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Archive for the 'Programming' Category

Java SE 6 on OS X

So Apple finally releases Java SE 6 for the Mac, with its huge speed improvements, and now I can’t edit any single input field on either of the Java applications I use (including Moneydance and IntelliJ IDEA) because the fields show up greyed-out and are read-only. No, rebooting did not help. Seems I have to […]

git add before commit

I’ve been experimenting with git for version control of my document folder, before I use it professionally. It has several things I like, particularly the blazing speed and the fact that there’s a single .git directory instead of a myriad of .svn all over the place (which made it a bit of a pain […]

Pragmatic Programming in Erlang, chapter 8

Lately I’ve been reading Joe Armstrong’s Pragmatic Programming in Erlang, learning a couple new tricks. In chapter 8 he proposes a problem:

Write a ring benchmark. Create N processes in a ring. Send a message round the ring M times so that a total of N * M messages get sent. Time how long this takes […]

Development blog

Speaking of which, I’m keeping a development blog at my company site. I’ll continue to publish the Grails plugins and any other code I create over there. Enjoy!

VMware 2.0 beta server performance

VMware server has been in beta since November, 2007, and you can try it out for free by going to their site. Don’t. It’s unstable and has performance problems - I had to manually reboot our machine at least twice a week because the virtual servers became unresponsive. I originally thought that […]

CentOS and VMWare Server

If you’re using CentOS hosts on a VMWare server, you should read this.

Grails Image Tools plugin

A few days ago I released version 0.1 of my Grails ImageTools plugin, based off some work that I’ve done on personal projects. It provides functions for:

Image loading
Image saving
Cropping
Masking
Scaling

The latest version of the documentation will remain at the Grails wiki. You probably should also read my post on JAI and masking operations if […]

Zend debug breakpoints not working on Mac OS X

It’s the revenge of PHP debugging: for some reason breakpoints just stopped working on my Eclipse PHP IDE. This is apparently a known issue, even on release 1.0 of PDT.
After much hair-pulling, I’ve figured out a workaround: while debugging only stops on a breakpoint the first time while using the integrated Eclipse […]

Grails 0.6 released

Grails 0.6 has been released, here’s the release post.
For those wondering what it is, Grails is a framework for the Java platform designed for high productivity. I started using it for a project with version 0.5, have since moved to 0.5.6, and will soon upgrade to this latest version.
While I appreciate Ruby on Rails’ […]

Hiring quality programmers

On-the-spot article about hiring quality programmers, and the very high costs of staffing your company with adequate people.

When you work in an environment with experts things simply work. They are easier to use and require less initial training. The software is easier to modify. Requested changes happen more frequently […]