Blog Insights

Branching and merging in Subversion is a great way to work on large new features without disrupting mainline development on trunk.  However, it has a reputation for being so difficult that many developers never take advantage of it.  In this post I'll show just how easy it really is thanks...

On many occasions I want to be able to inject environment specific property values into my Spring managed beans. These may be things like web service endpoints, database URLs, etc. Values I know for each environment at build time, but I want to use the same WAR/EAR file in each...

If you're like me, receiving 30-40 emails is par for the day. Because Source Allies provides consulting services for companies wishing to implement or better take advantage of Zimbra, it is also the mail server we use at our company. Zimbra has incredible search capabilities, but my OCD tendencies still...

Siri, which debuted last week, is surely the first iPhone app that's the commercialized result of a multimillion-dollar Defense Department research project. It's a "virtual personal assistant" that uses voice recognition, your GPS location, and links to local information and services to respond to requests you speak into an iPhone...

Last weekend while pondering the question "Is Scala ready for the enterprise?" I decided to write a simple Java EE 6 app entirely in Scala, without using any Java. I had three main reasons for doing this: one was just to see how easy/difficult it would be to write everything...

Last year I coordinated a technical book club here at Source Allies. This was my first experience doing one and I wanted to share my experience for the benefit of others who may be looking at starting one. The fact that we even started a book club was a big positive...

In reality it's likely your TFTP and NFS server are going to be the same server, however because we go by IP in this, it is hopefully easier to understand. The PXE client connects to the given IP and requests the file (pxelinux) The system then looks for a configuration file. sudo mount...

Why would you ever need that? Say you get a jar file. After using the jar for a while you realize that there is a bug in a class in the jar file. Unfortunately you also find out that the jar is no longer supported and there is no way you...

I've been working on a web-based tool that stores, among other network-related things, IP addresses. When I first started I stored each IP address as four TINYINTS (0-255 for each octet): mysql> desc ipaddresses; +----------+---------------------+------+-----+---------+----------------+ | Field | Type ...

Over the last several months I have worked on several content heavy websites for one of our partners. When I say “content heavy”, I mean that 80%-90% of the pages in the application are static, or at least mostly static, a customer name, membership number, etc may need to be...