Archive for August, 2007

More Joys Of Python

Friday, August 31st, 2007

I haven’t had a chance to do anything in Python lately.  But yesterday I needed to do some screen scraping and, after looking at the HTML I needed to scrap from, I knew that I needed some good tools.The HTML is table in a form with several rows in it. In cell in each rows [...]

A Late-Blooming Garden

Thursday, August 30th, 2007

I saw a vegetable stand yesterday that was filled with pumpkins and watermelon — you know, late summer and fall items from the garden. I thought of our garden at home and I chuckled to myself.You see, our small garden is a late bloomer. I got started a little late and planted three tomato [...]

Lunar

Tuesday, August 28th, 2007

I sneaked out of bed at about 4:40am this morning. I tried the backyard first, but we had too many trees in the way. I ended up walking a block or so to the main street where there was less tree cover. I tried to take a picture, but my camera and [...]

Some Random Techie Notes

Friday, August 24th, 2007

I was going to try out Git on my machine this afternoon as a little project.  But then read the warnings on Git’s WindowsInstall page and agreed with the user’s comment at the end. I’ll give it another year.How come I just found out about the svn list command?$ svn list file:///c:/Projects/repos/my_proj/branchescheckpoint-1.187/checkpoint-1.188/checkpoint-1.189/checkpoint-1.190/checkpoint-1.191/checkpoint-1.192/checkpoint-1.194/I switched to using [...]

Compliance vs Commitment

Friday, August 24th, 2007

I was taking the last of my New Employee classes this week.  One class was on communication and one of the Big Ideas from that class was “Compliance vs Commitment ” and that you really want people to be committed to what you are saying as opposed to just complying.  This passed through my brain [...]

Jython 2.2 is finally out!

Friday, August 24th, 2007

I was busy this week and didn’t get a chance to blog this:Jython 2.2 released!! Woohoo!!It’s been a long time coming guys.  Congrats!  Powered by ScribeFire.

Another Work Example

Wednesday, August 22nd, 2007

This email was in my inbox one day. It was meant for another team, but I’m on their alias (long story). The contents were:It is important that we keep our test cases up to date. Whom ever has the pager should run continuous integration on a daily basis.There is nothing “continuous” about someone logging [...]

My Big Ball of Duct Tape

Tuesday, August 21st, 2007

I have two projects at work — one is new, and I’m using Spring, and unit tests and life is good. But one is old — quite old. There is code from five years ago, which is positively ancient for a J2EE application! This app is just a Big Ball of Duct [...]

Book Review: Spook Country

Sunday, August 19th, 2007

It’s not often I review a book only published a couple of weeks ago. But some strange twist of fate, I was able to get it from the library on the same day it was published.

I like William Gibson, but kind of lost hope for him in his second trilogy. I didn’t [...]

Setting up a JNDI Data Source in Spring

Friday, August 17th, 2007

Just put something like this in your applicationContext.xml <bean id=”appDS” class=”org.springframework.jndi.JndiObjectFactoryBean”>  <property name=”jndiEnvironment”>       <props>        <prop key=”java.naming.factory.initial”>weblogic.jndi.WLInitialContextFactory</prop>        <prop key=”java.naming.provider.url”>t3://localhost</prop>      </props>    </property>     <property name=”jndiName” value=”datasourcejndi_name”>   </property></bean>You’re properties and jndiName will probably be different.  But still — no code, just configuration. It doesn’t get much better than that!Powered by ScribeFire.