I’m finishing up my first week of 2010 with Hopslam in the fridge.  It’s been a wonderful week.

CodeMash was awesome.  I’ve gotten a few new directions to explore in my side projects.  I got a little taste of Ruby, which I need to continue.  Plus I won a Scala book, and have started reading that.  Not to mention that I talked to another person who said I need to learn Groovy and Grails.  Looks like my year is going to be busy.

I don’t know if you noticed the new page I put up related to my Android apps.  I created a Google Android app that displayed the CodeMash schedule.  I really enjoyed creating the app and am trying to come up with a new idea for phone app development.

On this day…

• 2009: A year removed from the beginning — Today is an anniversary of sorts.  It was a year ago that I started the Part-Time Developer series.  I believe [...]
• 2008: The Part Time Developer 1: Explanation — I apologize for the incoherence of my last post. I should no better than write one when there’s no [...]
• 2005: The calm before the storm — Yeah, yeah, the big storm is supposed to start tonight and pretty much last all day tomorrow. All the [...]

Related posts:

1. 2009 Goals: Professional
2. I get to go to a conference!
3. What’s the probability you know the probability?

I decided to use JPA (Java Persistence API) for my data access.  It would give me an opportunity to learn something new, get a different perspective from Hibernate, and since the other members on my team had used it I had ready tech support.

The project was a success, though making the “Holy Grail” of Bill of Ladings seems a little like overkill it was a good learning experience and was my first project that I was a major part of to make into production.  We’ve had some peculiarities caused by the legacy system that we’ve had to accommodate for.

I did have one major mistake that I rectified this week after a swift kick to the head from a team member.  I’d been letting Spring inject an EntityManager into each one of my DAOs (Data Access Objects).  I’d found a great series of articles on using JPA and setting up a generic framework for your DAOs.  But I’d neglected to realize that the articles must not have been written for the web world and threading.  EntityManager’s  aren’t thread safe.  While this wasn’t seeming to cause us a problem, it was a good idea to rectify it.

EntityManagerFactory’s are thread safe, so it was a pretty easy change to switch over to injecting the correct entity factory and then creating an EntityManager as needed for every method that required one and then closing it.  Hopefully, this will circumvent one issue that was caused by our legacy database driver.  Fingers crossed.

I really like JPA.  I used EclipseLink as the JPA provider.  Annotations rule for all this ORM (object relational mapping) stuff.  So much nicer than the load of Hibernate XML files.  I believe Shindo told me this years ago, and I’m glad I finally had an opportunity to use it.  On our main project, we’ll be stuck in Hibernate XML hell forever, most likely.  I know Hibernate has it’s own annotations for this, as well as coming JPA support, but I really like the seemingly lightweight feel that EclipseLink gives me.

On this day…

• 2007: Catch-up 1 — Let’s try to kill a few of these.

  Birthday Money
  I got something like $60-65 for my birthday. While it’s probably [...]

Related posts:

1. Programming I’ve been up to
2. Josephus’ Circle of Doom or “links of the day”
3. The Part Time Developer 6: Adding Hibernate to the Spring Tutorial

I’ve got to say I’m somewhat disappointed.  While the last 100 pages or so flowed along nicely, getting to that point was slow going for me.  I nearly gave up before getting to that point.  I’m glad I didn’t, because the novel as a whole was worth it.

The story centers around Hiro, a hacker, now delivering pizza for the mob, who had a hand in creating the Metaverse, the matrix before there was a Matrix movie.  He gets pulled into a power struggle against a weapon that affects the innermost wirings of our brains, especially programmers.  A mind virus if you will.

There’s a lot of ancient history delvings and biblical stuff, which seemed quite tedious for me to dig through.  In the end, it all clicked for me, but I can’t say I enjoyed getting there.

I also didn’t enjoy or find very believable the future that was outlined.  The US government has nearly dissolved and everything is franchised.  The book was written in the early 90’s, and doesn’t take place all that far into the future, so it was just a little hard of me to suspend my disbelief that things could ever approach that.

The Metaverse was cool.  Of course I’m a sucker for most things cyberspace related.  It would be pretty awesome to have a program capable of the interaction that the Librarian program was.  It was basically a data analysis program that appeared as a librarian that you could just ask questions to and request hypothesis about more direct topics.  Will we ever get there, I don’t know.  But data mining is an interesting topic.

I give Snow Crash a thumb up.  I’m glad I read it.  I’d compare my problem getting through it to a Tom Clancy book.  I always found the first part of Clancy books slow going and then it was a fun roller-coaster down to the end.

I had actually heard of (and was probably more interested in) Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon but had gathered that Snow Crash would be an easier introduction to Stephenson.  I still plan on reading it, but it’s on the pile for now.  I’ve got some tech books I need to get through.

One other note.  Stephenson has a unique writing style.  I don’t know if all his books are that way or just this one.  I guess I would call it somewhat disjointed.

On this day…

• 2008: Unrelated ramblings to unload my mind — I’m really loving the little “Previously on this day” section of my blog.  It’s probably more entertaining for me than [...]
• 2007: Things I need to blog about — 1. Octobeerfest
  2. Tim’s MicroLeague
  3. Apache Jakarta Digester
  4. Birthday Money
  5. Computer Repair Business
  6. Red Wings/NHL/Hockey
  7. Chelsea’s idiot owner

  Related posts:2009 Goals: ProfessionalI [...]

• 2007: Pit Reloaded — I’m in the process of resetting Pit for season 7. Some of you Pitters have already found your way [...]
• 2006: The gang was all there! — Well, I had said yesterday that our plans were very loose. In fact, the only place we got to [...]

Related posts:

1. The second last snow of the winter
2. Surviving the snow
3. 2008: Year in review

One of my team was working on a side project that had a somewhat dynamic data aspect to it.  What I mean is depending on a certain type selection made by the user, there was some data for that selection that wasn’t needed for other selections.  This was a fairly large aspect of the application.  He had a data model worked out on how to set up for these special types, and getting them to and from the database.  Displaying it was the problem.

Very simplistically making this more concrete, let’s say that if the user picked selection A, he’d have to supply fields 1, 2, 3.  If selection B was picked, fields 4, 5, 6 would need supplied.  Given that future selections may need to be added that required other data, a flat model where each selection would just have all the fields didn’t make sense.  While each selection had a number static fields common across the selections, each selection had it’s own distinct data.

Initially he was thinking he was going to have to create a separate screen for each type of selection or at the least a separate panel unique to each selection.  I told him he shouldn’t have to do that.  We could make a special panel that would dynamically display the data depending on what was needed.  So I set about tinkering with it in my spare time.

This whole app is supposed to be a tempory hack to get the users through the next couple years.  So I wouldn’t say my solution is extreme enterprise quality.  I didn’t take the time to figure out how to get my controls binding to a data structure.  We’ve got some pretty slick (when it’s not causing troubles) binding in our Eclipse RCP app that automagically binds back and forth between controls and a data obect.  I haven’t dug into exactly how that works yet, but it’s on my list of todos.

I created two controls for displaying this dynamic unknown data: a dynamic grid table and a dynamic composite.  Both would add controls (Text, Combo, etc) based on what type of data was needed.  This was all backed by a list of property objects that described each required field, such things as the data type, value object, field title to display, etc.  The table would show a list of two columns, one for title and one for a control to hold the value.  The composite (which was used and subsequently more work put into) would layout a set of labels and controls as defined by the backing list.

The underlying database model stores everything as string so I added some convenience methods to load and extract the data from the underlying list as strings.  All in all it works pretty well and saved a lot of time that would have been stuck in making special panels for each selection type.  Not to mention the time that will be saved when a user requests some additional field to be added to a particular selection or a whole new selection added.  My co-worker made a pretty slick admin panel to handle the building of the dynamic data and additions.

This little side trip helped me learn a lot more about straight SWT.  I really enjoy being a developer of tools for other developers to use.  I have plans to add an easy builder way of creating the underlying list and being able to magically bind to and object.  But, there’s always new priorities so I may not be able to get back to it.  Perhaps I’ll someday find a need for such a thing in my own projects and can create a better version from the experience I’ve gathered.

Well, I didn’t get to the other side project at work that I detoured on involving JPA, so I’ll have to save that for another time.

On this day…

No other posts on this day.

Related posts:

1. Programming as a game
2. News you can’t use
3. The Part Time Developer 5: Spring

1. Continue to work hard and enjoy my job.
   This hasn’t been a problem so far, but I’m going to stay on top of things and make sure  
2. Learn Groovy
   I learned about the Groovy programming language around a year ago during the fateful conversation that got my butt in gear.  It was on my list of technologies to learn but I never got that far.  Dynamic languages have been all the rage the past year and I’d like to learn what one can do to help me in my own projects.  Groovy is the obvious choice for me since I’m already using Java and it’s built on top of the Java Virtual Machine(JVM).
3. Work on my own development projects
   This could be such things as finally bringing my old Overlord wargame idea to fruition or converting and extending Pit into a new development environment.  A lot of it might be plinking around with Groovy to learn it or such things as GWT (Google Web Toolkit).  Basically, just to get working on some different things to expose myself to new situations and new development libraries.  One of my paralyzing failings with the new technologies has always been not having something concrete to play with them in.  If I have some active projects, I’ll be able to see some possible uses for new things.
4. Read at least two programming related books
   I’m in the early stages of Effective Java right now and really grokking things.  I really enjoy getting advice from smarter, more experienced people than myself.  This is a wonderful book for such things.  Coupled with #3 above, having some projects to use these newly learned methods will help to drill them home.  Perhaps another book to get would be Groovy related.  The thing with a lot of programming books, is they’re mostly used as a reference for situations you are encountering.  Reading them from front to back in order is nearly mind numbing.  So most likely succeeding at #3 will help this one succeed.
5. By year’s end, program something that will make it worth getting a web host to make it available to on the web.
   I’ve not really been thrilled with my current web host for the last couple of years.  I find response slow as cat doo-doo, and the quality of their tech support makes dealing with most government guidelines a cake walk.  I was very close to pulling the trigger and moving FloydWing.com to a different hosting service where I could have my own application server running to host programs I would create.  But paying the extra amount to move to such a hosting service when I don’t currently have anything beyond this blog, the Pit forums, and Pit archive to put there would be a tremendous waste of money.  Another year of putting up with my current service may give me the incentive I need to make it worth it and get my money’s worth.
6. Work on somebody else’s project
   I don’t think I’m ready to jump into some existing open source project, but one of my work associates has a couple projects that he’s in the early stages of, one that may end up open source.  He’s already mentioned having me help out, so I think I should pursue that.
7. Start Pit back up.
   I heard from the faithful that they miss Pit.  I do too.  Even though we’re probably only three strong anymore, I still enjoy seeing how the seasons play out.  I’ve already put a little work into setting my environment back up and (most importantly) found the code and site archive.  I’ve got a a little more to do before I say we’re going to get moving for a definite, but look for a future blog post concerning this.

On this day…

• 2010: CodeMash 2010 — Only one more day of work before I head to CodeMash.  I can’t wait.  It was painful not being able [...]
• 2009: Mini review: Santa’s Butt Winter Porter — Santa’s Butt has a rear view of Santa looking over a list and holding a mug of brew while sitting [...]
• 2007: Spam, VASSAL, Exercise — Sorry, no The Mighty Endeavor after action report yet. Hopefully this weekend I can put some time into that [...]
• 2005: Wellies — Tonight was a very entertaining evening for me. For once I wasn’t the target of my children’s laughter.
  My wife [...]

Related posts:

1. 2009 Goals: Hobby related
2. Web bound
3. 2009 Goals: Personal

I finally got fed up with crappy non rewarding jobs in mid-January and started taking steps to rectify that.  I started relearning useful Java technologies.  The end result was supposed to put me somewhere around Columbus, but in the end that never quite panned out.  I’d resolved that I wasn’t going to find a rewarding programming position anywhere near L-town and the family and I finally accepted the need to possibly move.  Also, attending my first real software developer conference showed me a lot of cool technologies and things you could do with them.  (Sadly, I won’t be able to attend that in 2009.  CodeMash is definitely worth paying for yourself, but I’m not ready to lose 3 vacation days so early in the year.  Maybe next year.)

The wif-al unit’s grandmother passed away in February.  We also played tag with strept for quite a while.  Eventually, the wif-al unit needed to have her tonsils removed.  A few weeks of shear hell for her from that, mixed in with a couple job interviews for me, got us through March and April.

End of April/early May, I got offers from two companies.  Neither of these related to the possible position that started me down my path.  Thank goodness it did though or I wouldn’t have been ready skill wise.  One position was nearby at a tire manufacturer doing very narrow focused programming in C for a specialized tool used in that industry.  Not really a growth path there, and I’d already left one job because of narrow focused dinosaurian technology.  The other position was working on an ERP system under development that would require a move.  You already know which one I took.

May and June saw us working feverishly to get the house ready to sell.  If I can give any advice for people looking to sell, do all this prep work before putting it on the market.  Yeah, you’ll tell yourself that people will see the potential.  But trust me, people looking for a home to live in aren’t wanting to have to do work right away.  We corrected all the problems that had been hanging there for years and in the end it paid off.  The first (and only) people to look at it bought it.  It was a stressful 5-6 weeks getting it ready but I know it made a difference.

Something for me to remember.  If people can’t make it to something I’m putting on, don’t make a big deal out of it.  They may have a lot going on in their lives and don’t need extra stress from me acting real dissappointed.

I started the new job June 2nd, and drove 66 miles morning and evening for two months.  My back and butt are both glad that’s over.  As usual with my timing on most things, I picked the best time gas price-wise to be driving those long trips.  I’m being sarcastic.  Upper $4/gallon, keeps that tank hungry.

We sold the house and closed on our new house mid July and started the move late July.  A couple U-Hauls and multiple full vans later, all the junk had been moved.

Fall and winter came much too quickly for our tastes.  I coached the eldest girlywog’s 4th/5th grade soccer team for the first time and the youngest tried out karate.  We’ve tried to take advantage of our access to all the new things that are now close to us, minor league baseball, art museum, zoo, etc.  It’s been fun.  It still feels like it’s not real yet and we all miss the old stomping grounds and friends quite often.  But I’ve been told by people that they notice a change in me for the good.  And unlike the last job change, this one has stuck around.  I’ve been on the new job for over 6 months now and I’ve not woken up once complaining about the work I’m doing.  I think I may have mentioned that here before but it’s true and important for me.  Being miserable in your job, no matter how much you’re being paid, doesn’t do your family any good.  It takes too much of the good, fun you away from them.

The last month and half saw age old problems in my family resurface again.  I tried to make some people see things from a different point of view, but probably should have stayed out of it.  But then I’m enabling.  You can’t win either way.  It’s a shame when non-blood family’s stubborness and tunnel vision can ruin a whole family.

I did finally get to do some gaming and the family unit didn’t have to go anywhere on Christmas, which is a big plus.  We got a Wii for Christmas which is a very interesting system.  Yesterday we had another Christmas get together and in a couple weeks, we’ll get the last one out of the way.  Tomorrow the kidlings head back to school.  At work, we go into code freeze and begin the first of many testing and bug fixing cycles until a pilot install in May.

Should be an interesting and busy time, but I’ll give one of those outlook and resolution posts in the near future.  For now, I need to have that last Hell Hath No Fury…Ale.  Laters!

On this day…

• 2008: I get to go to a conference! —
  Next week I’ll be making the trek to Sandusky to attend CodeMash. I think it’s great that we [...]
• 2007: Old Books and such — In response to my recent post chronicaling my old role playing days, my buddy Sixftunda posted his rememberances of the [...]
• 2005: Back At It — Inclement weather pep talk

  Related posts:2009 Goals: ProfessionalI get to go to a conference!What’s the probability you know the probability?

Related posts:

1. Final Post…of 2008
2. Work, It’ll Kill Ya
3. Happy Holiday 2008

It was a nice break and gave me a little creative license to come up with something.  It was also nice to make something that didn’t depend on all the previous framework code and get to tinker with the basic building blocks of Spring and Hibernate.  That’s one thing that has always bugged me with big built up frameworks.  When you want to just take a small portion of something and start building something completely different, you end up wasting a lot of time just trying to untangle it from what it was attached to before.  Wasn’t that what dependency injection was supposed to free us from?  Maybe if it’s done right. 

Anyway, it’s been an enjoyable experience and after pretty much completing the base generic layer, I moved on today to use it in the ERP system for our images and drawings.  I also moved it into a separate codebase for our other application that needs it and will help integrate it there when the current developer is ready.

I basically made it to store any type of file as an attachment.  What I came to realize is that I had probably created a very simplistic document management system.  The base system is only concerned with storing, retrieving, and deleting the attachment and giving an id via a simple database table that tracks to the storage location scheme (which is Spring injectable).  Each instance that has a need for such storage can layer on it’s own specific search or naming needs.  For instance, the ERP part that I’m concerned with right now only needs to map order lines to the attachments, keeping it’s user file name so the user can relate to it.  The other current app, layers a virtual directory system on top of the attachment storage to make it stay consistent with what the end user is used to.

All in all it’s pretty neat.  Not rocket science mind you.  It’s not that much code.  The time was taken thinking about what I wanted and how it would be used and refactoring it to how I wanted it to be.  It’s been “existing framework neutered” so hopefully the core development team won’t complain to much, but it makes it easier for our development team’s other applications.  Programming religious wars are always an annoying thing.

On this day…

• 2009: Pot Cop — We don’t just have your regular run of the mill cops up here north of the border.  We’ve got talking [...]
• 2005: Odds & Anniversaries — I’ve been driven crazy by trackback spam on this blog for quite some time. About twice a week I’d [...]

Related posts:

1. The Part Time Developer 5: Spring
2. The Part Time Developer 3: Hibernation Mode
3. The Part Time Developer 6: Adding Hibernate to the Spring Tutorial

Hoping to hit the garage and basement hard tomorrow.  Got a Chelsea game in the morning though on FSC, so my priorities are still where they should be. 

Somewhere in all the boxes that are storing my games is my exacto knife and nail clippers that will enable me to remove my Storm Over Stalingrad counters and clip their corners.  I could probably forego the clipping since you don’t really need to stack the counters, but it looks nice.  We’ll see.  I’d like to get them ready so I could maybe start a solo game tomorrow.  Hoping to write up a rules review tomorrow.

I also partook of a wonderful beer tonight.  An old love so to speak.  It was everything I remembered and more.  But I should probably get going now, so I’ll have to put that review in the queue also.

On this day…

• 2008: Happy 2nd Anniversary, Sixftunda — I had just checked to make sure my last post showed up okay and noticed that the “Previously on this [...]
• 2006: Working for the Weekend — The biggest news of the week, that I just found out about, is that my good friend now has a [...]

Related posts:

1. Clip, clip, clip
2. Russian tanks approaching Karkhov
3. Storm Over Stalingrad (live) box opening

On this day…

No other posts on this day.

Related posts:

1. 2008: Year in review
2. Work, It’ll Kill Ya
3. Gaming days to start

You’ve got to document and hand-off anything that you’ve been working on and won’t be able to finish.  There’s the brain dump documents so that life can continue after you’re gone.  You’re constantly running into people you’ll probably never see again and have the last conversation.  You tell them the same story you’ve told the last twenty people you’ve run into.  Desk cleaning, returning borrowed things, giving away things you won’t need, cleaning up embarrassing files/notes.  By far the most painful is migrating email and files from your PC that you wish to keep.  Migrating your work and home digital life to one laptop drawbacks become evident when leaving.

Thunderbird made that pretty painless this time though.  I copied my profile directory onto my old laptop and *poof* everything is now there.  I’m not sure about the email address book, but I’ve got that exported just in case.  Moving all my blogs into Google Reader has made that a non-issue.  I just have a few bookmarks to go through that I saved before starting to use Reader.

Last week I really kicked butt and got most of this stuff out of the way.  I’ve had some minor things to complete this week but for the most part, this week has been pretty relaxed.  Leaving my last job saw me cleaning my desk out at 4:30 on Friday afternoon.  I’m not having that this time.  As of right now, I’m pretty much ready to power down, do 2 minutes of final packing, and then I’ll be ready to walk out the door.  Friday will be busy enough with all the final goodbyes, final lunch, and final meetings.

I’ve retained my responsibilities for overseeing my department right up until the end.  I figured such things would have been shifted away from me by now, but I’m still expected to report on our goings on at my final staff meeting on Friday.  That’s cool, makes me feel like I’ve been appreciated.  Looking back, I can’t really think of what I’ve done to truly have an impact these last 21 months, but people have told me I’ve had a positive impact.  That’s all I’ve ever tried to do, leave things better off than when I found them.  Don’t ask me what though, I can’t think of anything right now. 

On this day…

• 2009: Time of Champions! — The Blackhawks did their part, setting the stage for a good old fashion Original 6 Norris division matchup in the [...]
• 2006: Music and the Pit prequel — So it’s been a while since my last post. The Wings have been eliminated early for the 3rd straight [...]

Related posts:

1. Puck a duck, I’m crying on my Puck
2. Life really hates me and I mostly hate it too