I saw the Pragmatic Wetware book by Andy Hunt. “Hmm”, I thought, “a book on the human brain and how it works. Interesting, but I have too much else to read and study.” Wrong. Apparently I had missed the pragmatic part of that title. As I am averaging three to five technical books a month [...]
Archive for January, 2010
Pragmatic Wetware and The Dreyfuss Model
Posted in The Softer Side on January 28, 2010 | Leave a Comment »
Software Anti-patterns and Software Development Philosophies
Posted in The Softer Side on January 23, 2010 | Leave a Comment »
I always wanted to read the Anti-Patterns book, but never got to it. I stumbled across the Anti-Patterns list on Wikipedia at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-patterns and found it to be a worthwhile read. Obviously, a big part of learning what to do is learning what not to do as well. I got to the end of it, [...]
Regular Expression Pushups
Posted in Development Techologies, The Softer Side on January 21, 2010 | Leave a Comment »
Regular expressions were not my strong suit, but I felt it was important to master them (or at least reach competency). So, on a flight back from Walt Disney World last summer, I studied them from one of my Ruby books and summarized them in detail in Evernote (to refer back to them). I thought [...]
Debugging and Assumptions
Posted in Development Techologies, The Softer Side on January 18, 2010 | Leave a Comment »
I wrote a simple program for work a week ago – a webMethods java service that deletes a directory and recursively deletes all files and sub-directories. I put together some unit tests, and it ran great. Then, I was told that when invoked from another service (creating the directory for zip/unzip), half the time the [...]
Introduction to Data Warehousing, ETL, Business Intelligence and the Star Schema
Posted in Development Techologies on January 15, 2010 | 1 Comment »
One of the things I have appreciated about my “new job” is getting to work with a technically astute large-scale mission-critical enterprise architecture. Part of this includes data warehousing and business intelligence, two areas I have had interest in since reading “Super Crunchers” by Ian Ayres (a very interesting look at data mining to find [...]
Implementing the Java Messager Service (JMS) Request/Reply Pattern and Other Newbie Practice Runs
Posted in Development Techologies on January 11, 2010 | 1 Comment »
After summarizing the JMS Tutorial, I wrote a number of code samples to try to cover the essentials and experiment to make sure things worked the way I thought. This included at least the following: Using queues and topics Implementing a durable topic subscriber Using local transactions and experimenting with rolling back Using non-transaction mode [...]
ActiveMQ – Quick and Easy JMS Provider Installation and Workarounds
Posted in Development Techologies on January 7, 2010 | 1 Comment »
My new job uses JMS, finally giving me a good reason to really play with this technology. After reviewing the coding techniques, I needed a JMS Provider to work against that would be quick and easy to set up – Apache ActiveMQ. It was quick and easy: Went to http://activemq.apache.org/activemq-530-release.html and downloaded the Unix version [...]
SOAP Messages – RPC vs. Document vs. Literal vs. Encoded vs. Wrapped vs. Unwrapped
Posted in Development Techologies on January 4, 2010 | 1 Comment »
Okay, I know that all of this are not strictly versus each other, but I used to find the combination of options for SOAP messages intimidating. Why so many options to essentially accomplish the same thing? The following are the basic options: rpc/literal rpc/encoded document/literal document/encoded Since encoded is not part of the WS-I (Web [...]
