Archive for August, 2007

Testing out the Apple TV

Sunday, August 26th, 2007

I picked up an Apple TV this weekend. I had been holding out for quite awhile because I just couldn't rationalize the cost without there being the content to watch. However, on friday night I discovered that MIT was integrating their open courses into ITunes along with a lot of ...

Monitoring JVM Garbage Collection

Friday, August 17th, 2007

I had an interesting thought in a meeting today. We were discussing various performance and monitoring improvements and monitoring garbage collection came up. It occurred to me that the JVM is able to monitor heap size and report it at any time, but the state of the last garbage collection ...

Scalable applications

Thursday, August 16th, 2007

Been working with some new technologies lately and I've come to the conclusion that for building a scalable webapp, the combination of Java(Servlets/JSP), Spring, Distributed Hibernate caching, and Horizontally Partitioned Mysql Databases hits the sweet spot. I've heard several people choosing Ruby on Rails and Python for speed of development, but ...

Little gotcha with java auto-boxing

Wednesday, August 15th, 2007

Came across a fun little bit of trivia when dealing with auto-boxing in java. I'm processing content from Cloudgrove and as I examined words I wanted to check if they were in a stop word list. To make this a quick process I have a HashMap<String,Integer> of the stop words. ...

Google Video now offering actual videos

Wednesday, August 15th, 2007

I have a RSS subscription to new videos on Google Video from their tech-talks that they regularly publish. These are a great set of videos that remind me of being in school and being able to attend guest lectures, well worth checking out. I noticed last night that when you ...

Mysql range selects

Tuesday, August 7th, 2007

Had an interesting talk with one of the Mysql consultants last week and he pointed out that if you're using range selects with Mysql where you are selecting data, but using only indexed columns in the where clause it still has to read all of the data from the preceding ...

Having problems with the latest Firefox

Tuesday, August 7th, 2007

The latest version of Firefox(2.0.0.6) has been causing all sorts of problems for me. It just crashed for the third time tonight when I pressed ctl-w to close a tab. I've been a diehard Firefox supporter for many years now and this is the first time that I've really been ...