Gafter to Microsoft..
Initially I found it hard to Believe, but it appears to be true that Neal Gafter one of the Java-rock star has joined Microsot. I wonder what this means to his Closures proposal.
“working on Microsoft Visual Studio Managed Languages with Anders Hejlsberg, on C# and other languages. “
Also confirmed by the latest Java Posse podcast (#208)
SVN, Fix “Can’t convert string from ‘UTF-8′ to native encoding:”
Well getting back from vacation I tried to update one of my subversion repositories, and I were once more met with the “Can’t convert string from ‘UTF-8′ to native encoding:” , luckily it is easily fixed. This problem is caused by filename containing “special” characters (in my case Swedish ÅÄÖ).
[conlun@mbp:/]$ export LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8
Verify you changes by running
[conlun@mbp:/]$ locale
LANG=
LC_COLLATE=”C”
LC_CTYPE=”en_US.UTF-8″
LC_MESSAGES=”C”
LC_MONETARY=”C”
LC_NUMERIC=”C”
LC_TIME=”C”
LC_ALL=”C/en_US.UTF-8/C/C/C/C”
Switched feeds to FeedBurner
I’ve switched my feeds at this blog to be published via FeedBurner. There should be no disruption to your normal reading, although some aggregators might show some non-new items as new.
The WP plugin really made it a breeze.
Moved the blog, or atleast tried to..
I started to move my blog yesterday, from my own hosting to a shared hosting on Dreamhost (heard allot of good things about them, and as a bonus the have hosted SVN servers). I can´t remember the last time I used a provider to host things, but i guess it were 10 years ago 
.
Well things could have been going smoother, I changed the DNS at my registrar last night before hitting the sack and expected to be up and running when i woke up this morning. Guess what, my Dreamhost experience started out pretty rough (to say the least), they have had some serious downtimes all day. Well I guess these things happens, I will give them a spin and evaluate their services.
Minor update..
Well just a quick update what has been going on lately.
Another certification…
Last week I completed (and cleared) the Certified JBoss Developer, the test was quite interesting and a good followup to the the JBoss for Advanced J2EE Developer course I attended a couple of weeks back. Quite interesting to write an open-book certification, where you get 24h to complete the test (taking it at home). I recommend the course to anyone looking for the nitty-gritty details about JBoss AS (although you can pick up the information by reading the JBoss AS Guide). Although certification really doesn’t tell you anything, it can be a good edge to get interesting gigs.
Joined a JSR expert group..
Since I joined the JCP almost 10months ago, I have been more of a lurker (I haven’t participated actively in any JSRs). The time of change is here, some months ago I requested to join the JSR299 (WebBeans) expert group, and yesterday I got the approvement email. The JSR is really interesting, for those unfamiliar with it it’s basically Seam in a standardized way (the JSR is lead by Gavin King).
Work, work, work..
It has been real busy week at work (both client wise and internally). My current project is nearing it’s end (implementation wise) and I have had more time to actually do some coding in the project (ie less meetings, management, mentoring). I’ve been concentrating on verifying the overall architecture against the requirements. Also quite a bit of refactoring, moving out some common JSF functionalites to reusable components, this have given me a good chance to really dive into the JSF spec. Hopefully I will make these components available in some form over the coming months, it’s not exactly rocket-science component but usefully small tidbits.
I have also been busy on weekends, late nights migrating the infrastructure from old hardware/software to new servers. To this stage we been quite successfully and we have deprecated some applications, and old hardware. And I have begun to extend, and introduce a SSO solution to our business critical applications (most of them homegrown, and on diffent platforms such as .NET, J2EE, and classic ASP). We settled on CAS which seems to be a proven solution, but we are not quite there yet. We need to plug this into a Microsoft Active Directory for the authentication store, any suggestions here are very much welcome.
Questions about Open Source Java? This Podcast may have the answers!
Java has been released under the GPL v2 Licence. What does this mean for your Java apps? Are they GPL’d now too?
What is Java ME and why is it such a big deal that it too has been GPL’d?
How difficult is it to build Java from source? These and other questions answered by three of the big players from Sun Microsystems in this Podcast Interview
30sec Subversion setup
I also suffer from the same syndrome as Shane, so I post a link here for his easy and fast setup of a SVN repository.
JBoss training next week
Next week I will be attending a training session on Jboss in Stockholm (JBoss for Advanced J2EE Developers), the course details looks promising and hopefully it will dwelve into some gory details.
Team dynamics analogy
Found an interesting post over at Darren Hobbs blog about adding more team members to a project. Good analogy, if only the managers would catch on.
Being careful to distinguish between metaphor and simile, it came to me today that software projects are like turkeys.
You can’t achieve the same effect when roasting a turkey by doubling the temperatuire and halving the cooking time. Similarly a project cannot have the number of people doubled and the duration halved and get the same result. The rate of knowledge crunching is not increased by adding more people.
On writing code, a CLM?
Tom Ball is bloging if writing code while being a senior software engineer is limiting your career advancements. This got me thinking, I agree with Tom that this can be a limitation in manager eyes, the question is why?
My point of view is to be a successful senior engineer/architect I really need to know the stuff is really works, how else can I make suggestions on implementation, framework choices and so on? And I also love writing code and managing teams/doing design & architecture.
Is this really a leftover from the old way of doing software (i.e. waterfall) when you sat down and worked out all design? I really dislike just (only?) spitting out UML and documents/guidelines, sadly allot of architecture/senior positions seems to be just that.
So is the question is, is there a place for a coding engineer/architect?