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Posts about photography, contract bridge, astrophotography, astronomy, Java development, internet systems.

“Sexier Software with Java and Flex” James Ward

Notes from TheServerSide Java Symposium March 2009

I was interested in this talk because we use a lot of Flex in MyAds for MySpace. Ward is an Adobe guy.

He began with some flashy demos, an interesting way to enter car accident information for an insurance form on a web site, and a desktop application called SalesBuilder.

Flex components: [...]

“Intro to JRuby” Neal Ford

Notes from TheServerSide Java Symposium, March 2009

Why Ruby? He talks about the known good language features, but the biggest reason is Rails. Ruby is actually an older language than Java.

JRuby 1.1 incorporates a just-in-time (JIT) compiler, and in many tests is faster than the Matz Reference Implementation.

In answer to a question, JRuby would exclude some gems [...]

“Just Enough Early Architecture to Guide Development” Jon Kern

Notes from TheServerSide Java Symposium March 2009

Jon Kern from TogetherSoft, doing this since the 80′s.

Trick Q: How is software built? What’s the most important piece? Requirements? Customers? A problem? A: 1. People 2. Process, and 3. Tools

Q: How do we start? Use cases? Architecture? Domain? Just start coding? Is architecture emergent? A: It can be … [...]

“On the lam from the furniture police” Neal Ford

These are random notes from Neal Ford’s keynote talk at TheServerSide Java Symposium.

The “furniture police” he mentions are the management folks that unintentionally take productive people and squeeze them into environments such as cubicle farms that make productivity difficult. It’s also a metaphor for every distracting thing in the workplace.

The reference comes the book Peopleware: Productive [...]

Updating an old platform, and running PHP4 and PHP5 together.

Jane and I wanted to set up WordPress blogs with all the bells and whistles, and we had a quiet “pajama” weekend on tap.  My poor old server is running an old SuSE distribution (9.2) which hasn’t been supported with updates for several years now.

So you know what the food chain is like for manual updates. [...]