Blog Insights

Everyone, especially project managers, is in love with Agile Development. And why wouldn't they be? Under the old school system, you'd end up with developers either sitting around uselessly, or drafting up prototypes that will only be thrown away. Agile allows for parallel design and development, wasting less time and...

Need to sort a list of custom objects? Instead of coding up a custom implementation of your favorite sorting algorithm, you can simply use the tools provided in the Collections class (Collections framework) paired with the BeanComparator class (Apache project). Simple example: you have a List of Person objects and you...

After several weeks of performing support duties at a larger company I have begun to wonder about support practices and what could make the process better. The process in which I currently work goes as follows: It seems like there might be a quicker option. My responsibilities include monitoring all the tickets that...

Today is already becoming "one of those days" ;) A loosely written specification provided me with an ambiguity I did not account for:  the partner wanted expiration dates and ordering dates to be based upon business days, whereas the specification said "days" only.  So, I found myself scrambling to figure out...

There are no doubts that PHP made a huge impact on Web development industry. Because of it's flexibility, PHP finds it's usage in many areas, starting from simple Web sites and ending with complex Web applications (i.e. frameworks, shopping carts, etc...). So, today I'd like to share with you how can...

I am looking for a new firewall solution for my home and an open source system to provide to current or prospective customers. Whenever I ask tech minded people what open source solution they favor, I get the same answer again and again. So I started digging into the documentation...

An interesting find by Matt and some coaxing lead me to implementing the MIT Simile Timeline project found at http://www.simile-widgets.org/timeline/, the website also provides an API for the few functions Timeline has. I use timeline in my actitime-rc project to track when emails are being sent.  This is nice for people...

The folks at Spring have made it extremely easy to allow your application authenticate and authorize users with Spring LDAP. This blog entry explains how to check your directory structure and use some sparsely documented Spring LDAP parameters ({0} and {1}) to get everything working. In your Spring Security configuration, pointing...

I recently sat through several vendor demos for a partner who is in the market for a health care claims administration platform. These systems are large ticket items and the vendors ranged from large and well entrenched vendors with years of experience in the market to small and relatively new...

http://sourceware.org/cluster/conga/ Conga provides a client/server architecture for cluster management with the ricci and luci services. Luci acts as the configuration interface and sends instructions the the ricci client on each server. Ricci takes instructions from luci and updates cluster.conf as necessary. yum groupinstall "Clustering" yum groupinstall "Cluster Storage" Once installed luci must be initalized on...