There's much excitement about JDK 7 and in particular Lambdas! I've waded through the bloat to help you get an understanding of it. If you search for JDK 7 in your favourite search engine the chances are you'll hit the controversies surrounding lambadas in Java fairly early on in your hunt. It's a contentious subject, which means it's getting a lot of attention from a lot of clever people,...

It‘s official, the whole world is obsessed with Dunning/Kruger; Dr. Mercola was blogging about it this morning. He apparently read Errol Morris‘ piece in the NYT. Going back to the source, the two were pondering the case of the bank robber who was so dumb he didn‘t have the capacity to grasp his own incapacity. I‘ve already blogged about D-K. I was obsessed with it when I first found it using “StumbleUpon” because I‘ve seen it a thousand times in IT: people who you ask ‘give yourself a score on Design Patterns 1 to 10‘ and they say ‘9‘ and then you say ‘give me an example of Composite‘ and they say ‘when one thing is made up of other things?‘

Today, I was going to blog about fixing 2 bugs this week that were ultimately, it turned out, strangely related (in totally different projects). One involved a computation of infinity and the other the infinitesimal, which got me thinking about one of my favorite films of all time: The Incredible Shrinking Man I did a tour in college running the film series one year which was thankless since people in, yes, the birthplace of film, were not disinterested, they were belligerently opposed to foreign film or anything more ambitious than The Blues Brothers When I showed this film, it was a really interesting divining rod: the intellectuals who'd been turning out for the likes of Bergman and Bresson were totally put off, and a lot of the witless action/thrill-seekers were turned off by the pretensions. There's a reason this film has a 7.7 on imdb, and garners a mention in serious film analysis books like Amos Vogel's great Film as a Subversive Art

I hated the show “Mr. Magoo” when I was a kid, but I find myself bringing it up all the time these days. Today, I realized that Magoo and TISM are kind of opposite ends of the Dunning-Kruger spectrum: Magoo is man hurtling into the accelerating freneticism of the future completely oblivious (like the D-K bank robber thinking he‘s invisible) while TISM is Russell‘s too conscious man, literally seeing himself shrinking away from a world that is becoming more and more dominated by things. All great works of art have some level of allegory, and TISM is one of the great ones of all time (thanks to Richard Matheson‘s amazing script and great direction). What a prescient vision from the end of the 50s: as humankind shrivels, the struggle to hold onto some dignity is the natural first phase, but it quickly gives way to a desperate struggle to not perish at the hands of objects over which assured mastery it seems was merely a function of scale. The still is one of my favorites from film history: rousted from his doll house digs, the protagonist ends up in the doorway to the underworld (his basement), with an animal that is a miniaturized version of one of the most lethal organisms the ecosystem has ever produced, clearly, there is no way the last defense will hold. But the film‘s not done there: the last chance is that the wife, whose intuition is that her husband is in the basement, might find him. A few more random events conspire to assure this too evaporates, and as his world recedes, we‘re given a few telling signs that his own brother is already moving in on his desperate wife.

Is there anything between these two extremes? In programming, we are constantly being overwhelmed by complexity: soaked in it, and yet, the huge successes of the last few years are treatises in Magoo-like simplicity: Twitter and Facebook. Happened to catch a nauseating trailer for Andrew Sorkin‘s new film about the rise of Facebook. It seriously looks like it‘s going to make Jersey Shore look like Shakespeare in the Park. The lowest, stupidest flagellation, nay moth-like fluttering around the flame of power. Not real power, just its phantom: the temporary slags who got their name in the directory (momentarily). In this week‘s premiere of Mad Men Betty‘s new husband defends her hanging onto the house saying ‘it‘s temporary‘ to which Draper responds ‘everyone knows this is definiitely temporary.‘ Just as the Republicans were making plans for a 25 year lock on power in 2004, and now are looking like the only place they could win a majority is in a population that has a lead-soaked well or the deadly combination of blinding stupidity (D-K) and rash-like paranoia, so goes the saw. (Not a D defender either, they are feeding from a different part of the same pond; anyone vaguely conscious these days is completely fed up with the parties.) More speculation surfaced this week that Facebook could be another MySpace, while the latter, it turns out, is trying to rebrand itself younger (tyke trolling).

Anyway, my point is: maybe we have reached that stage where things are popping so quickly, there is such a scramble to grasp that the dignified fight is the 300: hopeless, but better than captivity, and thus the future holds only a revolving door of magoos. It has steeled my conviction that what we need most on the complexity side are two things: a firm embrace of it, that includes walking away from the rigid stupidity of the scientific method in favor of a world view dominated by probability (more on this), and tools to help us absorb our world more efficiently. In the past week or two, after converting to Git, using GitX to view commit sets, and watching the xcode 4 preview has made me realize that despite a decade just ended that was dominated by tools, clearly we forget that if each time we use them, we come out the other side not knowing anything new (I would argue this is the norm), then they are but a turnstile and we but their ear-tagged chattel.

The more I think about it, the less I understand the point in Scala’s Option class (which originated in Haskell under the name Maybe). If you read the voluminous material that describes the concepts behind the Option class, there are two main benefits: It saves you from NullPointerException It allows you to tell whether null means “no object” or “an object whose value is null” I claim...

DataValve is a free open source library that facilitates the creation of re-usable view and data access components as well as providing a number of features for pagination, sorting and parameterizing queries. This article defines the problems DataValve aims to solve and how it solves them. James Sugrue

I’ve just come back from three days in Santa Clara, spending time with some of the brightest people in the Java world - the JVM language summit is truly a fantastic collection of great people. And I was there too… James Sugrue

Some interesting statistics came out of the GUADEC conference this week, and with them, a fiery condemnation blog by former Red Hat employee Greg DeKoenigsberg.

The fourth JBoss Application Server 6.0 milestone was released this week.  It is the first to include support for EJB 3.1 Timer Service and EJB 3.1 Asynchronous invocations. M4 also comes with a different default JBossWS stack that uses Apache CXF.  With this support, users will immediately get better performance for WS-*.Objectivity Ships its New GraphDB

This article is about how to configure Apache Tomcat 6 or 7 to use OpenWebBeans based dependency injection. What is Apache  OpenWebBeans? OpenWebBeans is an ASL 2.0-licensed implementation of the JSR-299, Contexts and Dependency Injection for the Java EE platform. Project's web page can be found at, "http://openwebbeans.apache.org"

I get a lot of questions on how to select all rows in a table. In this post I describe how you can do that. A common use case for this is when you want to apply changes on a set of records, for instance change the status of all records in a table. You [...]

About once a week I find myself pointing people to the information in the Fusion Developer Guide about the usage of AM Service Method.
This is usually when people try to find out how to access view objects from a backing bean, or even worse when they try to find out how to access HTTP objects from their ADF BC layer.

So beyond pointing to the doc on AM service methods, I recorded a very short and simple demo to show the basics.

Something new? Eh? Should you do this? Eh? In all, probably not, but for me this was a good exercise towards some more updated demo scripting for my “Boost your environment with XMLDB” presentation or hopefully more clearer relabeled Oracle Open World name for the almost same presentation called “Interfacing with Your Database via Oracle XML [...]

Before the Oracle acquisition, Sun was contributing three servers to the build farm for the PostgreSQL project to test updates and ensure stability on Solaris.  Even though PostgreSQL was technically a competitor to Sun's MySQL, the company still supported development of the project and contributed DTrace support and other features to the platform.  This week, Oracle pulled the plug on those...

SunSolve was, and still is, Sun's way of distributing patches; the equivalent mechanism at Oracle is My Oracle Support (MOS), and Gerry just announced thatSun patches now available there. This includes the GlassFish commercial patches like 128640-20, which is one of the patches in GlassFish 2.1.1 patch 6.

I just looked directly for the patch ID (using Sun's patch number), I'll try to dig more info on how to use MOS and will post it later on.

The release of IntelliJ IDEA 9.0 last year brought a flurry of extra excitement with JetBrains' announcement that there would also be a FOSS Community Edition with the release.  Although there's no major announcements on the open source front, the next release of IntelliJ IDEA looks like its going to raise the bar for the major IDEs.  

I ran San Francisco 1/2 marathon over the weekend and improved my timing from last year by 3 minutes. I guess dance at a pre-wedding ceremony and 4 hours of sleep the night before slowed me down otherwise could've pushed harder. Anyway the results are still encouraging and the bar is higher for the next time!

This makes me among top 1.2 % runners overall, top 2.5% for "Men", and top 2.3% in "M 30-39" category. Here is the overall leader board:

I'm about 20 minutes behind the winner (5:47 pace) and so need to push really hard to close the gap there. Who knows I may win one day, but for now the plan is to close the gap as much as possible. Seems really difficult, but not impossible!

And I almost made it to the women's leader board ;-)

Michael Wardian, a popular American marathoner and ultramarathoner came second in the full marathon. It was a pleasure to see him cruising back on the Golden Gate birdge.

Here are the mile splits:

One thing clearly evident from the splits is that any amount of hill training is less. This is all the more evident by looking at speed / elevation chart:

Click on the image to replay the race.

And finally here is race route:

Here is the cumulative result of all the marathons so far:

Marathon / Half Marathon Total Time Pace San Francisco 1/2 Marathon 2010 1:35:42 7:18 San Jose Rock-n-Roll 2009 1:30:59 6:57 San Francicsco 1/2 Marathon 2009 1:38:21 7:31 Kaiser Permanente San Francicsco 1/2 2009 1:41:30 7:45 Silicon Valley 1/2 2008 1:45:42 8:04 San Francisco 1/2 2008 1:52:44 8:25 San Francisco Full 2007 4:04:33 9:20 Silicon Valley Full 2006 4:06:57 9:25 San Francisco 1/2 2005 1:48:50 8:18

Technorati: running marathon results runsfm sanfrancisco

Defne is a service oriented web application framework. The main motivation behind Defne is ease of use. Defne allows developers to concentrate on their business logic while it provides all other application requirements such as transaction and security. With Defne, you are able to implement powerful enterprise web application's business services easily.



Business - Service-oriented architecture - Programming - Web application framework - Business logic

Learn how to use Spring in order to quickly send e-mails. An example of JavaMail configuration for use with GMail's SMTP server is also provided.



GMail - Simple Mail Transfer Protocol - JavaMail - Java - Email

This first set of tips is from:Baishampayan Ghose Find him on Twitter. His GitHub a/c.It’s hard to pin point a few good tips because Clojure can do so many things in very nice and ingenious ways, that it’s not even funny. Anyway, here are a few: Tip #1: Sort a map on multiple keys:References Reference:  Clojure Tips from the Experts ...

We are staying in front of new world - all major browsers either support already or plan to support in next major version HTML5 (not in scope of this article) & WebSockets (main subject of the article). In 6 to 9 months we as application developers will have in our hands extremely powerful client side tools to build new generation of the Web. But are we ready on server side? And if not, what...

JSF with Seam and JPA is quite a powerful combination. However, you still have to be aware of many nuances. I plan to share some of these, starting with a lazy-load exception that is quite strange at first sight.