http://jeremy.zawodny.com/blog/ Random thoughts on technology, aviation, and life in general... en-us 2010-02-25T17:20:32-08:00 2012-01-06T17:27:03-08:00 Yup, another job opening. If you're interested or know someone who'd kick ass in this job, let me know. The job is on-site in Sunnyvale, California. <job_posting> Enjoy solving hard problems creatively? Know all the GOF patterns? Can you make database schemas into 3rd Normal form? Do you know the difference between REST, SOAP, and MOM? We are looking for an engineer to architect new services, build shared libraries, and refactor existing systems. You will work with Yahoo! News, Sports,... http://jeremy.zawodny.com/blog/archives/002378.html Kasia is looking to attend JavaOne later this month in San Francisco, but the company won't foot the bill for admission. I guess working in Java all day long (and sometimes all night too) for several years isn't sufficient to justify a bit of off-site training. Does anyone have a contact that might be able to score a ticket? I bet she'd even promise to blog about the conference. Hmm. Tim works at Sun now. Maybe he knows... Oh, and... http://jeremy.zawodny.com/blog/archives/002088.html Everyone enjoys a good language bashing now and then--especially when it's a shining example of how the language makes it hard to do something amazingly simple, like reading a file.... http://jeremy.zawodny.com/blog/archives/000829.html Browsing Java documentation on Sun's Java site is incredibly frustrating because the site doesn't seem to support a basic operation I want: search. Consider this example. I performed a Google search for java.util.Map.Entry and eneded up on this page. It has a lot of useful information on it. But now that I'm there, I was to search for something. I guess I have to go back to Google and start over. There's no search box on the page. WTF?! Contrast... http://jeremy.zawodny.com/blog/archives/000436.html This cracks me up. I remember back in the mid-90s when Java first came out. I actually read the Java 1.0 language spec. The whole thing. It was cool. One of the folks who was telling me about it (just before I read the spec) endorsed it by saying "it's like a cleaner C++ with no pointers!" I've heard the "you don't make pointer mistakes in Java" bit a lot over the years. Despite all that, I'm still able to... http://jeremy.zawodny.com/blog/archives/000422.html Success! I understand a bit of the object/interface model I'm working with--at least enough to add some functionality and not have it blow up. It compiles and runs. I've sucessfully extended my first real Java code in a meaningful way. I got a TrackBack ping that lead me to K's article about my and Java which I thought was interesting. (K is not to be confused with Kasia who has been called "K" on some occasions.) Apparently the transition I'm... http://jeremy.zawodny.com/blog/archives/000420.html So I've been working to understand the Java code I need to extend at work. And it's quite a bit of culture shock after being a Perl Hacker for the last... well, a long time. I've done Perl in some capacity now for over nine years. Java folks love abstraction. Thanks to Kasia's blog entry on Interfaces, a bit of chatting with her, and reading up a bit, I now get interfaces. They're Java's answer to multiple inheritance. The provide... http://jeremy.zawodny.com/blog/archives/000419.html So I'm reading some official documentation about JDBC and I run across this bit of text (emphasis mine): The second major advantage is that the DataSource facility allows developers to implement a DataSource class to take advantage of features like connection pooling and distributed transactions. Connection pooling can increase performance dramatically by reusing connections rather than creating a new physical connection each time a connection is requested. What does "physical" connection mean in this context? Is there really somebody sitting... http://jeremy.zawodny.com/blog/archives/000392.html Well, it's not really day #3. But I've spent a fair amount of time on Friday and over the weekend reading a copy of "The Java Programming Language" to refresh my memory on all this new-fangled Java stuff. I decided it was time I wrote a stand-alone Java program to do... something. Normally, you'd expect someone to write the standard "Helllo, world." program and build from there. No, not me. That's too easy and likely to work on the first... http://jeremy.zawodny.com/blog/archives/000378.html I spent a fair amount of time today reading about and playing with IBM's Eclipse. My reasons for investigating Eclipse are twofold: (1) I'd like to see if it is compelling enough as an IDE to make me switch from GNU Emacs. (2) I was tasked with learning about plug-ins and what Eclipse was really designed for. We were wondering about using it as the framework on which to build some Java GUI tools. On the first count, I've found... http://jeremy.zawodny.com/blog/archives/000360.html