fnokd!

When digging through code, I find it’s good to print it out, wander off away from the machine, and do some reading.
But if you print any reasonable-sized chunk of code from Eclipse, you’ll be carrying around several reams of paper, since Eclipse apparently thinks we’re all blind illiterates.
For the past decade, my friend & mentor [...]

Tomorrow is my first real status update call with my boss, Sacha Labourey.  I’ve been anxious to deliver something, to prove I hadn’t gone completely pudding-brained during my tenure as management.
This morning, it all finally came together in a pleasing fashion, causing me to hoot and holler loud enough to scare the cats and probably [...]

Since I’ve been back on the job, writing Java code lately, that means I’ve been testing Java code lately.
After living in the land of Ruby with RSpec, thinking about JUnit did not excite me.  Thankfully I found the rspec-maven-plugin, which integrates straight into the maven test process.
I like rspec because it removes a whole lot [...]

In order to deploy a Rails app, I’ve had to learn the innards of Microcontainer’s deployer framework.  After a few wrong turns, I feel like I’ve finally gotten a handle on it.
While we’re all used to dropping in an .ear or a .war, and might think in terms of deploying these archive formats, that’s ultimately [...]

Code comprehension.  It’s important when you jump into someone else’s code.
Eclipse makes it easy, with F3, command-T, and shift-command-G.
Very quickly, you can jump through a maze of classes and interfaces, diving into details or seeing the higher hierarchy.  I forgot how nice Eclipse can be.  Particularly if you’ve got the viPlugin.
72 open files (and bless [...]

I woke up and noticed that a memcached mode was announced by Bela Ban, the fantastically Swiss man who jogs waaay too much.
There’s a lot of things in this world that can take advantage of memcached.  Personally, I find this quite interesting, considering that memcached tends to be the cache-of-choice for lots of non-Java languages.  [...]

For those of you playing along at home, I’ve added jboss-deployers to my GitHub mirror set.  Like the others, the ‘vendor’ branch is the one you want.

jboss-deployers
jbossas
microcontainer
vfs

I’m adding JBoss projects to my mirror set as I trip across the need to browse their source.  If there’s a JBoss project you’d like to see mirrored out [...]

Back in May, I was a manager.
I feebly attempted to direct 8 great guys and gals to further the goals of JBoss.org.  After the Codehaus, you’d think I’d be able to help build an opensource community with fun and flair.  But I came to realize that it’s hard to build a community as an active [...]

In addition to the previously-mentioned JRuby mirror from Codehaus SVN to GitHub, I’m now also mirroring:

JBoss Microcontainer
JBoss AS5
JRuby

All are trunk-only mirrors, not picking up branches or tags. Since the JBoss repository path has about 77,000 subversion revisions, and at one point held any and all JBoss software ever written, I have not mirrored it [...]

So, I’m gearing up to work on some Java+Ruby (via JRuby) stuff. The Java world still seems fairly entrenched in the cult of Subversion, while the Rubyists have gone with Git lately.
I’m still wrapping my mind around Git, but with GitHub, it’s fairly easy and straight-forward. I paid my $7 for the micro [...]