Everything beta

There are three forces that shape a project: domain, process and technology. Add the "-driven" suffix to any of them and you'll perhaps recognize some of the methods used in projects you've been involved in and yet, as soon as one takes too much of a lead against the other two, failure will follow almost inevitably. At the intersection of these three forces we find familiar terms and concepts but first a word or two … read on »

    There's an interesting story rippling the news stream these days: The New York Times is questioning the ways Techcrunch reports on news. The crux of the issue is product journalism v. process journalism, the act of producing news only after all facts have been verified versus just writing the story based on what the author best knows about an event at that moment then let the story evolve and provide rigorous updates and corrections once … read on »

Level 2 cache is one of the most powerful features of the JPA spec. It's a transparent layer that manages out-of-session data access and cranks-up the performance of the data access tier. To my knowledge it has been first seen in Hibernate and was later adopted by the then-emerging JPA spec (driven mostly by the Hibernate guys back in the day). As annotations gained strength and adoption, L2 caching that was initially configured through XML or … read on »

     "Thinking in..." anything has been a marketing quirk for a while now, being used and abused from the field of language learning to computer science. Thinking in Java is the title of a well known book written by Bruce Eckel. I am passing a "Think in Spanish" course flyer ad every time I stroll on Bloor Street West here in Toronto. Funny, thinking within the rigors of a discipline is the very definition of thinking … read on »

Since I went back from vacation (Easter with family back home in Romania) I got quite interested in the mobile internet. This was the first time I wasn't going to internet cafes or asking buddies to let me use their internet (and their PCs). I have a beaten Nokia 3100 that works both in RO and here in Toronto. I was playing with it in my first vacation days back home, exploring the features of my … read on »

As I'm using the ubiquitous Hibernate 3.3 as the JPA 1.0 provider for Spincloud, I decided to try out another one. I had tried OpenJPA (spawned from Kodo JDO) when they only supported build-time bytecode enhancement and it was a pain to make it work. It worked all right but boy what a pain. There's now an agent to provide on-the-fly enhancement but I'll take transparent enhancement anytime. I've heard about EclipseLink before. The … read on »

I couldn't miss this one. It didn't take long  after Google released its seafloor imagery to its Earth and Maps products for someone to claim the discovery of nothing less than Atlantis itself! Ah, and again it wasn't me... Take a closer look at the Atlantic Ocean floor area: On the left, a grid-like structure is clearly visible. I also spotted a similar "grid" east of the main one (yes, I called it!) and some more off the … read on »

I love Hollywood movies. They project a surreal world that in which all stories have a happy ending. Whenever the hero seems to be cornered and rapidly heading to his doom, a last-second turn of events allows him to escape. This is deus ex machina. God from the machine. To the rescue. I'm thinking back at many movies I so enjoyed. Terminator, Die Hard (yeah, right), Batman, Ironman, Indiana. Deus ex machina all over. I denounce them. Think of … read on »

I like RESTful URLs. They clearly express the intent of the provided resource. We humans speak a language close to REST when we talk to The Internet.  Take a look at Google's RESTful search query, probably the most used RESTful URL ever: http://www.google.com/search?q=your-terms-of-choice in freeform language this translates to: "Google, search for this term." How about the Flickr RESTful tag cluster search service: http://api.flickr.com/services/rest/?method=flickr.tags.getClusters& api_key=a6f11b67ae348a7b3f2da0d865b8bc1d&tag=Berlin In Flickr lingo this means: "Fetch all tag clusters for the 'Berlin' tag". It doesn't take much to … read on »

Oh, that “I’m a Mac” commercial is on the TV again. Then some ugly new ad where some webcam people defend the PCs on behalf of Microsoft: “I’m a PC”. While my brain was tricked into an attempted wash, I realized that I’m not any of it. I’m a human being. I’m not trying to help you here Redmond but voila, here’s one good ad slogan: I am not a machine. I’m a human being. And I use … read on »