 8 feels like a real step forward, and not just because of lambdas.
{2014.03.02 14:24}
It's been a long-time policy not to mention where I work on my blog(s). But an ex-colleague of mine got in touch late last year to say that some code I'd worked on in a previous job was being open-sourced, and would I object to having my name listed in the credits? Call me vain, but the only reasonable response to a question like that is "sure, why not!"
And so it is that I'm listed as a co-author of the Cougar application framework. It was the brainchild of a colleague, and pretty cutting-edge at the time, with lots of asynchronous wizardry and protocol agnosticism built in from the outset. We did a lot of interesting things with it. Another open-sourced chunk of code that I worked on was Tornjak, although we didn't call it that at the time. This was all itch-scratching stuff and a small part of it was my baby for a while, so it's quite a stroll down memory lane. It's fun looking through the documentation as well, and picking out things I remember writing, or recognising turns of phrase which I know have to be mine. It also reminded me that my github page is a little bare; about time I got around to actually publishing some stuff.{2014.02.08 21:41}
I fired up the old XP laptop this weekend for the first time in months. 2014 will see XP finally die, with no new security updates, and that's pretty sad. My old cheapo Acer's about 7 years old now and it's still zippier running XP than the beastly Dell we bought to replace it, which runs Windows 7, which is just about the crappiest (Not Responding), most sluggish (Not Responding) and downright frustrating version of Windows I've had the misfortune of using (Not Responding).
{2014.01.29 22:32}
Too late for Christmas, but once the new year settles in this might be a good candidate for a new pet project.
{2013.12.30 22:41}
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