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 [...]
I’m using Sun’s Java Advanced Imaging libraries for image manipulation on a personal project, as I’ve mentioned before.
Things were working swimmingly, but when I started testing with images from my phone’s camera the following exception started appearing:
Error: One factory fails for the operation “jpeg”
Occurs in: javax.media.jai.ThreadSafeOperationRegistry
java.lang.reflect.InvocationTargetException
[...]
The problem was not [...]
I’ve been building a personal project for a couple months now using Groovy on Grails. Through all this time we’ve been working with in-memory HSQL databases, but now that we’re ready to do a test release I began testing embedded Java databases to pick which one we would use.
My first candidate was Apache Derby, based [...]
Software release is such a pain. Better it remained hidden, cozy and safe, in our development environment.
Very detailed article on automating server backups using Amazon’s S3 system, which I’ve recently trying out using myself for one of my Assembla-hosted projects.
PS: Yes, I’m making the Assembla backups myself. I’m not too keen on giving someone else the secret access key.
I just spent a few hours tearing my hair out at an peculiar behavior with JAI, and thought to briefly document it in case anybody ran into a similar situation.
I started off from the code on this relatively old article, adapting it to my needs on Groovy. The intention was to:
Get an image
Crop it [...]
A very good page on setting up Postix as a mail server on OS X, including fixing a broken launchd script.
Set the org.postfix.master.plist file exactly as it is on that page. If you leave out the last two keys, it might tell you that it was launched but you won’t be able to [...]
Great speech by Clay Shirky about how much people love doing something is an indicator of if it will succeed.
Originally found via BoingBoing.
Here’s a helpful bit for MySQL users for whom the service starts and shuts down immediately. After updating a few things on my Mac, MySQL started misbehaving - I ran it, the service started, and it stopped itself a second later. This is what my console looks like:
hydra:~ ricardo$ sudo [...]
If there’s one thing I’ve learned over the years, is that people are lazy and good at rationalizing. Why exercise, if a single chocolate will make you fat again? Why oppose a corrupt government, if they’ll just be replaced by someone worse? Why learn something new, if it’ll be obsolete in six [...]