tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14811959350801954792011-12-04T23:42:15.745ZStephen Souness, a Java developer in London sharing some thoughts on what's happening in the world of Internet, Java and database technologies.Stephen Sounesshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02865488454850253029noreply@blogger.comBlogger1201100tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1481195935080195479.post-22964431567819124092011-12-04T23:07:00.001Z2011-12-04T23:14:07.136Z

Recently the company that I currently work for acquired 80% ownership of an e-commerce company that I previously worked for. I'll see a few more familiar faces at the Christmas party this week. With a bit of luck I might even do some match-making - borrowing a developer to give the team a hand for my current project.

Stephen Sounesshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02865488454850253029noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1481195935080195479.post-63198916860366536352011-11-22T00:27:00.001Z2011-11-22T00:28:31.286Z

I find it fun to work with young developers, their enthusiasm and willingness to learn new things makes leading the way less of a chore and more of a privilege. Today was a great example. Late in the day I set up a user account in Jira and emailed it across to the newest member of the team. As we got ready to shut down our development for the day he said something along the lines of, "Hey,

Stephen Sounesshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02865488454850253029noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1481195935080195479.post-2040985242276231822011-11-20T08:44:00.001Z2011-12-04T23:33:24.361Z

Introduction This blog entry provides an overview of my recent experience of developing a software system which keeps its core data fresh and ready to be presented to users. It is a work in progress, so may end up spanning a few posts. What do I mean by an auto-refreshing cache? A cache which has its content pre-loaded and refreshed automatically without user action. Why do I want an

Stephen Sounesshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02865488454850253029noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1481195935080195479.post-33520484978901376692011-10-19T18:14:00.000+01:002011-10-22T10:59:44.797+01:00

A while ago I joined a project which had some old school (naive) approaches to concurrent processing in an object oriented language. In these enlightened times I automatically double check whenever I see a Java class that has been declared with "extends Thread" (not just because some former colleagues regarded the extends keyword as blasphemy). I've read enough to know to prefer implementing an

Stephen Sounesshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02865488454850253029noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1481195935080195479.post-82097510445754026712011-10-13T10:33:00.002+01:002011-10-13T10:34:04.693+01:00

I have recently taken a few weeks off work to travel back to my home country to catch up with friends and family, and soak up some of the Rugby World Cup hype. When it came time to look for contact details for various friends who I hadn't seen for a while, I ended up resorting to Facebook messaging. A while ago Facebook opened some loophole which allowed me to see contact phone numbers for

Stephen Sounesshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02865488454850253029noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1481195935080195479.post-87678634742959824872011-09-22T00:19:00.000+01:002011-09-22T00:19:30.633+01:00

I had a fun chat with some of the guys and girls of the London Java Community (LJC) this week. There were a few of the usual war stories - like the guy who was talked into going along to a job interview and found that the company had a very zealous approach to "not invented here" technologies - to the extent that they had actually produced their own source control system. Not embracing open

Stephen Sounesshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02865488454850253029noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1481195935080195479.post-47858714215180792862011-09-21T00:29:00.002+01:002011-09-21T00:29:51.634+01:00

I'd like to think that I am at a well-balanced point in my Twitter usage.  At current count I am following 152 and am followed by 38 (which reminds me that I intended to cull one from each of those lists, but I digress...) Today I found myself tempted to criticise one of the people that I follow for complaining about the state of a technological product. I held back after remembering that I had

Stephen Sounesshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02865488454850253029noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1481195935080195479.post-80124580134550207142011-08-30T01:46:00.000+01:002011-08-30T01:46:43.680+01:00

Back in August 2010 I decided to leave my job to find a more satisfying role while I still had a reasonable amount of time left on my visa. A few weeks later I received an unsolicited approach from someone who I had never met, but who now worked at Autoquake and had liked the look of my LinkedIn profile.  I had interviewed with Autoquake before and had actually been offered a position, but

Stephen Sounesshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02865488454850253029noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1481195935080195479.post-84456580952617213482011-08-30T01:15:00.000+01:002011-08-30T01:15:44.720+01:00

I'm one of those crazy people who actually reads the posts of the people that I follow on Twitter. I foolishly thought it would be a good idea to catch up on the tweets from the weekend. An hour and a half later, I have my browser open tab count down to three, but I won't be getting anywhere near 8 hours sleep tonight. From the various tangents that I followed out from Twitter, I found the

Stephen Sounesshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02865488454850253029noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1481195935080195479.post-14576947692813599992011-08-25T13:01:00.000+01:002011-08-25T13:01:40.606+01:00

I don't know about you, but if I send an email asking a specific question, then I expect a response within a day or so - even if it's just to say, "We'll have to get back to you at the end of the week". If this lack of responsiveness was from a massive busy government department with an anonymous email address on their website I might understand, but for a commercial organisation that is paying

Stephen Sounesshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02865488454850253029noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1481195935080195479.post-19543552197936605092011-08-22T23:35:00.000+01:002011-08-22T23:35:37.952+01:00

During a recent code review I came across a slightly naive approach to speeding up a group of HTTP requests - by allocating a thread to each request and setting them all to run at once. Given that I have some responsibility for and control over the servers that these threads will be connecting to, I wasn't looking forward to each client potentially attempting to establish 20+ connections at a

Stephen Sounesshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02865488454850253029noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1481195935080195479.post-25948175157933162382011-08-18T00:32:00.000+01:002011-08-18T00:32:22.856+01:00

I noticed some unusual behaviour in an application yesterday so I took a dive into the source code to see whether it might be something obvious. In amongst some business logic for cache refreshing I found a call to CollectionUtils.removeAll.  I hadn't personally used this CollectionUtils class before, so I decided to see what functionality it offered and how it worked.  The Javadoc looked okay,

Stephen Sounesshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02865488454850253029noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1481195935080195479.post-68110349514159437062011-08-18T00:04:00.001+01:002011-08-18T00:04:52.855+01:00

One of my colleagues has been on leave this week so I have had a little more freedom to try out changes to the current project without worrying about potential conflicts when checking the changes into the version control system. One of the changes that I had been contemplating for a while involved introducing Spring Flex so that our main integration point between BlazeDS and our Java web

Stephen Sounesshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02865488454850253029noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1481195935080195479.post-28501782951123985602011-08-17T23:36:00.000+01:002011-08-17T23:36:06.050+01:00

Up until last week I was blissfully ignorant of the popularity of Blackberry devices to young people.  I was stuck in the mindset that business users and Obama were the main fans of the technology because of its email capabilities. The mainstream media have been heavily publicizing the use of Blackberry's other messaging capabilities and how it was applied by naughty people to coordinate

Stephen Sounesshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02865488454850253029noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1481195935080195479.post-4584646436268770722011-06-02T08:42:00.001+01:002011-08-17T23:24:13.841+01:00

I am now eight months into my current job and I have been involved in a handful of projects which have somehow involved no less than four of the other organisations that I interviewed with in the last couple of years. Interestingly each of the organisations had either made me some sort of offer, or is still trying to recruit me. I didn't do a shotgun approach to applying for jobs, so is the

Stephen Sounesshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02865488454850253029noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1481195935080195479.post-89110818303243085482011-05-17T06:47:00.003+01:002011-05-17T07:33:39.416+01:00

Love it or hate it Maven and its ilk have reached a level of use in mainstream Java projects that it is generally simpler to set up your project dependencies using pom.xml file(s) rather than manually obtaining the appropriate jars for the libraries that you need to make use of.To bring in a simple standalone library that is self-contained (i.e. a single jar with no dependencies) this can be a

Stephen Sounesshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02865488454850253029noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1481195935080195479.post-31714960436833065412011-04-15T12:52:00.004+01:002011-04-15T13:08:29.248+01:00

There is a lot of hype going around at the moment related to the wonderful functionality that websites will be able to offer once browsers implement the so-called "HTML5" features.Some features should enable graphical capabilities without requiring a plugin (bye bye Flash), others are targetted at mobile devices - such as enabling the capture of an image from a camera.The one that has been most

Stephen Sounesshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02865488454850253029noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1481195935080195479.post-59038267515905619632011-04-13T07:55:00.005+01:002011-04-13T08:26:32.546+01:00

I have recently been exploring options for enhancing the functionality of an existing website by integrating some streaming data feeds.In the interests of making this functionality available on a wide range of devices (read iPads and iPhones as well as PCs) I would like this to be achieved without Flash or any other proprietary plug-in technology.So, my old friend and foe Javascript is the lead

Stephen Sounesshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02865488454850253029noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1481195935080195479.post-48098483709563681362011-02-16T00:45:00.003Z2011-02-16T00:54:30.884Z

Okay, so I'm on Twitter and I generally check for updates at least once a day.I used to have a policy of blocking followers who followed at least 3 times as many tweeters as followed them because they smelt like spammers / marketers (particularly those that magically tweet every x hours, no matter the time of day or night).Sure enough, now I find myself edging towards my own threshold of

Stephen Sounesshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02865488454850253029noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1481195935080195479.post-76487650446460101192011-01-05T18:36:00.003Z2011-01-05T18:52:41.985Z

I started off with a handful of inherited projects loosely cobbled together with no declarative dependency management (old style - directory of jars in each project, copied into one big mess for deployment).My initial task was to investigate using the existing system to expose access to the same data sources using REST, without breaking the existing SOAP implementation.I muddled around for a

Stephen Sounesshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02865488454850253029noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1481195935080195479.post-86883807251793804842010-10-29T00:43:00.003+01:002010-10-29T00:48:20.463+01:00

After a record amount of feedback (2 emails, even though it was from the same person I will count it twice), I havefinally gotten around to setting up RSS feeds for this blog.Sometime soon I should be posting about my experiences of using JAX-RS to expose some existing SOAP web services in a not REST-ish manner.My recent quiet period coincides with starting a new job.

Stephen Sounesshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02865488454850253029noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1481195935080195479.post-42920649752701783032010-10-06T23:51:00.003+01:002010-10-06T23:59:44.666+01:00

Today I had an interview for a role contracting at an e-commerce organisation near London.After completing the multi-choice "technical test", and blitzing through the practical task, I had the face to face aspect of the interview.The first of the two interviewers had a familiar accent, then I recognised the face as well - "Hey, I think you were in my class at uni"...Eleven years later and about

Stephen Sounesshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02865488454850253029noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1481195935080195479.post-31118363909883784432010-10-05T11:34:00.006+01:002010-10-05T12:01:31.912+01:00

Sorry to bore you with yet another post designed to remind myself about what I should be mentioning in job interviews.This post is a breakdown of some of the various participation that I have had in open source projects in the last few years. Grails - postings on public newsgroup with gotchas of an upgrade to version 1.1.1 with maven versioningTomcat - following and posting responses to Tomcat

Stephen Sounesshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02865488454850253029noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1481195935080195479.post-73591856548693655972010-10-04T23:52:00.003+01:002010-10-05T00:16:07.920+01:00

One of the things that I really appreciate about attending job interviews is the opportunity to learn what people from other organisations and industries consider to be challenges.Take deployment as an example, some organisations are very particular about changing as little as possible on their production environments, whereas other organisations regard a complete replacement of the entire

Stephen Sounesshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02865488454850253029noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1481195935080195479.post-32325350253168836342010-10-04T22:30:00.005+01:002010-10-04T23:26:33.481+01:00

I haven't really paid much attention to The Server Side website for a couple of years, but I had a glance around it this evening when trying out how things look on the iPad.I came across an article entitled Moving from Spring to Java EE 6: The Age of Frameworks is Over which reminded me of a lengthy blog post that I had read recently Spring to Java EE – A Migration Experience. Sure enough the

Stephen Sounesshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02865488454850253029noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1481195935080195479.post-31199070221917002852010-10-04T17:54:00.002+01:002010-10-04T18:01:48.718+01:00

While working with graphic designers on various websites in recent years the decision of whether to include Flash or not came up on a number of occasions.Things progressed from, "Let's not", to "Okay, as long as we have some Javascript to serve alternative content", to "Flash is so prevalent, alright you can use it for content that won't need to be maintained by the customer"Now that the iPhone

Stephen Sounesshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02865488454850253029noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1481195935080195479.post-67929120950914824722010-10-04T17:18:00.004+01:002010-10-04T17:46:18.825+01:00

Even before acquiring my iPad (today) I have been thinking more seriously about getting into developing for mobile platforms.I have been along to a couple of presentations about Android and cross-platform development for Android and iPhone so have picked up some useful ideas.Since I don't have a Mac I think I will have to target the Android platform first.Hopefully the development won't involve

Stephen Sounesshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02865488454850253029noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1481195935080195479.post-27271561486923410882010-10-03T21:22:00.005+01:002010-10-04T09:52:41.674+01:00

I was fortunate enough to be involved in a range of projects for real estate companies and large property developers between 1999 and 2008.Infinity Investment Group- Responded to request for proposal with a detailed estimate and planned approach for the Pegasus Town properties site (still live in a less functional form at: http://properties.pegasustown.com/ ).- Participated in discussions with

Stephen Sounesshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02865488454850253029noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1481195935080195479.post-79773332604942195712010-10-03T01:03:00.006+01:002010-10-03T21:21:53.951+01:00

One of the problems of having over a decade of commercial experience developing software, is that I really can't fit enough information onto my CV without putting off recruiters.This post might act as a supplement to outline my e-commerce project experience.My most recent e-commerce projects have involved me designing and developing for the following technologies, integration points, and key

Stephen Sounesshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02865488454850253029noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1481195935080195479.post-29635762839180772042010-10-03T00:10:00.004+01:002010-10-04T15:29:26.986+01:00

HelpingHaving a suite of tests which cover the intended behaviour of a class in isolation allows the development team to feel more comfortable that subsequent changes to the implementation of that class have not had undesirable side-effects.HinderingIf a blanket policy is in place to have some numeric value associated to represent "good test coverage," then some test cases can become an overhead

Stephen Sounesshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02865488454850253029noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1481195935080195479.post-58136633625462551242010-09-29T12:47:00.006+01:002010-09-30T22:44:25.081+01:00

While reading Spring Enterprise Recipes - A Problem-Solution Approach this afternoon I noticed that Spring uses a LinkedHashMap as the implementation for maps that it injects into beans.I'm curious about this implementation choice, as it seems to go slightly beyond what would be expected for a default Map implementation.I'm going to do some digging around to establish the motivation behind this,

Stephen Sounesshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02865488454850253029noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1481195935080195479.post-30759648711813162712010-09-29T10:07:00.004+01:002010-09-30T00:51:13.845+01:00

Last night I attended a presentation at JAX 2010 which included a brief overview of Glassfish 3 and JEE 6.I was pleased to see the use of facelets and XHTML files as the standard view to use with JSF 2, as that makes so much more sense than trying to use JSPs.The "deploy on save" integration with the IDE during development was impressive. It used to be a real pain developing code to be deployed

Stephen Sounesshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02865488454850253029noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1481195935080195479.post-88094012426351993552010-09-23T20:02:00.005+01:002010-09-23T20:10:15.199+01:00

I've recently resigned from my job, so will have some time on my hands to investigate technologies - in between applying for jobs, responding to calls from recruiters, preparing for interviews and attending interviews.This is a sort of "note to self" on some areas of interest, in no particular order:ScalaSpring 3Tomcat 7Hybris 4.2 (if I decide to stick with E-Commerce)

Stephen Sounesshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02865488454850253029noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1481195935080195479.post-78446386768084033402010-09-18T18:21:00.003+01:002010-09-18T19:19:51.674+01:00

I came across a nice looking load/performance testing tool called loadUI today.The Java site had a profile about it as an example of a Real-world JavaFX App:http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/javafx-loadui-170428.htmlI've only had a brief play with it so far and while it seems very slick I think I will stick with JMeter for its support of multi-page tests.http://www.loadui.org/About-loadUI/

Stephen Sounesshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02865488454850253029noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1481195935080195479.post-17024535520891940532010-09-13T23:29:00.002+01:002010-09-14T00:06:06.103+01:00

Something that I particularly enjoy about living in London is the time that I have each morning and evening during the commute between home and work for reading on the Underground.One of the books that I am currently reading is Continuous Delivery - Reliable Software Releases Through Build, Test, and Deployment Automation. I found the first chapter acted as a timely reminder for my recent

Stephen Sounesshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02865488454850253029noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1481195935080195479.post-24837710244840895622010-09-05T11:47:00.002+01:002010-09-05T21:16:14.592+01:00

I think that software development is an amazing industry to be involved in.I see my university studies as having been just the start of the learning required to be a successful software developer. It gave me a background to the way software can be developed, and an appreciation for how operating systems, networks and relational databases function.Back in the 90s software engineering was taught

Stephen Sounesshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02865488454850253029noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1481195935080195479.post-33498789315993834792010-06-23T22:59:00.002+01:002010-06-23T23:33:49.404+01:00

After a solid year of working, I will be taking a break and doing some proper travelling - instead of just weekends away.Having given the required 8 weeks notice at work and received confirmation of the necessary approval of a director, the first week of accommodation and transport has been booked and discussions are well underway for options for the following two weeks.Hopefully that volcanic

Stephen Sounesshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02865488454850253029noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1481195935080195479.post-29932448264415187102010-06-17T23:47:00.002+01:002010-06-18T00:04:53.017+01:00

Oh the joys of the software industry.AnalysisDesignEstimationImplementationTestingDeployMaintenanceJust another day.

Stephen Sounesshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02865488454850253029noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1481195935080195479.post-15771194258712555742010-06-13T01:05:00.002+01:002010-06-13T01:51:10.485+01:00

A few years ago I used to carry my video camera around quite a lot.I uploaded some clips to YouTube:http://www.youtube.com/sounieEventually the novelty wore off, so I generally only have the camera with me for weddings and other big events.Today I had a look around the "Insight" section of my YouTube account and discovered that a YouTube rival site has embedded some of my video content. If it

Stephen Sounesshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02865488454850253029noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1481195935080195479.post-42135984615060383302010-06-09T08:03:00.003+01:002010-06-09T08:21:50.229+01:00

While reading the Martin Fowler Refactoring book on the tube yesterday, I got to thinking about how programming languages are similar to general written and spoken languages.Here are a couple of examples:Terms that mean the same thing, but are called different names (synonyms).Terms that share the same name, but mean different things (homonyms).Much like written English, it requires a certain

Stephen Sounesshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02865488454850253029noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1481195935080195479.post-39113985679205794752010-05-29T23:42:00.004+01:002010-05-30T16:27:36.048+01:00

The site navigation is built up from a hierarchy of data stored in a relational database.Every user is presented with the same navigation, based on their group memberships.The navigation hierarchy is updated relatively infrequently.This sounds like a classic candidate for data caching.The implementation should result in:- fewer trips to the database- less short-lived objects- less duplicate

Stephen Sounesshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02865488454850253029noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1481195935080195479.post-31897132824340998452010-05-20T01:10:00.002+01:002010-05-20T01:17:46.124+01:00

At last week's Spring Source Forum in London I found myself thinking that being able to deploy Java applications into the cloud directly from SpringSource Tool Suite isn't that different to what can already be achieved for Google App Engine with their Eclipse plugin.Less than a week later, I see Rod Johnson has blogged that VMWare have been collaborating with Google engineers for a while, and

Stephen Sounesshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02865488454850253029noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1481195935080195479.post-70745311083569110422010-05-20T00:22:00.000+01:002010-05-20T00:36:40.621+01:00

Today it was decided that it was time to bite the bullet and create a branch in the subversion repository for the latest project I have been working on.I grumbled about it, but had enough other work to focus on to not offer to get involved in the process.After overhearing further bits and pieces about how the branching was intended to work I grumbled some more - "You're telling me that I'll have

Stephen Sounesshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02865488454850253029noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1481195935080195479.post-26717017803809350502010-05-18T00:19:00.002+01:002010-05-18T00:31:26.637+01:00

Today I tried the delegation technique for getting things done in a team.It didn't work anywhere near as well as I had hoped, as the updates that I expected 2 people to take a couple of hours at the most didn't get completed until the end of the working day.As a result I had the office to myself to deploy the latest version of the current system onto the production servers from around 6 til 10:

Stephen Sounesshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02865488454850253029noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1481195935080195479.post-15847956017084635262010-05-14T00:24:00.003+01:002010-05-14T00:47:00.430+01:00

A couple of months ago I booked today off work to attend the Spring Source S2G forum.Unfortunately due to a looming deadline and issues arising back at the office, I felt compelled to miss the last couple of sessions but I still felt that I learnt enough from the day to make it worthwhile.Mark Thomas did a good job of outlining some of the new features to be expected in Apache Tomcat 7.0.Rod

Stephen Sounesshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02865488454850253029noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1481195935080195479.post-73453257374581275422010-05-09T21:22:00.003+01:002010-05-09T21:32:05.252+01:00

I've been stuck in the world of Windows as my desktop development environment for my entire professional career thus far (11+ years).In the last couple of companies that I have worked at several of the developers have been successfully using a Mac for their day to day development.It seems to be the case that "Once you go Mac, you never go back".There are a couple of Macbook Pro laptops sitting

Stephen Sounesshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02865488454850253029noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1481195935080195479.post-47900757063526942542010-04-22T23:21:00.002+01:002010-04-22T23:39:51.211+01:00

On a fairly regular basis I hear people saying that documentation needs to be produced as early as possible, because otherwise it won't get done.By the same rationale, test driven development must be considered a good way to ensure that software has tests.Alas, the ambulance parked at the bottom of the cliff is still seen as effective.

Stephen Sounesshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02865488454850253029noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1481195935080195479.post-54510991195121301752010-04-10T12:52:00.004+01:002010-04-10T13:08:52.357+01:00

I was reminded of a line from a song recently, "You're talking a lot, but you're not saying anything".The rest of the lyrics aren't relevent, but that line sums up my thoughts after a recent presentation.It was like going for a meal and expecting a big feast, only to discover that the host is only going to serve hors d'oeuvres.Is it just me, or do most software developers like similes and

Stephen Sounesshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02865488454850253029noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1481195935080195479.post-36997383201070346352010-04-08T22:00:00.004+01:002010-04-30T06:58:33.323+01:00

I used to be the administrator of a handful of servers as well as having regular developer responsibilities. At the time I saw it as a way to make myself more of a valuable resource to the company, which almost backfired during the dot bomb era when billable hours were the main measure of value to the company.In recent weeks I have had to take on responsibility for configuring production servers

Stephen Sounesshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02865488454850253029noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1481195935080195479.post-41389129365332860902010-04-07T23:13:00.004+01:002010-04-07T23:29:27.287+01:00

Lately I've been liking the expression, "Sometimes it's easier to ask for forgiveness than it is to ask for permission".In my case it's not a matter of doing something without asking, but rather not doing what has been instructed.Past experience just won't allow me to schedule testing with a third party when my client still needs to verify their approach has been approved. Admittedly it's

Stephen Sounesshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02865488454850253029noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1481195935080195479.post-58697806575777940972010-03-30T22:20:00.002+01:002010-03-30T22:26:28.656+01:00

From time to time over the past four months or so I have been receiving phone calls at my work claiming to be representing a secure delivery company that want to arrange for a delivery within a specified time range on a particular date.Every time they ask for the names of people who should be allowed to sign for the delivery on my behalf, in case I am unavailable.After the first couple of calls I

Stephen Sounesshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02865488454850253029noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1481195935080195479.post-21470367797903737202010-03-28T02:45:00.002+01:002010-03-28T02:47:46.840+01:00

I'm slowly coming to the realisation that the last few books that I have purchased have been PDF files rather than physical paper.Once the hype dies down and the inevitable technical version 1 issues are ironed out I may take a look at iPad.

Stephen Sounesshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02865488454850253029noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1481195935080195479.post-90740650163471595602010-03-16T23:59:00.003Z2010-03-17T00:05:13.730Z

This evening I attended a meetup of the London Java community in a bar in central London.There were a few familiar faces and some interesting informal discussions.One discussion that I was lightly involved in revolved around the idea of some agile development practises effectively just being micro-management.That triggered a memory about something I had read a few months back online.Here is a

Stephen Sounesshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02865488454850253029noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1481195935080195479.post-1393186616493130242010-03-15T23:05:00.004Z2010-03-15T23:39:28.926Z

It's not about the number of issues that you deal with, it's the estimates against them that counts towards velocity in software development.Dealing with the smallest issues first might give some sense of satisfaction and accomplishment, but you'll have to face reality eventually and deal with those problems that require more thought.

Stephen Sounesshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02865488454850253029noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1481195935080195479.post-88535014073526208112010-02-20T11:09:00.002Z2010-02-20T11:17:21.554Z

I sometimes wonder whether I am some kind of chump for continuing to buy DVDs.Surely they will become a dead format, much like VHS tapes have?

Stephen Sounesshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02865488454850253029noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1481195935080195479.post-71660956316544756522010-01-31T21:51:00.006Z2010-02-28T23:26:44.122Z

Web services are probably the most common mechanism for distributed systems integration online at the moment.In the Java world there are tools available to generate classes to act as remote proxies and interfaces.Apache Axis and Axis2 provide a wsdl2java command line utility for generating these Java classes from a web service's WSDL file/URL.What some people may not consider is that the

Stephen Sounesshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02865488454850253029noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1481195935080195479.post-13166530598294234992010-01-29T08:05:00.002Z2010-01-29T08:12:39.923Z

A recent web application that I worked on had some strange issues within a day of going live.The configuration has 2 nodes serving web pages over http and https behind a load balancer.Secure pages and logins are served over https, all other URLs are directed to be served over http.Some users reported that they could successfully login, but the next link they clicked would lose the login.It turned

Stephen Sounesshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02865488454850253029noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1481195935080195479.post-48577448064097159322010-01-18T23:39:00.002Z2010-01-19T00:15:28.993Z

A few days ago I noticed a blog post over at SpringSource that announced the intention to move dm Server across to the Eclipse Foundation.I haven't been attending enough geek meetings lately to appreciate what is going on in the world of OSGi, or the politics of the VMware acquisition of SpringSource for that matter.A cynical person might observe such an announcement and think, "that project has

Stephen Sounesshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02865488454850253029noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1481195935080195479.post-68780589480615102262010-01-05T23:22:00.002Z2010-01-05T23:41:43.694Z

Earlier this evening I attended the London eXtreme Tuesday Club for only my second time.It was an interesting couple of hours of casual geeky conversation, including a live demo of some Erlang code for a handful of the group huddled around a netbook.The general discussion around Scalar and Erlang reminded me of my first year of studying computer science at university, as our COSC122 course

Stephen Sounesshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02865488454850253029noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1481195935080195479.post-78819579378742919622010-01-04T23:35:00.003Z2010-01-04T23:58:31.898Z

If you've been developing software for long enough, you should have a reasonably good idea of what methodologies and technologies you can work well with.I was fortunate enough to gain exposure to a range of different sized projects, using different approaches in the first decade of my career.- Team sizes of 1 to 8;- Timescales from a couple of days to 18 months;- One-off throwaway scripts,

Stephen Sounesshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02865488454850253029noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1481195935080195479.post-89800264193993729612009-12-31T20:11:00.003Z2009-12-31T20:33:21.005Z

As a professional software developer I sometimes find myself having to defend decisions made, when the inevitable unexpected problems arise.A few months ago I was pleased when the decision was made to move away from the JBoss portal server implementation, to a more open platform which would run directly on Tomcat 6. Leaving the office on Christmas eve with two known potential show-stoppers was

Stephen Sounesshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02865488454850253029noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1481195935080195479.post-2205936709525831252009-12-15T21:55:00.002Z2009-12-15T22:01:56.208Z

I've been feeling a bit under the weather recently, so thought I should check out the health insurance paperwork that my employer recently gave me.Imagine my surprise at reading the period covered finished yesterday - just a few weeks after it started!It turns out that the policy is being renewed to include an updated list of hospitals etc., but I can't help but feel that I am technically not

Stephen Sounesshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02865488454850253029noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1481195935080195479.post-81746767421762766222009-12-15T21:44:00.003Z2009-12-15T21:49:19.821Z

Sorry for the lack of content in this post, but I sometimes use this blog as a bookmark/reminder for myself.Here are a couple of blog posts from one of the maintainers of Tomcat.http://blog.springsource.com/2008/08/08/optimising-and-tuning-apache-tomcat/http://blog.springsource.com/2008/10/14/optimising-and-tuning-apache-tomcat-part-2/I found it reassuring to see the load testing tools that Mark

Stephen Sounesshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02865488454850253029noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1481195935080195479.post-72725606742300057642009-12-09T07:25:00.003Z2009-12-09T07:28:11.408Z

Several months back I was disappointed to see Facebook allowing adverts for something that looked vary much like a scam, using Google's name for credibility.While I haven't seen those ads for a while, I was pleased to see an article indicating that Google is suing:http://www.stuff.co.nz/technology/digital-living/3144491/Google-sues-work-from-home-scammers

Stephen Sounesshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02865488454850253029noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1481195935080195479.post-89944444983556182072009-12-06T23:04:00.005Z2009-12-06T23:17:41.475Z

I've decided it is time to move on from my cheap and primitive Nokia.Last week I ordered myself a shiney new T-Mobile Pulse.Apparently it is the first Android phone to be offered as a Pay As You Go deal.I would have preferred the Hero but it is just too much hassle to get onto a contract deal, given that I have not been living in the UK for 3 years, and possibly won't be here for another 24

Stephen Sounesshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02865488454850253029noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1481195935080195479.post-70660502767173884142009-10-06T22:26:00.002+01:002009-10-06T22:46:07.160+01:00

Today I had yet another "follower" on my Twitter account. Someone who I'd never heard off, in a line of business that I have no interest in etc.Sure enough their following vs follower count was up around 1,000 to 50.Being an IT type person, I try to look for patterns for such things. I notice that this particular individual had the bulk of their posts listed as being sent using something called

Stephen Sounesshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02865488454850253029noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1481195935080195479.post-4357515832200179052009-10-04T23:30:00.003+01:002009-10-04T23:45:29.169+01:00

I'm getting accustomed to carrying a technical book with me on my tube ride to and from work.I've never been a speed reader, so it's good to have half an hour or so at each end of the day where there isn't much else that I can usefully be doing.One of the books that I am currently reading is Refactoring To Patterns by Joshua Kerievsky. It's part of the Martin Fowler signature series.Today I

Stephen Sounesshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02865488454850253029noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1481195935080195479.post-77478685583290534312009-09-25T00:02:00.004+01:002009-09-25T00:42:05.563+01:00

From a fairly early age I've been accused of having an analytical mind.In recent years I think it has made me come across as a bit cynical, but I don't see that as being a negative thing - maybe I'm just a cynical optimist?I recently stumbled across an old blog post by Kent Beck which rebutted some comments that Joel Spolsky had made during a podcast.After several years of working in project

Stephen Sounesshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02865488454850253029noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1481195935080195479.post-29341167471350135002009-09-17T23:43:00.003+01:002009-09-17T23:53:31.828+01:00

A few weeks ago I attended an XTC (eXtreme Tuesday Club) meeting in London which was based around people reporting on what their experience of Agile 2009 was.The whole arrangement was unlike any kind of meeting that I have attended before. A bunch of people with similar interests meet in a room at a pub in central London and socialise. There were no announcements or presenters up the front.I

Stephen Sounesshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02865488454850253029noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1481195935080195479.post-42982697577849847982009-09-15T22:02:00.005+01:002009-09-30T00:54:02.462+01:00

I've somehow been "volunteered" into doing the stuff that no one else wants to do.It's a strange world where entire days can go by without much feeling of achievement, or a few minutes can lead to a revelation, like finding a patch for some related third party system, or opening a configuration file in a different editor which highlights syntax differently. It's as if a spotlight has been shone

Stephen Sounesshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02865488454850253029noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1481195935080195479.post-22455101604990861822009-09-11T00:04:00.003+01:002009-09-11T00:09:14.141+01:00

It seems to me that Liferay and GateIn (JBoss and eXo) are the only big players in the open source space for Java Portlet Containers.When I recover from the joy that I experienced from configuring the previous generation on a server, I will have to take a deep look into these options.Apologies to anyone who came here looking for an insiteful comparison.

Stephen Sounesshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02865488454850253029noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1481195935080195479.post-84736441483240497352009-09-10T22:53:00.007+01:002009-12-11T08:13:49.900Z

In case I'm not the only person on the Internet with an interest in this, JBoss 4.2.2 does not play nicely with Apache using the AJP protocol.After a lot of experimentation with various combinations of settings at both the Apache 2.2 end (mod_jk and mod_proxy_ajp) I came across the following:https://jira.jboss.org/jira/browse/JBPAPP-366I found this slightly reassuring.Due to various reasons and

Stephen Sounesshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02865488454850253029noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1481195935080195479.post-69086275727050809282009-08-13T23:19:00.002+01:002009-08-30T19:16:24.299+01:00

I think that one of the best things about software development is that it is always changing - unfortunately this ever changing environment doesn't often allow for things to change as simply as dropping in the next version.Deploying applications to some servers recently I discovered that some of the components used different versions of some low level libraries. This could have made me

Stephen Sounesshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02865488454850253029noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1481195935080195479.post-37231013463066695762009-08-11T00:10:00.005+01:002009-08-11T00:18:49.080+01:00

I found myself doing a double-take as I skimread the Twitter feeds this evening. VMWare to acquire SpringSource - hey, hey what the?Rod Johnson has blogged about it, and this time it's not April fools day so there may be some truth behind it.I wonder what this means for other virtualisation and cloud computing providers?For instance, will this influence the direction of Grails support for Google

Stephen Sounesshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02865488454850253029noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1481195935080195479.post-67992095227358307302009-08-04T22:02:00.004+01:002009-08-04T22:45:56.903+01:00

After a holiday in Ireland and the UK back in 2007, I decided that if nothing much was happening for me in New Zealand then I should head to the UK where I would have more opportunities to see the rest of the world.In September 2008 my paperwork came through for my tier 1 visa to live and work in the UK.I booked my flights so that I would arrive on the same date that the visa became valid, hoping

Stephen Sounesshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02865488454850253029noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1481195935080195479.post-90330499050249442902009-07-30T21:32:00.003+01:002009-07-30T21:44:30.289+01:00

My new job has been running quite smoothly so far, although the seniority aspect is a little different to what I was expecting as most of my teammates are recent graduates or still studying.Today I got that "hmm, maybe I am getting old" feeling when one of my colleagues mentioned that he would only have been five or six years old around the timeframe I was describing. It started off as a, "

Stephen Sounesshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02865488454850253029noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1481195935080195479.post-81826392946685169072009-07-30T21:07:00.002+01:002009-07-30T21:28:10.564+01:00

Since upgrading to Eclipse Galileo (a.k.a. 3.5) I've noticed that there has been a definite lag in plugin developers supporting the latest version.A couple of examples that have resulted in me keeping a parallel Ganymede (3.4) version installed include:- Google App Engine- Spring Tool Suite (well, not really, as I uninstalled this once I saw the recommended configuration tweaks to get the plugins

Stephen Sounesshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02865488454850253029noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1481195935080195479.post-32994399380460314782009-07-23T22:44:00.004+01:002009-07-24T00:33:38.263+01:00

This evening I attended a meeting of the London Android group hoping to glean enough interesting information to tempt me into upgrading from my current mobile phone (see image).So far my market research online has been interesting. Some mobile phone deals come with special offers - I don't think I need hair straighteners thanks anyway.A "deal" that almost sucked me in turned out to be for a

Stephen Sounesshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02865488454850253029noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1481195935080195479.post-45165784109751192872009-07-21T22:06:00.007+01:002009-07-21T23:08:10.952+01:00

I've recently started working at a new job, which has involved installing and getting up to speed with some JBoss software.Based on my previous experience, I thought that it would simply be a matter of heading to the JBoss website and downloading a zip containing the binaries. Alas that was not to be, as the jboss.com website only appears to offer 30 day evaluation downloads and emphasizes the

Stephen Sounesshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02865488454850253029noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1481195935080195479.post-14176370838788301442009-07-18T19:58:00.002+01:002009-07-18T20:51:26.665+01:00

Software development is an interesting processOnce you've identified what needs to be developed there's typically some aspect that you haven't dealt with before. Here are some examples:- a data type in the persistence layer (e.g. GIS Shapefile data)- an unfamiliar MVC framework (e.g. moving from Struts to Spring MVC)- a different JDBC connection pooling implementation- Grails and Groovy instead

Stephen Sounesshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02865488454850253029noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1481195935080195479.post-36724768333163501832009-07-16T21:04:00.007+01:002009-07-17T14:59:27.314+01:00

This morning on my way home from the latest job interview, I got to thinking about the costs and benefits of applying different approaches to persisting the domain objects of an application.The company that I had the interview with have two development teams, working on two major projects. One of the projects is using iBatis, which I took as a sign that this company isn't just blindly following

Stephen Sounesshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02865488454850253029noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1481195935080195479.post-77828000748784303332009-07-16T00:17:00.003+01:002009-07-16T00:21:59.586+01:00

I wonder how long it will take for world records to start related to Twitter?e.g. the most retweeted tweet.I'm mildly curious about seeing some visualisations of patterns of acticity in the twitterverse. So far I'd expect Michael Jackson's death to have been the most significant world event since Twitter has been in the mainstream.

Stephen Sounesshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02865488454850253029noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1481195935080195479.post-37571875557360573682009-07-15T22:45:00.004+01:002009-07-15T23:00:07.795+01:00

The old expression that "it's a small world" rally rang true for me today.On my way home from a job interview this afternoon I thought that I recognised an old friend from New Zealand queuing up to use an ATM. Sure enough it was! After nine and a half months I have finally bumped into someone that I know from back home.As if that wasn't enough, when I attended the London Spring User Group

Stephen Sounesshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02865488454850253029noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1481195935080195479.post-34295178744905195022009-07-15T00:23:00.004+01:002009-07-15T00:30:31.689+01:00

Today I heard that I was definitely the second choice, out of the final four candidates that were interviewed for a Java developer role last week. I hadn't been pressuring the agent for feedback, and he was quite keen on emphasizing that the company will be looking to grow further in the coming months - hopefully I won't still be available then.On Wednesday morning I have my first face-to-face

Stephen Sounesshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02865488454850253029noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1481195935080195479.post-56485584343303399162009-07-13T00:34:00.003+01:002009-07-13T18:55:24.169+01:00

As a different approach to preparing for the latest round of interviews, I've been reading snippets of the Java Language Specification. After a decade of programming in Java, I was surprised to come across a keyword that I didn't recognise, strictfp.Evidently it's been there since version 1.2, but I guess back then I was more interested in developing Swing components and troubleshooting garbage

Stephen Sounesshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02865488454850253029noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1481195935080195479.post-25555656004253373932009-07-08T00:49:00.012+01:002009-07-12T20:05:42.048+01:00

I've been posting responses to various queries on the Hibernate Forums lately.There seem to be a few recurring queries, so I'm looking to put together a white paper of sorts.Here are my thoughts of what this might include. JPA versus Hibernate:- Standards compliant versus proprietary- EntityManager versus SessionJPA does not require EJB3- using a JPA implementation does not necessarily require an

Stephen Sounesshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02865488454850253029noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1481195935080195479.post-54253847662141719652009-07-06T22:41:00.005+01:002009-07-09T15:37:25.204+01:00

Earlier this evening I attended a presentation by John Ferguson Smart, a fellow kiwi who is in London running his Java Power Tools Bootcamp at SkillsMatter.The title of the session was, "Getting Serious About Build Automation: Using Maven in the Real World". Based on his recent JavaOne presentation of the same name (slides available for download).Before attending the talk I was probably a lot

Stephen Sounesshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02865488454850253029noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1481195935080195479.post-59367935717606079912009-07-04T23:04:00.006+01:002009-07-06T08:43:50.849+01:00

I've started working on an application to allow people to manage their Facebook groups from outside of Facebook, as a hobby project to keep my skills fresh while I am between roles.This morning as I was writing some tests and expanding the application to the point where it would be ready to start interacting with Facebook, I found myself feeling uneasy about the structure of a Service.The method

Stephen Sounesshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02865488454850253029noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1481195935080195479.post-73327714383819552009-07-03T10:34:00.019+01:002011-05-17T07:40:39.750+01:00

This is going to be a long post, something I am considering as an appendix to my CV so that interested parties can get a more detailed view of my areas of expertise.2011- Developing RESTful web services using JSON- Converting stand-alone SOAP services to be integrated into a web application- Liaising with client project managers and their suppliers- Consuming XML web services2010- Mentoring

Stephen Sounesshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02865488454850253029noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1481195935080195479.post-33136310399496191812009-07-03T02:28:00.005+01:002009-07-03T02:40:38.759+01:00

Thursday was not a good day to be deploying updates to my hobby application on Google's App Engine.Early in the day I had been making some good progress with refactoring my client UI, and adding some intelligence to the server side for allowing game rules to start to take effect, but by mid-afternoon I noticed that I was unable to redeploy my application.Secure in the knowledge that nothing of

Stephen Sounesshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02865488454850253029noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1481195935080195479.post-87113525344681817302009-06-30T22:35:00.004+01:002009-07-02T10:24:23.748+01:00

I've gotten back around to trying out Google App Engine.The main area that I have heard about it has been in my dealings with Grails, but I am sticking with the plain Java capabilities for my initial experimenting.It seems fairly trivial to build and deploy some servlets using the Google plugin for Eclipse - even though that has meant switching back to a Ganymede version of Eclipse instead of the

Stephen Sounesshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02865488454850253029noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1481195935080195479.post-79523847912580467162009-06-30T12:13:00.005+01:002009-06-30T12:23:52.590+01:00

For a change of pace I popped across to Ireland to attend a wedding on the 27th of June.I had my video camera with me and managed to get some good footage of the speeches.The groomsmen helped to make the event a lot of fun - one of them even managed to bribe the best man into mentioning me in his "thank you"s, so here is the clip.(NB: this post is also an experiment in how Facebook will allow me

Stephen Sounesshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02865488454850253029noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1481195935080195479.post-8818281308146953452009-06-25T00:56:00.000+01:002009-06-25T01:08:56.971+01:00

I was just perusing the Grails User mailing list and came across a post by Graeme Rocher asking for the community to let him know what bugs are "hurting" the most.As part of the movement towards greater stability outlined as a key objective on the roadmap for Grails 1.2 "Bedivere", Graeme is heading up a bug fixing crusade targeting what is going to produce the greatest value to the active users

Stephen Sounesshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02865488454850253029noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1481195935080195479.post-27933246858957665252009-06-24T21:36:00.000+01:002009-06-24T22:06:58.725+01:00

Today I had one of those interviews where everything seemed to just flow naturally from the start to the finish.I was initially hesitant to agree to this face-to-face interview, as I am in the process of preparing for another interview which will involve me using an editing environment that I am not particularly familiar with. The agent's description of the interview process convinced me to go

Stephen Sounesshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02865488454850253029noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1481195935080195479.post-42759337588394667642009-06-22T15:24:00.000+01:002009-06-22T15:48:48.938+01:00

I was somewhat relieved when I came across this blog post which highlights the fact that other developers have also faced a loss of productivity when working with Grails.The "convention over configuration" approach speeds up development and keeps the learning curve fairly easy for most developers, but the list of open issues on the Jira suggests that there are still some aspects that need tuning

Stephen Sounesshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02865488454850253029noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1481195935080195479.post-30065455415970782262009-06-16T20:46:00.001+01:002009-06-16T21:06:57.354+01:00

Since I tried tricking the context-sensitive advertising system into not showing me all the dating sites, I have noticed quite a few advertisements that looked to good to be true, in other words scams.Out of curiousity I have clicked on some links and found that they show up as a fake site designed to give the appearance of an online newspaper with a journalist's report on their "product".If you

Stephen Sounesshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02865488454850253029noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1481195935080195479.post-88523234871042408782009-06-14T23:05:00.000+01:002009-06-15T00:06:05.469+01:00

In my career so far as a software developer I have worked on a number of projects that were supposedly guaranteed to launch the investors into the bigtime.Surprisingly enough - they didn't.This post is intended to provide some general advise to others that may be considering investing money and manhours into a "killer app".Be realistic when you determine your potential market, then knock that

Stephen Sounesshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02865488454850253029noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1481195935080195479.post-23825600910252740692009-06-14T00:07:00.000+01:002009-06-14T00:20:56.680+01:00

A week or so ago I signed up with a Google App Engine account. The next step was trying to think up an application to develop and deploy onto this new-ish cloud computing environment. I thought about an auction system, as I have some experience of that from a project that I lead back in New Zealand, but I got side-tracked into preparing for some interviews.Yesterday I was looking for someplace

Stephen Sounesshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02865488454850253029noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1481195935080195479.post-71732809125149083672009-06-12T12:52:00.000+01:002009-06-12T13:01:45.547+01:00

I thought that I may have been missing some subtle aspect about programming in Groovy when I noticed some code that was trying to specify the transactional behaviour of a service.According to the Grails documentation the way to specify this is by including a static variable named transactional and set it to true or false.The default behaviour (without the existence of this static variable) is

Stephen Sounesshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02865488454850253029noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1481195935080195479.post-89615600669128510442009-06-11T09:36:00.000+01:002009-06-11T09:40:53.806+01:00

My local Underground line was mostly uneffected by the RMT strike, as it turns out that not all lines are operated by the same union. This was a great relief when it came to finding my way to a job interview on the other side of town, as I didn't have to use buses or boats or anything that I would normally avoid when wearing a suit on a rainy day.Coming back home at around 5pm did seem a bit

Stephen Sounesshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02865488454850253029noreply@blogger.com0