This is the last and final part on my SpringOne 2009 experience. This post summarizes the sessions I attended from day 4 and wraps up with a summary of my take aways. Session: OSGi and Groovy Jump Start The presentation started with a 5 minute youtube video preview which I...

Session: Agile Architecture - Technologies and Patterns - Kirk Knoernschild Some of the questions this session set out to attempt to answer were What is architecture? What defines architecture? What are architectural decisions? Is architecture a forward only decision? Several definitions of Architecture were quoted from prior literature. Such as...

Running a day late on my posts. Here’s day two (yesterday) Session: Grails Quick Start - David Klien David walked through the creation of a Grails web application to track a JUG’s meeting schedule. I liked his presentation style or maybe because the room wasn’t very crowded things just registered...

It has finally arrived. SpringOne which I have been anticipating for over a month is finally here and it  couldn’t have come sooner. I need one more blast of warm sunny weather before the hibernation months of winter. My day started at 3:30 am, well actually 4:00 am as I...

A Brief Introduction This is the first in a series of blog posts that will attempt to demystify OSGi and demonstrate how it enables the creation of modular web applications. We will explore various aspects of the technology along with the challenges of using this technology. I encourage you to...

I saw a really great post on the Freakonomics blog talking about how hidden connections almost sunk Chicago.  I’ve seen situations like this all too often during my career.  At least in the software world, we can try to prevent this by developing modules that are more loosely coupled.  Of...

So here’s the situation. Let’s say I have this query here: SELECT * FROM employees WHERE employee_id NOT IN ( 1234 , 3456 , 5678 ); How do we do that with the Hibernate Criteria object with a Restriction? You would think that the Restrictions API would have a “not...

Recently I installed Windows 7 RC on the Dell Latitude D830 I use at work and I have been slightly impressed. One of the most useful features so far has been the ability to right click on an image and select “Burn Image” thus I no longer need to use...

In Confessions of an IT pro, Becky Roberts talks about her nine biggest professional blunders. It really brought back some old memories. Maybe I’ll write a later post discussing some of my less-than-finest moments. A minor points in the article really struck me and I wanted to point them out:...

Introduction to ImageMagick ImageMagick® is a software suite to create, edit, and compose bitmap images. It can read, convert and write images in a variety of formats (over 100) including DPX, EXR, GIF, JPEG, JPEG-2000, PDF, PhotoCD, PNG, Postscript, SVG, and TIFF. Use ImageMagick to translate, flip, mirror, rotate, scale,...