The Porter Method

New Home for The Porter Method

2005-11-07T19:20:00.000-08:00

Well I finally bit the bullet and decided to get some hosting space and break free from the chains of Blogger.

The new home for this blog will now be located here: The Porter Method Blog.
Please update your links accordingly. The new feed location is here. RSS Feed.

My new webhost is TextDrive. So far the experience has been good. The new blogging setup will be using WordPress. If you see something that looks strange, then it is probably because of my ineptitude with WordPress. Hopefully it won't take too long for me to get up to speed.

Eventually I'll have a full site running at www.theportermethod.com, but things are a bit hectic right now, so it may be a couple of weeks.

Alabama .Net Code Camp 2005 Recap

2005-11-01T20:16:00.000-08:00

First of all here is a link where you can download a zip file of my presentation.

Introduction to Creating Installation Packages with Microsoft's Windows Installer XML (WiX) Toolset

To run the examples, you should download the latest binary version of WiX and extract the archive to C:\Wix

Then download my presentation and extract it to C:\, add the C:\WiX directory to your path. After this you should be able to work with all of the samples.

The contents of the presentation archive are:
Introduction to Creating Installation Packages with Microsoft's Windows Installer XML (WiX) Toolset.ppt - Presentation File
Guid.vbs - VBScript to generate GUID and place it into the clipboard using some magic IE Automation
xsd_doc.html - HTML Documentation generated from the WiX XML Schema (a bit easier to use than browsing the XSD file directly and reading the documentation)

Here are the other sessions I attended:

Pooling for Performance - Andrew Corley
Very interesting session talking about the advantages of Database Connection Pooling and Object Pooling. SQL Server offers built in support for connection pooling. The .Net Framework makes adding support for Object Pooling completely trivial. Looks like a great implementation. Andrew did a great presentation and will be speaking to the Lower Alabama .Net User Group in the near future about SQL Server 2005 (I believe that will be the topic).

Building High Performance Applications with ASP.NET 2.0 - Russ Fustino
Russ is a Microsoft evangelist so his presentation skills (and wit) were top notch. He showed off some fantastic new enhancements to ASP.Net 2.0.

The ones that really caught my eye were the builtin support for caching pages. You can cache an entire page based on a time duration or cache all but certain portions of a page. Very impressive is a new feature working with SQL Server 2005 that allows a page's dataset to be tied to a set of database tables and be updated by a push from the database server informing the page that the underlying data has been changed, so refresh the cached copy. Really cool stuff. Russ mentioned that the architecture is open so you can write you own broker to work with different databases. The VS.Net 2005 IDE support of creating ASP pages is of course wonderful.

Another awesome new feature is the ability to compile your pages and server side code down to dll files (which will improve the performance). I'm sure it will start a flame war, but I really wish the JSF (Java Server Faces) guys would have emulated MS's ASP.Net. I was not impressed with JSF when we recently evaluated it at work. Sun is very far behind in this regard. That's ok, all of the cool kids are using Ruby on Rails anyway :-)

During this session I saw something that made me think of Kathy Sierra and her Creating Passionate Users concept. After seeing one of the new features I actually saw two developers exchange high fives. They were that enthused about what they would be working with soon. That's is definitely a passionate user base.

Free .Net Tools (log4net, code-gen, reflector and more) - Paul Lockwood
Paul showed off some free tools that enhance .Net development. He showed Log4Net, a great open source logging framework (which I'm very familiar with since it is a port of Log4j). NDoc was another tool Paul showed. It examines assemblies and generates a nice documentation file of the classes and methods. Reflector was the coolest one he showed off. It is a decompiler for .Net code. Get your obfuscator ready because you can really pull out very accurate source code from normal compiled code. A bit scary actually.

DataWindow.NET - David Avera
Dave showed off the new features that will be coming out in DataWindow.Net 2.0 (which is currently in an open beta that you can join here). Some new presentation styles are coming along with support for connecting datawindow objects to .Net DataSets. I have a bit of a bias since I do some work with datawindows through PowerBuilder but I think DataWindow technology is awesome.

A Primer for Secure Coding (Parts I and II) - Brandon McMillon
Brandon went into various forms of attacks that can be raised against systems (Spoofing, Man in the Middle, etc). He described some principles for bringing security into the development process through threat modeling. There was an overwhelming amount of information (he said the slide set was actually a week long course, so we did skip around a bit). We finished up getting into web specific attacks such as Cross Site Scripting (XSS) attacks and everyone's favorite....SQL Injection attacks. All in all a good session. Can't wait for the slides to be posted so I can really pour through the information.

One of the organizers of the event, Microsoft's Joe Healy, posted a recap of the event

All in all it was a great event and I'm glad I was able to attend. I will post a link when I find out where the presentations for the other sessions will be posted. I also would like to say thanks to Rich and Laura for opening their lovely home to Casey and me for the weekend (and for the fantastic Baked Spaghetti).

Free Commercial Databases as Far as the Eye Can See

2005-10-31T20:31:00.000-08:00

Looks like with Oracle's recent announcement all of the big names in the commercial database market have free versions that can be used in production environments. There is Sybase ASE Express Edition for Linux, Microsoft's SQL Server 2005 Express Edition, and Oracle Database 10g Express Edition.

Here's a short feature comparison on the very basic stats.

Oracle Database 10g Express Edition
4 GB of data
1 CPU
1 GB of RAM
One instance per server
Downloads For Windows or Linux

Microsoft's SQL Server 2005 Express Edition
4 GB of data
1 CPU
1 GB of RAM
Windows Only

Sybase ASE Express Edition for Linux
5 GB of data
1 CPU
2 GB of RAM
Linux

Each of these databases are exceptional pieces of technology. I have worked mainly with Oracle and SQL Server and am really blown away with the features that have been packed into Oracle 10g and SQL Server 2005. I think these moves by the commercial database companies to release free versions of their software could really have an impact on the open source databases typically used to build small to medium sized databases on the cheap. We'll see how it affects their future.

Also, the Alabama .Net Code Camp this past weekend went great. I'll have a post tomorrow summarizing things and posting a link to the files from my presentation.

DataWindow.Net 2.0 Beta Now Open

2005-10-24T16:46:00.000-07:00

Just got word today from Dave Fish with Sybase, Inc. that the Beta for DataWindow.Net 2.0 has just opened. Here is the text of the message and link that Dave posted to the Sybase Newsgroups:

------------------------------------------
The Beta program for DataWindow .NET 2.0 is now open. Please visit http://www.sybase.com/detail?id=1038007 to register and download the software. The Beta web site contains information on how to access the Beta newsgroup.

Regards,
Dave Fish
Sybase
------------------------------------------

If you are a current or former PowerBuilder developer working in the .Net world, then you already know all of the amazing things the DataWindow brings to the table. The 2.0 release includes some incredible new features including: support for using DataWindow.Net with WebForms and the ability to bind datawindows to .Net datasets

If you are not familiar with the DataWindow and have looked at competing controls such as the ones available from Infragistics or the new and improved .Net DataGrid, you really should give DataWindow.Net a try. It is a fantastic product.

Also, if you are going to be in the Birmingham, AL area this weekend, you can come see Dave Avera, one of the programmers that works on DataWindow.Net, give a presentation at the Alabama .Net Code Camp on this very subject.

(Shameless Plug: I'll also be at the Code Camp giving a presentation on the Windows Installer XML (WiX) toolset).

Ticketmaster Is Evil

2005-10-22T12:52:00.000-07:00

So I broke down and decided to go ahead and attend the Butch Walker show in Atlanta coming up on November 18, 2005. This show will pretty much be the end of his tour and then he'll be back in the studio to record a new album. So this will be the last chance to see him perform live for a bit.

Mobile is 328 miles from Atlanta (so says Google Maps). Multiply that by two for both legs of the trip and you get 656 miles round trip. My truck gets between 17 and 20 mpg. Gas is running about $2.70/gallon so the total fuel costs will be:

Worst Case - 656 miles / 17 mpg * $2.70/gallon = $104.19
Best Case - 656 miles / 20 mpg * $2.70/gallon = $ 88.56

Hotel Room for 2 nights will be around $80/night so $160 lodging.

Then of course there is the little matter about the tickets to the show. The face value of the tickets is $18/ticket, but I'm sure from the title of this post, you know it didn't cost me $36 for two tickets.

Not even close. Behold the audacity and greedy disregard to the fans and the artists that ticketmaster has.

Good thing I'm a big fan, because something about an $18.50 premium added to $36 dollars of tickets seems wrong. And hey Ticketmaster, that "Convenience" charge doesn't feel very convenient to me. And the Order Processing Charge.....shouldn't that be part of the "Convenience" charge. Oh and the Ticketfast Delivery charge you see there. That's e-mail. They are e-mailing me tickets to print out myself. If I trusted the good old US Postal service, I could have them mailed to me for no charge (which I might add is a larger expense to Ticketmaster than e-mailing them to me). Yes, expensive trip, but I am a fan. But Ticketmaster is still a very, very bad organization.

It is true. There are just a few absolute evils in this world, and Ticketmaster is one of them.

Come Hear Me Speak At Alabama CodeCamp 2005

2005-10-14T16:57:00.000-07:00

I just got word yesterday that I have been accepted to speak at the upcoming Alabama .Net Code Camp in Birmingham, AL on Saturday, October 29, 2005.

The topic I'll be presenting is: Introduction to Creating Installation Packages with Microsoft's Windows Installer XML (WiX) Toolset

WiX is an open source toolkit (yes Microsoft is an open source company) for building MSI files that was written by Rob Mensching. It is being used internally by Microsoft on many of their products and also has been adopted by some in the open source community as well (MySQL being one of the bigger ones).

Installation packages are one of those things that tend to get pushed off until the end of a product's development cycle. This is unfortunate since they really are an integral part of the finished product. Also how many of us have tried to install versions of our own products during development and been forced to track down developers to find all of the undocumented things that must be done to get the product running. WiX can help make all of that pain go away.

WiX allows you to define XML configuration files that detail the installation process. These files are then analyzed and coalesced into an MSI installation file of the product. One of the really beautiful parts of this system is that it is fully scriptable since it relies on command line calls to executables.

Thus you can add the creation of an MSI into your build process so that at every step of development there is always a nice installation file that can be used to install the product. This can help you embody Continuous Integration end to end.

I am a huge believer in the Continuous Integration ideology and try to constantly preach the gospel of source control, unit testing, and nightly (at least) builds to any in the unwashed masses that will listen. These concepts can save so much time in the long run and alleviate many of the common issues that cause us headaches as developers.

If you will be attending or in the area, come check out my presentation or at least say hi. I will be out and about in Birmingham throughout the weekend so feel free to give me a call (my cell is listed in the top right corner on my blog's webpage) if you want to meet up.

The Code Camp's session list is posted Here. If you look closely, you will see that my friend Dave Avera from Sybase will be speaking. He is based in Auburn, AL and is one of the guys that is doing amazing things with the DataWindow.Net product.

Hope to see you there.

Update: I had incorrectly spelled "Hear" in the title of the post using "Here" instead. Oops, my mistake got it corrected now. Where is that context sensitive spellchecker when I need it.

The Man, The Myth, The Legend, Butch Walker

2005-10-13T17:05:00.000-07:00

One of the feeds I read regularly (Creating Passionate Users) talks about how to get users excited about your product, company, etc.. Excited users tend to share their experiences and stick with you for the long haul.

Those that know me know that I am this way towards the music of the great Butch Walker. He is a perfect example of an entertainer that has created and nurtured a very passionate fanbase.

Here is a great example that let me see it first hand:

He was recently opening for Avril Lavigne (with whom he cowrote and produced some tracks on her latest album) at a show in Atlanta and posted on his website that he would be performing after the show at a local club under an assumed name (because of contractual reasons I believe).

So with zero marketing aside from the post on his site he was able to pack around 500 people into a tiny club and put on a great rock show. Now that really qualifies as a passionate user base. I even drove 4 hours from here in Mobile, AL to attend. What makes him different aside from great music?

It could be because of some of these characteristics:

- He communicates to his fans through his site ButchWalker.com which creates a dialog

-He puts on great shows that include interaction with the crowd (he'll even come out into the crowd and perform a song sans mike if he's feeling the vibe)

-He keeps you guessing (I pre-ordered his latest CD through Sony Music after hearing about it through his site, and when it arrived they had thrown in a live album he recorded for those that pre-ordered, good surprises rock)

-He sticks around after shows for autographs and pictures so he is very approachable.

-**The GF Casey added this one**He just looks so dreamy when he's up there rocking out (And I thought she was just going to the shows with me because she liked spending time with me)

And thus he has created this ever-expanding fanbase that follows him around and supports his musical endeavors. Now those are passionate users.

***Free Stuff Alert***
If you saw yesterday's post, you know that he just released a new album of cover songs through iTunes. I really, really want you to check out his music and see him live if you get the chance.

To help with that process, I'm willing to gift one of the singles off the new album to any that ask for it. I will gift out 10 total so don't procrastinate. The single is a medley of Queen tunes from a live performance he did in Atlanta.

This medley really gives you a great idea of what his live performances are like. Disclaimer: There is some explicit wording in the song so if you are under 18, please don't respond (but it is a rock show, so what do you expect)

To qualify for the free single, e-mail me (if you go to the webpage containing this blog, my e-mail is in the upper right corner) and let me know your Name, E-mail Address, and what City and State you are in and I'll send it out.

**** Unfortunately this offer is only good to those in the US (iTunes gift rules, not mine).

I will keep the number of remaining singles updated at the bottom of this post.

No more singles remaining

1 - Kayla in Anaheim, CA
2 - Nicholas in New York City, NY
3 - Aaron in Katonah, NY
4 - Alex in Blackwood, NJ
5 - Chris in New York City, NY
6 - Winston in Dallas, TX
7 - Taylor in Tempe, AZ
8 - Steven in Austin, TX
9 - Jennifer in Seattle, WA
10 - Lisa in Gloster, MS

Butch Walker - Cover Me Badd EP

2005-10-12T21:08:00.000-07:00

Some of my friends complain that my blog tends to stay too technical and doesn't really talk much about my personal life. So here is something for them.

For those of you that don't know me, I am hooked on the music of a musician named Butch Walker. Some of you may remember him from a little band called the Marvelous 3 that had a hit song "Freak of the Week" Windows Media Real Player back in the mid 90's. I highly recommend checking him and his music out if you get the chance. He has one of the best live shows I've ever seen. Since the breakup of the Marvelous 3, he has done two solo albums (Here and Here) and has become a very sought after producer (producing the likes of Avril Lavigne, SR-71, American Hi-Fi, and The Donnas).

Got an e-mail yesterday from ButchWalker.com mentioning that he had just put out an album of cover songs on iTunes. The album is titled Cover Me Badd - Link here for you iTunes folks (a play on words, of course, with the cheesy 90's band Color Me Badd

The EP contains 6 songs:
Since U Been Gone (Live) - 2:15 - Kelly Clarkson
A Good Year for the Roses - 4:04 - George Jones
Alison (Live) - 3:47 - Elvis Costello
Live and Let Die - 3:14 - The Beatles
Queen Medley (Live) - 8:37 - Queen (of course)
Always Something There to Remind Me (Live) - 4:13 -Naked Eyes

The live tracks (especially the Queen Medley) do a great job showing how Butch is in concert. He likes to joke and have a good time with the audience and most of all get them involved in the show. "Always Something There to Remind Me" was the closing song that Marvelous 3 used to perform and it is an awesome cover. I got a chance to see the Marvelous 3 perform at Atlanta's Music Midtown (2001 to be exact) right before they broke up for good and when they played this song it was absolutely unbelievable.

Butch may be coming to your town. Here is his current Tour Listing

He will be in Atlanta on November 18 but I don't think I'm going to be able to make the drive this time. Saw him about a month or two ago up there and it was awesome. Have to see if I can make it up there for it somehow....

Also here is a Pollstar.com article on Butch - Butch Walker Has Been Here Before

Happy listening.

Oracle Acquires Innobase

2005-10-10T18:25:00.000-07:00

Though it didn't seem to get noticed much in the main technical press, the acquisition of Innobase by Oracle is big news in the open source database market. Many of you may recognize Innobase as the company that produced and supports InnoDB (one of the underlying database engines used by MySQL).

This could have dire consequences for the business model of MySQL AB. MySQL AB sells commercial licenses for their MySQL database product along with services and support. The contract regarding inclusion of InnoDB with MySQL is up for renewal next year and with Oracle holding the reigns now the negotiations could be difficult (and costly) for MySQL AB.

The press release by Oracle says they are committed to expanding the product and contributing to the open source community, but if you have seen what is to become of the PeopleSoft and JD Edwards products Oracle recently acquired, you may not be so convinced of their noble intentions.

For the open source crowd, we can take solace in the fact that InnoDB is GPL software, but with Oracle now "owning" the main developers on the product, new features and maintenance could dry up considerably. We'll just have to wait and see what Oracle's plans are for the newly acquired company.

In addition to MySQL, there are other alternatives to the high cost databases out there. Some of these are: PostgreSQL, Sybase ASE on Linux (Free for one CPU box, 5 GB max data storage, and 2 GB max RAM), Apache Derby, and FireBird

Here are some of the reactions and reporting from the Blogosphere:
KasLog - OracleÂs Innobase Acquisition; Open Source is Not Necessarily "Free"

Oracle's Open Source

IT Toolbox - InnoDB and the Compromise of Dual Licensing

SAP Ventures - Oracle's Open Source Database Endorsement

CIO Weblog - Oracle adds open source to the shopping cart

LANUG Meeting One Recap

2005-10-03T20:49:00.000-07:00

The first meeting of LANUG (the moniker given to the Lower Alabama .Net Users Group) was a great success with around 27 in attendance. There were some new faces and quite a few friends and acquaintances I have met over the years. Some of the companies that had employees in attendance were: ACO, STI, Morrison's, Dawson Engineering, and of course yours truly from DailyAccess Corporation.

Microsoft's Developer Evangelist for the South East region, Joe Healy, was on hand to give a presentation of some of the new features in Visual Studio 2005 and SQL Server 2005. I must say that the upcoming features are very exciting. ASP.Net 2.0 is an incredible language and platform and definitely is well ahead of the other technologies out there.

Visual Studio 2005 brings some great new features for VB.Net and C# developers including Edit and Continue (allows one to alter variables and add code during execution in Debug mode), incredible refactoring support (very similar to what exists for Java in Eclipse), and Click Once deployment (adds smart client capabilities to apps to allow them to update themselves to the latest version via the internet seamlessly for the user).

SQL Server 2005 has an incredible number of new features, we were able to only cover a few but they were awesome. The new version adds incredible XML support right into the database (very similar to what Oracle 9i and up have with SQLX and the XML SDK's in PL/SQL). There is also the ability to call .Net managed code functions inside stored procedures and standard SQL queries. This allows one to have the option of writing functions in a .Net language versus T-SQL which depending on what is needed can make things much easier (have you tried to split a string in T-SQL based on a delimiter??? It's one line in C#). The example that Joe gave of this feature was the Great Circle algorithm with GPS coordinates. (Something I also saw this week, is that IBM's DB2 and Oracle's 10gR2 on Windows have support for this type of functionality)

I have to say that Joe Healy is one of the best presenters I have seen in awhile. He had great energy, was comfortable in front of a crowd, and had great contents (more code than powerpoint which is a big plus). I would highly recommend checking him out if you have the opportunity to hear him speak. He also gave out some great books as door prizes (unfortunately I was not a winner of any of the texts, but Casey won a VB.Net book)

Here are links to the code samples that Joe used from his site DevFish.Net.

What's new and cool in VS2005 - Powerpoint, SQL2005 GPS functions for bearing and Great Circle Distance, stored procedure and view definitions. Visual Studio 2005 Beta2 project using Virtual Earth.

Upcoming .Net Events
October 29, 2005 - Birmingham, AL - Alabama Code Camp 2005

November 25, 2005 - Atlanta, GA - Visual Studio 2005 and SQL Server 2005 Launch Event

November 25, 2005 - Mobile, AL - LANUG Meeting Two - Speakers TBD

December 13, 2005 - Birmingham, AL - Satellite Launch Event for Visual Studio 2005 and SQL Server 2005

Lower Alabama .Net User Group Meeting One

2005-09-25T12:40:00.000-07:00

From the reminder message I received
---------------------------------------

The Lower Alabama Dot Net User Group's first meeting is next Tuesday evening (September 27th) from 6:00 PM to 8:30 PM CST. We are really excited to have Joe Healy come and talk to us about Visual Studio 2005.

Guest speaker
Joe Healy, Microsoft's .Net Developer Evangelist for the Gulf Coast.

Topic
Visual Studio .Net 2005

Refreshments & Door Prizes
We will have pizza and drinks at 6:00 PM, and the meeting will start around 6:30. We will also give away several door prizes throughout the evening.

Location
SouthEast Technical (SET) Solutions
273 Azalea Rd.
Office Park Three
Suite 200
Mobile, Alabama 36609
NOTE: A map to the location can be found here. SET is behind the Red Lobster at Airport & Azalea.

Contact
If you are planning on attending, please contact Matthew Hughes (mat_hues AT hotmail DOT com) so we can get an estimate of how much pizza to order. Thanks!

http://www.loweraldotnet.org

---------------------------------------

If you are available, please send Matt an e-mail and come out and support the user group. These kinds of things tend to last and succeed much better if there is community support. Plus, don't forget how great a networking opportunity these types of events are. I hope to see you there.

If you need more info, feel free to call me (my number is listed at the top of my blog web page).

DataWindow.Net 2.0 Sneak Peek Webcast

2005-09-20T20:16:00.000-07:00

From the TeamSybase blog, there is a DataWindow.Net 2.0 sneak peek webcast happening on September 29, 2005.

If you currently use the PowerBuilder DataWindow (or have used it in the past) and are interested in seeing how it fits into the .Net environment then I highly recommend checking it out. Us PowerBuilder users have known about the DataWindow for years and it is truly amazing (and getting better all the time). Definitely worth spending a little time checking it out. Sybase's DataWindow.Net Product Page

OpenOffice Ready For Prime Time?

2005-09-18T19:20:00.000-07:00

I have been using the latest builds of OpenOffice as they have become available over the past 9 months or so. I have to admit I am quite impressed with how mature this product has become. I would have to say that this suite could be ready to replace Microsoft Office for the vast majority of users out there.

We all know that most of the features in the Microsoft Office suite sit unused for all eternity never to be touched by end users. Also if you have ever taken a look at MS's balance sheet, you will see that the Office suite is the big cash cow in their product line.

There is a nice article over on Oreillynet.com talking about the importance of OpenOffice and the need for more developers to get involved.

I would ask you to give it a try if it has been a while since you looked at OpenOffice. I am fully convinced my company could get by using this suite, but I think the level of resistance from end users and upper management would prevent this from ever happening. But think of all of the licensing costs that could be saved.

I have been eagerly watching the case regarding the state of Massachusetts giving closed document formats the boot. I wonder if there is any way I could push for something like this in my own city. Probably would have to run for city council before I could make this kind of change a reality, but you have to admit that the fact that a taxpayer funded government produces public documents in a format that requires the purchase of proprietary software seems a bit off.

If I had to gaze into my crystal ball, I would have to guess that Microsoft will be forced to create converters to and from the Open Document Format put together by OASIS. The question will be how long they will be able to hold out.

Here are some screenshots of OpenOffice opening some of Microsoft's template files available from their website. I especially like the presentation I pulled up in Impress (the PowerPoint equivalent). You can click the pictures for larger versions.

OpenOffice Writer (Word Processor)

OpenOffice Calc (Spreadsheet Application)

OpenOffice Impress (Presentation Software)

Update: Added Screenshots for OpenOffice Writer, Calc, and Impress

Southern Hospitality after Katrina

2005-09-05T09:16:00.000-07:00

My friend Big Joe Duke showed off a bit of good old fashioned southern hospitality to the New Jersey Power guys yesterday. If you ever get the chance to check out Joe's ribs, you must. They are unbelievable (plus he has the coolest man shed/gameroom/gazebo/brickpit/grill/etc, etc around). Check out BJD's Pictures

Hurricane Aftermath

2005-09-02T16:25:00.000-07:00

Things are getting back to normal here in Mobile. My house has power and internet so I feel whole again. Gas is hard to get (not because there is a shortage, but because everyone is trying to fill up everything that will hold gas since they are in panic mode). I have 100 miles left on my car before I need gas so it should get me through the long weekend and then gas should be easier to get next week.

Casey and I went down to Biloxi, MS to visit her parents and take them MRE's and cases of water. The destruction down there is unbelievable. Casey's parent's house and her grandmother's house were completely destroyed (meaning nothing but a concrete slab left) but everyone made it through the storm safely (which is the most important thing, the rest is just stuff).

Here is a link to pictures we took while down there showing her former house, the destruction on the beach, the casinos no longer in the water, and the house her parents rode out the storm in. Hard to imagine a storm having that much power. Sad situation for all those involved. Be nice to your neighbor and tell your parents you love them. You never know what tomorrow may bring.

Hurricane Katrina Cometh

2005-08-28T16:46:00.000-07:00

But lucky for us and unlucky for New Orleans, it looks like we will be spared some of the brunt of the hurricane. Once it hits shore it is forecasted to turn to the North East and head our way, so tomorrow morning we are forecasted to have 60-100mph winds. So we'll see how it goes. Shouldn't be any issues at work. We have natural gas generators and lots of built in redundancy, so hopefully won't be required to head down there in the storm and take care of anything.

Saw today that one of the local stations has weather blogs. WPMI NBC 15 has blogs for two of their forecasters, David Glenn and Scott Walker. Nice to see some of the local stations embracing blogging. Scoble would be proud.

Keep your thoughts and prayers with the people of New Orleans, unfortunately I have a feeling the Super Dome will be the only thing left intact there.

TechWave 2005 Recap

2005-08-26T08:08:00.000-07:00

Bruce Armstrong of TeamSybase has created an excellent write up of the events of Sybase's big conference of the year TechWave 2005. TechWave 2005 was held in sunny (and steaming hot) Las Vegas, NV. You may recall that a coworker and myself spoke at TechWave 2004. It was a great experience and I would have liked to have attended this year, but it didn't work out. But at least I was able to get the recap from Bruce. Thanks Bruce.

Coding Certifications

2005-08-09T17:09:00.000-07:00

As I read and learn various techniques to aid me in completing my assignment for the Sun Certified Java Developer exam, I am left wondering why Sun is the only company that I know of that has this type of exam for certification in their development language. Especially after the dot-bomb years where even my postman had an MCSE or MCSD you would think Microsoft would have implemented a test that actually requires one to create and submit a working program.

I'm not saying that written tests serve no purpose, but I think in addition to the written tests the requirement to complete a program using good development and design techniques is a very good way to rate an individual's ability. As I read somewhere on the JavaRanch forums, the written test certification tells an employer that they won't have to teach you the language, a certification involving writing a program tells the employer that you are fully capable of developing actual applications using the language. Now which candidate do you want in your shop for intermediate to high level positions?

If anyone knows of any other tests like Sun's Certified Developer exam, please post a comment and let me know.

On an unrelated note, I've been toying with the idea of setting up a Linux box at home and have been looking at various distros. The one I've been playing with today is the LiveCD version of Ubuntu. Really neat so far, I have a feeling this one might be the one to use. I'll let you know how it goes.

Telemarketing Phone Calls from Politicians

2005-08-08T18:24:00.000-07:00

So one of the nice loopholes in the National Do Not Call Registry (see Exceptions here) is the exemption provided to political organizations. Now as my loyal readers know I took the plunge and went all cellular a few months back. I ported my existing home phone number (which was actually a VOIP number through Packet8.Net) over to my cell phone. Now those of you with cell phones know that you typically pay for a finite package of minutes per month. Thus Telemarketing calls are definitely undesirable since not only are they using up your valuable time, but also your expensive cell phone minutes.

Since I had my phone number changed a couple of years ago and did not leave a forwarding number at the old phone number, I do not receive many undesirable calls. After switching to cellular I have started putting down bogus phone numbers anytime I'm required to fill out a form requiring this information (unless I can thing of a really good reason they need to contact me via telephone).

I thought I had all of my bases covered by using this technique along with being on the National Do Not Call list, but recently I started receiving phone calls (automated and real people) from anyone even contemplating running for mayor here in Mobile, AL. I wondered how they got my phone number and how I could get it removed from their list (I ask each of the real people to remove me, but the automated ones just don't listen), and after a couple of days it finally hit me.

They must have acquired my phone number from my voter registration card. I must have put down an actual real number on that stupid thing. Of course it does have a warning on it saying if I sign it after knowingly putting down false information I can be convicted and imprisoned for up to five years, but I'm willing to risk it. So I am submitting an updated voter registration card with a bogus phone number in the hopes that I can stop the hoard of phone calls from these political groups.

I'll let you know how it goes (and if I end up in the slammer because of this).

JavaOne 2005 - Day 2 - Keynote

2005-08-02T17:52:00.000-07:00

OK, so better late than never. I'm finally getting around to writing up the rest of JavaOne 2005. I had really intended to write up the day's events every night before going to bed, but things were just too busy.

The keynote started with Sun Chairman and CEO Scott McNealy taking the stage. He is quite a charismatic speaker and seems to be a good person to have representing the company in the public space. He announces the aquisition of SeeBeyond Inc. by Sun. SeeBeyond is an Enterprise Application Integration company that has a suite of tools for working in the EAI space. This stuff is definitely going to be big. I will definitely have to focus more on the EAI world (which I am doing now through my work with the open source Business Integration Engine and as a Beta tester for BizTalk 2006).

Next Olivier Piou, CEO of Axalto, talked about the status and impact of the JavaCard technology. There are currently 1 billion JavaCard devices out there and Piou expects that in 3 years there will be another billion JavaCard devices (the ID cards for JavaOne have embedded JavaCard chips in them).

The keynote then kind of diverges into a socio-political slant in which Sun makes a strong statement regarding their desire to opensource the Education and Health Care industries in order to improve these two areas for everyone. They show an interesting video about the Brazilian health care system and how Java technology has improved the overall system.

Fabiani Nardon, CTO of Brazilian National Health Care System, comes up to talk about the progress they have made using Java. 2.5 Million lines of code developed in 4 months. Very integrated with using JavaCard technology to store medical information. She mentions that they have been talking with Africa about how to share what they have built and learned to improve their health care system.

Next the idea of opensource education is brought up. This is something I am all for. I am convinced there are plenty of poor teachers and poor educational systems out there. Someone knows how to get information into people's heads, so we should find them and use their methods and materials to teach our children. As part of this initiative they mention the JEDI (Java Education & Development Initiative) project from the Phillipines, the BlueJ project, the GELC (Global Education Learning Community) project, the MIT OpenCourseWare open source curriculum, and the Sun Student Developer Community.

No Experience, No Problem

2005-08-01T17:46:00.000-07:00

So you are like most fresh, young college graduates. You have your degree in hand, you have a head full of skills, and you are ready to solve all of the world's problems using your ability to wrangle and line up lots of little bits....and of course you would like to be paid for it.

But, you can't seem to find a job anywhere. Reason most often given? You don't have any experience. Ah yes, the old chicken/egg problem.

Well you are in luck, today ONLamp.com has a fantastic article about how you can get real world experience (and improve your skills in the process) while you are searching for that paying job.

Their article The Virtual Internship: Taking Control of Your Future by Becoming an Open Source Developer makes many good points about how you can get some street cred while you are still waiting to get hired on somewhere.

I highly recommend checking it out. And don't just sit there, get involved in some project somewhere. Some good places to start searching for ideas are SourceForge and the CodeHaus.

Joel Talks About Hitting The High Notes

2005-07-26T20:27:00.000-07:00

Another great post from Joel Spolsky of www.joelonsoftware.com. This time he is trying to quantify the dramatic difference in productivity and creativity a truly exceptional programmer can have versus your run of the mill "I write code just to pay the bills" mediocre programmer.

Hitting The High Notes

Well worth a read.

I only know of a couple of companies that seem to have been founded on the premise that Joel states at the beginning of the article. One is Fog Creek Software (Joel's company) and the other is ThoughtWorks (where the great Martin Fowler currently hangs his hat). They have blogs over at ThoughtWorks too, definitely worth checking out.

I would love to hear about other companies founded with these ideas in mind. If you know of any others, post a comment. It is nice to see companies succeed based on the main idea of creating an enjoyable environment for their workers.

Business Integration Engine gets Groovy

2005-07-20T19:22:00.000-07:00

I have been working with BIE (Business Integration Engine) trying to set up a proof of concept at work. I had a file format that did not have a built in parser in BIE. I thought about writing a new parser, but it seemed a better approach would be to convert the file into a known format using a bit of scripting magic.

So the plan was to use some regular expressions to convert the file into a nice fixed width format (which BIE can parse out of the box). After seeing that one of the loyal users of BIE had contributed a Jython plugin action that allowed me to perform Jython scripting inside my workflow, I decided to try and use it for the regex parsing (since I've wanted to play more with Python anyway).

Well I must say that Jython did not do my bidding if you will. I could not figure out (or find good examples showing) how to do regular expression parsing using the built-in Jython libraries (I believe it uses the Jakarta ORO project).
So after looking at the code for the Jython plugin, I decided I would take Rod Cope's advice (from his awesome Groovy presentation at JavaOne 2005. You can find a link to download the presentations here, his is TS-3402.pdf) and write a plugin for Groovy (http://groovy.codehaus.org).

It turned out to take less than an hour, and now BIE supports Groovy scripting inside workflows. Next on the agenda will be to add support for BeanShell and Rhino (which I've used in some Ant scripts with great success).

You can download the plugin here: Groovy Plugin for BIE

We also have set up a wiki for BIE here: BIE Wiki

Lower Alabama Dot Net User Group Website Is Live

2005-07-18T17:20:00.000-07:00

Well a site has finally been put up for the Lower Alabama Dot Net Users Group. Please go to this site and register if you would like to be included on mailings regarding this user group's events.

The site is being run on DotNetNuke and the webspace has been graciously provided by ACO Employment Services. They also have an Information Services group that creates a securities tracking piece of software called STAR.

Hopefully we'll see a high level of interest for the user group in the community.

On another note, I have set up a Wiki for BIE (Business Integration Engine). The wiki is located at: http://biewiki.schtuff.com. This will give the user community a place to park resources for BIE. Schtuff.com is a great site that provides free Wiki's with up to 200 MB of space.

SCJA Beta Exam - Denied by Dennis

2005-07-14T16:28:00.000-07:00

Well Friday was supposed to be my day to go take the Sun Certified Java Associate Beta Exam. I was looking forward to checking it out and also being able to provide constructive feedback to the test designers. Unfortunately Hurricane Dennis had other plans for my testing experience.

I received a phone call today from the Triangle of Technology Prometric Testing Center in Pensacola, FL (closest place to Mobile, AL that offers the Sun tests) saying their power was still not restored (and might be back by Tuesday) so I would have to reschedule. Only one problem with rescheduling....the beta exam period ends tomorrow.

Oh well, hopefully the test designers can get by without my input.

So to cheer myself up I went ahead and signed up for the Sun Certified Java Developer exam (been meaning to but was waiting on the Associate exam to pass first) using my handy dandy discount voucher I received for participating in the Certified Programmer beta exam.

Sun very quickly processed my submission and sent me the link for the application. So I have downloaded it and hopefully will get started this weekend. For those that are interested I received the B&S application.

I promise I'm still going to write up more about JavaOne 2005. Hopefully this weekend.

Also something I just saw. The SD West 2006 Call for Papers is up. I'll have to put together a submission for this one and see if I can get accepted.

Hurricane Dennis

2005-07-07T20:09:00.000-07:00

Tomorrow (Friday July 8, 2005) I'm heading back to Mobile. Been out here in San Francisco for almost 2 weeks (JavaOne 2005 and then a week of vacation with the GF). And it looks like I'll have a warm welcome when I get back from Hurricane Dennis.

Funny thing about the big city, as Casey and I were printing out our boarding passes in the 1st floor internet area of the Commodore Hotel, we ran into a couple from Pensacola, FL that were looking at the hurricane's projected path. Hopefully it will work out well for both of us. We were both hoping it would sweep East and hit Tallahassee, FL instead of Pensacola or Mobile. We'll see how it goes.

I promise I have a ton to write about JavaOne. I filled up a legal pad and had to start writing on the backs of the pages, so once I get home I'll break it down by the day. Sorry for the delay, but it has just been too busy a 2 weeks. The short version is ..... Spring, Hibernate, Groovy, ActiveMQ, JBI, ServiceMix, Sybase... will expand later.

JavaOne 2005 - Day 1 - Afternoon Sessions

2005-06-29T06:48:00.000-07:00

Java Business Integration - A Foundation for SOA
Ron Ten-Hove and Peter Walker, Senior Staff Engineers with Sun Microsystems

This session (which I found out this morning was the most attended session from yesterday) went into the SOA concept and where the new Java Business Integration (JBI) standard fits into it. It ended up being more of an SOA description than really getting into the details of JBI. It was a very buzz-word centric talk. It basically ended up rehashing what was mentioned in the keynote regarding this technology.

Some links regarding it:
http://java.sun.com/integration
http://java.sun.com/developer/earlyaccess/jbi

Groovy = Java Technology + Ruby + Python for the JVM
Rod Cope, CTO and Founder of OpenLogic
Groovy Project Page

This session was definitely the best one I saw from the day. Rod Cope was an exceptional presenter of material and very funny to boot. I would highly recommend checking him out if you get a chance.

Groovy is yet another scripting language. The beauty of this one is that it is fully available inside Java and actually Java code is Groovy code...

The scripting language provides a concise powerful scripting language that gets compiled down to good old Java classes. It was begun in August 2003 and has a thriving community built around it.

Some of its features are:
Dynamic and Static (Optional) typing
Native Syntax for Lists, Maps, Arrays, and Beans
Autoboxing
Closures (which are nice little methods defined on the fly)
Built-in RegEx support
Operator Overloading

The technology fully integrates with Ant, and can actually be used to replace much of what Ant does. It can also be used inside Ant scripts to give a bit more programmatic control (such as If statements and loops, etc).

Groovy provides very, very simple methods to read and write XML, HTML, and interact using SQL. There is a wrapper that allows Groovy to use COM automation to automate things like Word, Excel (and it is super easy too). It also has a scripting shell that can be used interactively (for those of you that love a good shell).

All in all, great little quick and dirty scripting language. Low barrier to entry for Java programmers. Really can provide great utility in writing test cases in your unit tests. Not yet ready for mission critical apps, but version 1.0 should be out by September and Rod apparently has a book in the works on Groovy so I will be looking forward to that.

A Hitchhiker's Guide to SOA - Orchestrating Loosely Coupled J2EE Services with BPEL and BPMN
Charles Beckham, Todd Fast, Mike Frisino, Sun Microsystems

This session was a quite entertaining overview of the ideas and concepts involved with SOA, including descriptions of BPEL, ACDC worker services and BPMN. It of course followed the layout of the Hitchhiker's guide from starting with the phrase Don't Panic to including witty definitions from The Guide for each of the topics.

Basically the jist of what we are shooting forward is a collection of loosely coupled services. The problem is how to describe the services in ways that the business analysts can understand and how to make all of this fancy new fangled XML easy to work with.

BPEL - Business Process Execution Language - XML based language that specifies processes. It describes long running stateful transactional conversations between two or more partner services

Now BPEL itself doesn't really do any work, he is more of the coordinator of things and controls the exchange of messages back and forth amongst the various partners. BPEL relies on ACDC (no, not the band, though they are quite good) Worker Services to do the actual work. ACDC stands for Async, Conversational, Document Centric services. These perform the actual actions that our traffic cop (so to speak) BPEL does.

BPMN - Business Process Modeling Notation - BPEL unfortunately is difficult to write (being XML and all), and even more difficult to visualize (being XML and all). BPMN is a standard notation format (developed by BPMI) that is a kind of flowcharting language with special considerations for BPEL. BPMN can be mapped to BPMN (and vice versa)

Of course here is then where everything drifted off into the marketing world. As luck would have it, Sun's Java Studio Enterprise has a set of tools to handle all of the creation of BPMN, BPEL, mapping between formats, managing the partners of various services, etc, etc. So off we went into Marketing-land to view what Java Studio Enterprise can do to handle all of this fancy stuff :-)

But overall quite informative even though they diverged a bit at the end. Plus the Charlse, Todd, and Mike show was very humorous.

Visualizing Gizmos, Gadgets, Whatchamacalits
Mike Brown, Boeing Corp

This session talked about using Java3D to do some very interesting real time modeling and physics type modeling. A bit over my head since I'm not really a graphics guy, but it was entertaining to watch Mike's virtual shirt thrower he built go to town on his computer based on the physics rules he defined.

And thus ended the sessions for day 1. We spent some time chatting at the Sybase booth (since we are big Sybase fans) checking out their new product Workspace (based on Eclipse, very cool. Check it out

JavaOne 2005 - Day 1 - Keynote

2005-06-28T06:50:00.000-07:00

The Keynote went quite well this morning. They had a pretty interesting band called Magnetic Poetry playing prior to the event. John Gage of Sun was the MC for the session. Jonathan Schwartz spoke and thanked the community for a great 10 years. His focus was on openness and community as the real driver of technology and adoption. He also spoke about the concept of technology as a social utility which was a very interesting idea. He mentioned Brazil's health system as a great example (said it put our CDC to shame).

There was a presentation by Yasushi Nishimura, Director of Panasonic R&D about the new BlueRay DVD technology. One cool thing they mentioned was that the BlueRay standard had chosen to use Java for the menu system and API on the disc. So every BlueRay DVD player will include a JVM and also...drum roll please....a network port. Let the hackers get ready for what they can come up with with those tools available.

Sun has made nice with IBM and they renewed their partnership for 11 more years (10% better than the previous 10 year agreement so they said). Also IBM will be providing support across their entire software suite for Solaris 10 (which is open source now).

Java = Participation and FOSS. Schwartz made a nice compelling case for the free open source software movement. Free is the perfect price, there is no downside from FOSS, community is where it is at, etc, etc.

They announced Java Business Integration (JBI) as defined in JSR-208. Looks like everyone is doing SOA these days...and this also moves into my Business Integration Engine type system. So I'm very interested in checking this out.

Open Sourcing of Sun's Application Server (Project Glassfish) with a CDDL license.

Whole set of new features for the Java Studio Creator product line, including integration with their application server and the JBI spec, BPEL, BPMN, Mapping, Routes, etc, etc....

The T-shirt hurler of the day was based on an Angle Grinder, but really didn't do much flinging. The shirts just sort of fell out of the launcher.

Graham Hamilton announced that they are finally dropping the stupid 2 from the product names J2SE, J2EE, J2ME goes to JSE, JEE, JME. About time. Also they will go to whole numbers with no decimals. So after JSE 5.0 it will move to JSE 6, JSE 7, and so on.

Java development themes for the future - Become more open. Weekly snapshots available of the Java 6 development. Contributions can even be made to the code line from the community. Couple of new licenses to facilitate this access - Java Distribution License (JDL), Java Research License (JRL), Java Internal Use License (JIUL)

Bill Shannon announced details of the Java EE Roadmap for the future. Simplification is the main thing for Java EE going forward. A shift to allow POJO development with Java EE, extensive used of annotations to reduce the need for deployment descriptors.

The release schedule is Java EE 5 final draft spec Q3 2005, SDK Beta Release Q4 2005 and Final Release Q1 2006.

Will post about the sessions from day 1 a bit later. Currently I'm in the keynote listening to how Mobile is going to conquer the world :-)

JavaOne Day 1 - Pre-Keynote

2005-06-27T06:20:00.000-07:00

OK, so less than 30 minutes into the morning of JavaOne and I am sorely not impressed with the organizational planning. Keynote begins at 8:30am, around 5,000 people will be attending, there is a drizzling rain outside, so what did the planners decide....have everyone line up outside until they open the doors at 8:30. Bad idea.

Breakfast is served inside the exhibitor pavilion, but there is also a line for 5,000 people waiting, and they ran out of pastries and bagels. So if I were ready to wait till 9:00am I would get some coffee, but I've got to go stand in the rain so I don't miss the keynote.

So far Sybase's TechWave 2004 is beating the pants off of JavaOne 2005 in terms of organization and good planning. Hopefully the content will make up for these little annoyances.

One day till JavaOne 2005 begins

2005-06-26T18:53:00.000-07:00

Spent my first full day in San Francisco and boy are my legs tired. Quite a bit more geography here than where I'm from (plus you can't really walk to get anywhere in Mobile, AL. Cars are definitely required). Went by the convention center and got registered, so now I definitely have a spot at the conference. We skipped the NetBeans Day Session (since we are die hard Eclipse faithful), but Tim Bray blogged about it.

One thing that struck from a social networking point of view is the conference badge. It consists of a neck strap attached to a plastic sleeve that holds a paper printout of what level of access you have to the conference. It also holds a plastic smart card with you name and company listed on it and an embedded chip. The chip is used for keeping track of attendance to sessions and also to use the internet terminals at the conference.

Now the social networking part, the name and company listed on the smart card are in quite tiny print. You wear this around your neck during the conference, so anyone talking around you should be able to see you name on the badge (in case they have forgotten or just to strike up a conversation with you by name). But from the font size of this thing, I don't think anyone without perfect vision is going to be able to read this thing from more than a few feet away. Also missing from the conference badge is where you are from. This is another way for people to strike up conversations if they see a location that is familiar to them or interesting, but alas, it is not listed on the badge. Kathy Sierra would probably agree with me on this point (and by the way she will be signing books along with Bert Bates tomorrow at 3:00pm, hopefully I can say hi). Am I the only one that has this idea about the use of the badge for social networking??? I think not.

Sybase got it exactly right last year at TechWave 2004 in Orlando, FL, where a coworker and I presented a great session if I do say so myself. :-) The TechWave conference badges very, very prominently (and in large font) displayed your name, company, and where you were from. This made it very easy to strike up conversations with people on a variety of things. We'll see how they do for TechWave 2005

Case in point, one person I made the acquaintance of at the conference had the name Don Clayton. Now having worked in high school at a Putt-Putt Golf and Games, I knew that Don S. Clayton created Putt-Putt in 1954 (actually met him in 1994), so I walked up to this individual and asked if he knew who the other famous Don Clayton was...interesting conversation ensued. So Strke One against Sun. Computer people as a general rule need as much help as possible socializing, so please give them every nudge and edge you can.

Well tomorrow my official coverage begins. We start at 8:30am with a keynote from Jonathan Schwartz (who is a prolific blogger). Can't wait to get started.

If you are out here at the conference and want to get together, give me a ring on my cell or send an e-mail. It is listed in the top right corner.

BIE (Business Integration Engine) - Part 1

2005-06-23T05:01:00.000-07:00

As I mentioned previously, I have been looking for an open source BizTalk like product and one of the solutions I wanted to evaluate was the Business Integration Engine from the Brunswick Corporation.

I finally got around to downloading and installing BIE and wanted to write about the experience so far. The main function I would like this product to provide for us is for it to manage the receipt and exchange of files from our trading partners. The promise of tools like this is for the tool to present a documented view of the file exchanges and file formats being used and prevent one from having to write a new parser each time a new trading partner comes on board with their own custom file format (or changes their format).

So far after a little bit of tinkering, I'm pretty impressed. The product is built on top of JBoss and the installation is very straightforward. Download the latest install from the SourceForge project page, extract and install.

After installation you may start the BIE service via the start menu menu item. You can then browse to the product dashboard on localhost:5803

From here one of the shortcoming shows up. The product does not come with any documentation. The company that originally wrote BIE offers documentation for a small fee (couple hundred bucks), but it would be nice to have a little bit more information to get a feel for the product (that's where I come in I suppose).

BIE breaks processes into WorkFlows. A WorkFlow is a set of actions that can be triggered, such as parsing a file into XML, mapping that XML into a different format, and then updating a database with the resulting data.

When parsing a file into XML it does this via a MessageFormat. You can define various message formats for your files. They come in different flavors such as (MS Excel, Comma Delimited, Fixed Width, XML, etc). You enter the criteria for your file and save it with an identifiable name. For example, with a fixed width file, you enter what row the data starts on (in case there are header rows), enter a comma delimited list of the field names, and then a comma delimited list of the length of each field and save it. That is all that is required to teach it how to parse a new fixed width file. Pretty spiffy, no code required.

WorkFlows can be triggered by a variety of listeners. The built in set of listeners includes a JMS listener, a directory watcher, an FTP directory watcher, a mailbox watcher, and a scheduled listener that can execute workflows on a periodic basis.

The listener that interests me the most is the directory watcher. When receiving a file from a trading partner, they push the file to us. The directory watcher scans a directory and takes action when a file appears.

When a file is found, BIE looks at the filename and reads everything in the filename up to a period (.) or underscore (_) character. Then it takes that text and looks for a WorkFlow by the same name.

You construct WorkFlows using a graphical editor that allows one to drag and drop and connect various actions together to perform your process. These can consist of logging operations, database operations, XML translations, XSLT transformations, sending Email, File operations, etc, etc, etc.

Enough for now, next time I'll post some screen shots and go into more nuts a bolts of stringing a WorkFlow together.

Here are some links that were extremely useful (once I found them all that is):

BIE SourceForge Project Page
Brunswick WDI BIE Page
BIE SourceForge Mailing List Page
BIE FAQ through Adaptive Dynamics
Brunswick WDI BIE Discussion Forum

Voice Driven Eclipse Based IDE

2005-06-22T05:08:00.000-07:00

I had the opportunity last night to be a tester for my friend Julie's CIS Master's degree thesis project at the University of South Alabama. It is a voice driven IDE based on Eclipse and using IBM's Via Voice software.

Now of course whenever anyone gives me a headset with a microphone attached to it to put on a couple of things happen. First I have flashbacks of my days doing tech support which causes me to break into a cold sweat. Then I become the control tower scene in the movie Airplane - Roger, Roger, what's our vector, Victor... etc. But after that I finally got focused and began to test the app.

Let me just say that the application is a very nice piece of work. I have encouraged her to get a project page up on the web so I can link to it, and also for her to hopefully release the source code under an open source license if the University will allow it.

The project deals with allowing the creation and manipulation of an SWT GUI using only voice commands. It does not deal with populating the code in the events on the visual objects just creating the GUI, its layout, and the properties of the visual objects.

A couple of things that stood out to me. The voice recognition stuff was very nice but still has a long way to go. Unfortunate, but that is just the fact of the times we are in right now.

Also I must have either a speech impediment or a crazy accent, because the Via Voice software really couldn't understand when I said the words "clear", "back", and "two". Of course I only trained it using a 5 minute passage from Treasure Island, but still it has me paranoid now that maybe I don't know how to speak the Queen's English.

As for the outcome of the road trip last weekend, all was as it should be. Def Leppard, contrary to my expectations, really put on an awesome show. I couldn't have asked for more (well except for my friends picking a better spot to stand than right behind a big tree). From my vantage point, I can tell you that the guitar players on either end of the stage were great. Not sure about the guys in the middle of the stage since the tree was right there :-)

It was truly a great send off to Rob. We will wish him well in his new position on the West Coast. Of course I'll see him there in a week since I'll be out in San Francisco for JavaOne. Not enough time left to get everything done before I leave this weekend, but I will manage somehow.

Weekend Road Trip

2005-06-17T05:14:00.000-07:00

Today I'm heading up to Birmingham, AL to hang out with my friend Rob in his last weekend as a resident of the great state of Alabama. He has accepted a job with Intel and will be trekking out to Sacramento, CA. That will actually work out well for me, since I'll be out in San Francisco, CA (a bit south and west on the picture) for 2 weeks starting a week from this Saturday. So I'll get to check out his new stomping grounds.

Saturday some friends from here in Mobile will be driving up to Birmingham so we can all attend City Stages and rock out to the one and only Def Leppard. We saw them a year or two ago when they came to Pensacola, FL. Awful show. It was like they really didn't want to be there but had to pay the bills. Probably be more of the same Saturday (since they have gone from playing civic centers to outdoor festivals), but in their day they made some great 80's rock so I can hope they put on a decent show (do it for all the hair bands that have come before you)

Some links for today:

Going to JavaOne? Like free T-Shirts? The Eclipse group will be giving out free t-shirts at JavaOne if you visit 6 of the Eclipse project's supporting companies' booths (of course Sybase is now a contributing partner).

Release 1.1 for jTDS is out. Very nice opensource JDBC driver for SQL Server and Sybase databases.

Awesome DHTML/JavaScript calendar definitely need to get this incorporated into our work websites. Found from a link in a post on Brian Bailey's Leave it Behind blog

Chicken Tortilla Soup

2005-06-12T14:06:00.000-07:00

The GF, Casey, asked me to make her some of my famous Chicken Tortilla Soup passed down from generation to generation in my family over the years. So first I had to find the recipe (which really came in the newsletter that comes with my power bill, not from Grandma's kitchen).

I always have a bit of a problem tracking down the recipe, so I thought I would post it here so I can find it later. The recipe is posted on the Alabama Power website here, but the details are as follows.

Chicken Tortilla Soup

* 4 cups fat-free chicken broth
* 4 cups water
* 3 boneless chicken breasts
* 1 can 98% fat-free cream of chicken soup
* 1 can Rotel tomatoes
* 1 cup skim milk
* 12 oz. Velveeta Light cheese
* 1/4 cup sauteed onions
* 1 teaspoon garlic powder
* 1 teaspoon chili powder
* 1 teaspoon salt
* 1/2 teaspoon black pepper
* 3 low-fat flour tortillas, torn into small pieces

Directions
Boil chicken in water and broth until tender. Cut chicken into bite-size pieces and return to boil. Add remaining ingredients, except tortillas. Boil 10 minutes and then add tortillas. Boil until tortillas are soft - about 10-15 minutes, stirring often to keep from sticking.

Now I don't add the tortillas anymore because they get very soggy (kind of like a dumpling), but you may like them. Also go easy on the chili powder because that stuff packs a pretty good kick, and this recipe already turns out quite spicy. It is also good with turkey substituted for the chicken in case that is more your style.

Arlene Cometh

2005-06-11T10:14:00.000-07:00

Well looks like it is going to be a very wet day here in Mobile today. We have Tropical Storm Arlene coming towards land, and she should make landfall this afternoon. Of course the sad thing is that 70 mph winds from a mere tropical storm just don't get too many people excited around here.

Weather Channel Update

If you watched the projections of this storm, from the beginning it has been expected to head right up Mobile Bay. Hopefully this is not how the whole season is going to shape up.

One good thing that I can see from starting our hurricane season this way is that at least people will go ahead and grab their hurricane supplies now so they should be ready later if we get any more big storms dropping by.

My phone number has now officially ported to my new cell phone. My good friend Horst had the distinct honor of being the first phone call received on my new communications medium. Of course he was in complete shock when I told him were talking on a cell phone (since he knows how much I have resisted these things).

So begins the great experiment, I have trusted the great and mighty Scoble's opinion and posted my cell number up on the site. We'll see if any interesting interactions result from that level of accessibility.

Idea Overload

2005-06-09T17:01:00.000-07:00

So these days I'm having a problem that comes and goes for me. It is an idea overload. I have so many different ideas running through my head that I end up not really focusing on any of them. So I'll enumerate them here so that I can at least look back later and see what I did or didn't focus on further.

The ideas I have are broken down between things that I would like to work on personally and things that can benefit the company I work for.

Personally

J2ME Schedule App for JavaOne 2005
Now that I have received my cell phone (still waiting for my number to be ported), I see that it can run J2ME apps. I would love to be able to load all of the sessions for JavaOne 2005 onto the phone. That way I can see where I am supposed to go next, plus have the ability if a session is full to find quickly my next favorite choice or a list of all of the other sessions at that time.

I have never written a J2ME app so this should be interesting with about 18 days to go till JavaOne. I have created some handheld stuff in C# for the .Net Compact Framework, so it will be interesting to see how the Java side compares.

Unified List Server
I would like to see a server application that can encapsulate all of the following into one dataset that can be added to our retrieved in whatever format the user likes:
NNTP - Newsgroups
Mailing List
Web Forums
RSS

Example: I really like the content available at JavaRanch.com, but I really hate going to a website and looking through the web forums to try and find things that are new that I have not read yet. What I would prefer is to retrieve the forums as newsgroups. That way my newsgroup reader presents everything to me in a nice threaded format with an easy way of seeing what is unread for me. I, personally, like newsgroups (thanks to the fantastic Sybase Newsgroups getting me hooked), but others may want it in mailing list format or RSS format with the ability to reply with comments.

I would like to see an app that does all of this but keeps all data in a central repository, so if you receive it in mailing list format, you reply to the message and it gets updated and is viewable by everyone in their respective preferred formats.

I really think that Apache James is the perfect platform for something like this to be built upon since it encapsulates most of those items already.

Open Source OFX Class Implementation in Java
Implement the OFX standard using something like Castor or JAXB and put it out on SourceForge for all to use. I've implemented a subset of the standard by hand (before I learned of tools like Castor) but would like to have the whole standard done.

Work Related

Open Source BizTalk like application
Microsoft's BizTalk while being extremely powerful also comes with an extremely powerful price tag. Sybase also has a similar product but it comes with a similar price tag as well. There is an existing app called BIE (Business Integration Engine), but I'm not sure how well maintained this product is or will be in the future. The forums on their site are fairly dead (of course it is GPL'd so I could maybe run with it and branch and fix myself).

Rules Engines
This is a solution looking for a problem for me. I'm positive this could be incorporated into our business, but just not sure exactly where it would fit. Drools has just released version 2.0 so I'm very interested in checking it out.

BPM (Business Process Management) and Workflow Engines
Another solution in search of a problem. There are a couple of open source products out there (jBPM, Java Workflow Editor, Open WFE) but I need to figure out where they would fit.

JBoss Application Server
JBoss looks pretty interesting and there are a couple of different things they are doing with it, need to see what it has to offer. This is a good question for the Cynergy Systems guys. Have you guys done much with JBoss?

(Sidenote with small plug: Got to meet some of these guys out at TechWave 2004 and have interacted with them in the Sybase newsgroups. They are definitely some sharp individuals and aren't afraid of hard problems, so if you need some consulting or training done you may want to give them a call.)

Oh well that is enough about things I want to work on, how about some neat links.

Very cool applications up at 37Signals.com that take advantage of the new AJAX paradigm (all the cool kids are doing it, why aren't you?). Check it out.

Also if you were just about to get around to registering for the free Sun Certified Java Associate Beta Exam...well, you snooze you lose. They have had enough people register for the exam, so they have closed registration.

The end of an era

2005-06-05T20:41:00.000-07:00

So it is with great regret that I must confess to you all that the end of an era is here. I feel like a small part of me has died inside. After standing firm for oh so many years I have finally given in and I have a confession to make...

My name is Doug Porter, and I have signed up for cellular service.

Those of you that know me know that this is a very big move for me. I have always had a love/hate relationship with the telephone in general. The cost of basic telephone service always seemed absurd to me, especially with the monopoly of the Bells in days gone by. So about 2 years ago I ditched my home land line and signed up with a VoIP service.

The VoIP provider I have used is Packet8.net. Like I tell people, VoIP is not for everyone. For me it worked pretty well for the way I use the telephone. It was cheap ($20 per month for unlimited local and long distance), and it worked fairly well accept for a couple of issues. Such as:

Whenever there were bandwidth or network issues the call quality suffered. Some people on certain cell phone services could not reach me at my VoIP number. And of course Murphy's law always prevailed and whenever I was waiting on or trying to make an important call the service went down.

But other than that, I was happy with it.

But I finally have come to accept that I really need a bit more connectivity these days, so I finally bit the bullet and signed up. I had my good friend Rob (who is the wizard when it comes to these things) help me find a great deal on a phone and service that would fit my needs. He set me up with a service deal (and a nice discount coupon) from LetsTalk.com.

So, supposedly next Tuesday I will receive my new phone and become a proud member of the Cingular network (which from the looks of the coverage map should cover me just about anywhere). Then it will be goodbye to Packet8. They have served me well but it is time to move on.

On another note, I have just tried out a password protected wiki called PbWiki (which of course being a Sybase user I thought would stand for PowerBuilder Wiki, but alas it stands for Peanut Butter. Because it is as easy as making a PB&J sandwich...get it..). Very simple and easy to use. I'm using it to collaborate with my friends on getting together information for our upcoming trip to JavaOne and San Francisco. If you need something simple then this fits the bill nicely.

San Francisco May Never Be The Same

2005-06-04T09:46:00.000-07:00

As part of my professional development for the year, my company DailyAccess Corporation has decided to send a coworker and myself out to Sun Microsystems' JavaOne conference in beautiful San Francisco, CA.

I am absolutely excited to be able to attend this conference. The environment we use at work is Sybase PowerBuilder for internal applications used by our employees, Sybase EAServer as our application server (housing components written in Java and PowerBuilder), Java Servlets and JSP's for our website, and a nice Oracle database for the backend to round it all out.

So I am hoping that the knowledge I'll gain from JavaOne will help me improve the code I write for the components in our application server along with other server side processes we have written in Java. I'm also looking forward to some of the sessions on various web frameworks. We will soon be deciding on a new web framework for our sites and this should help us have more information to make an informed decision.

I am going to try (we'll see how it works out) to give a day by day post of the goings on at JavaOne along with pictures of the event and city. So stay tuned to this space.

Once I decide on the sessions I want to try and attend, I'll post that here also, so you can play along at home.

The conference runs from Monday, June 27 - Thursday June 30. I will be arriving into San Francisco the evening of Saturday, June 25. I have decided to take some vacation time after the conference, so I will actually be in San Francisco the following week, leaving to come back to Mobile on Friday, July 8.

If you are going to be at JavaOne or in the area and want to try and get together, let me know. A la the great Scoble, I am going to be posting my contact information in this space soon. We'll see how it works out. So check back and you will be able to find out how to reach me if you want to get together during the conference.

Sun Certified Java Associate Beta Exam

2005-06-02T10:23:00.000-07:00

Sun has created a new entry level certification exam (Sun Certified Java Associate) for those with around 6 months experience with Java. They have just released the beta version of the exam which can be taken at no charge from Prometric testing centers from June 20 - July 15, 2005.

Unfortunately for me here in Mobile, AL, the closest testing center that is offering this test is Triangle of Technology Academy over in Pensacola, FL.

Of course, this is where I took and passed the Sun Certified Java Programmer exam, so maybe that place is good luck for me.

I think I am going to sign up and take it. In theory I should be able to pass with flying colors (and if I don't pass I may have to step out into traffic) but it is also good to take the beta to be able to provide valuable feedback to the test designers.

Here are the Exam Description and also the Exam Objectives pages. You can sign up through Prometric's website. The exam number is 311-019 (it is at the very bottom of the Sun exam list on Prometric's site)

Good luck. After taking it, it will be around 2 months before results are published. A great forum for help in preparing for the Java exams is JavaRanch. This site was started by Kathy Sierra and Bert Bates (the wonderful creators of the Head First series). You can read a collective blog from them and a couple of their cohorts at Creating Passionate Users

GreaseMonkey is Cool

2005-05-30T20:43:00.000-07:00

OK, so I mentioned earlier that Google was rewriting my search result URL's to be redirected through itself (and tracking my clicking habits in the process). Here is what the URL looks like when I searched for GreaseMonkey and tried to click the first link:

http://www.google.com/url?sa=U&start=1&q=http://greasemonkey.mozdev.org/&e=10313

After doing a search on the web regarding this, it appears this only happens to certain locations at certain times. I tried this search on another PC in the house and it doesn't do it. So you may not see this when you search.

Now having discovered GreaseMonkey a month or so ago (and by the way BookBurro is just plain magic, check it out), I decided I would write my own script to take these URL's, pull out the address that comes after the q= part and before the & part and replace Google's link with the clean version.

After a bit of hacking around this is what I produced:

// ==UserScript==

// @name Google Link Fixer
// @author Doug Porter
// @namespace http://dougporter.blogspot.com
// @description Cleans up google search result links that use a redirect through google.
// @include http://google.*/*
// @include http://www.google.*/*

// ==/UserScript==

(function() {
var aref = document.getElementsByTagName('a');
var href = '';
var id = '';
var beg = -1;
var end = -1;
var cleanUrl = '';

for (var i = 0; i < aref.length; i++)
{
href = aref[i].href;
id = aref[i].id;

if((id.indexOf('aw') < 0) && (href.indexOf('url?') > 0))
{

beg = href.indexOf('q=') + 2;
end = href.lastIndexOf('&');
cleanUrl = href.substring(beg, end);
aref[i].href = unescape(cleanUrl);
}
}
})();

Crude, but works. What it does is get a list of all <a> tags. Then it walks this list looking for tags in which the id attribute does not contain 'aw' (these turned out to be adds) and where the href attribute contains 'url?' (which indicates a redirection).

Once it finds this it looks to pull out the string that falls between 'q=' and the last '&' character. Then it sets the href property of the current <a> to the cleaned version of the URL. It uses the unescape() function to make sure ? and = signs in the URL's don't get encoded.

Improvements to be made: Probably could be done more efficiently using XPath. Also very susceptible to breaking if Google changes their redirection and link format. One thing that would be nice would be to add some indication when a replacement had been done...(change the underline or coloring or something).

Well give it a try if you run into this problem and let me know how it goes, but keep in mind that this was a quick hack in a couple of minutes.

Got to find a place to store my script so I can provide it online, but I'll let you know when that happens. Till then enjoy.

Memorial Day

2005-05-30T14:50:00.000-07:00

Today is Memorial Day. I hope you all get a chance to stop and remember all of our past and present members of the armed forces on this day.

I took advantage of the long weekend to head up to Birmingham, AL and also over to Atlanta, GA to visit some friends.

A great time was had by all, but I did end up feeling like I spent the whole weekend driving. I finally was able to try something out to make the trip a bit more enjoyable. Some of you may have seen or heard of ITConversations.com. For those that haven't, it is a site that holds mp3's of various technical talks and interviews. I downloaded and burned some to CD for the trip (since I don't currently have an iPod or car radio that plays mp3's). I have to say this helped make the drive much more pleasant. Plus I got to learn a little bit instead of just listen to radio stations come and go as I put miles on the road.

I listened to a talk by Thomas P.M. Barnett (a prolific blogger himself) which was a shortened version of one I had seen on TV. I listened to a 2 CD set of Steve Wozniac of Apple fame. I also listened to Wil Wheaton, Bruce Schneier, the great Paul Graham, and Jonathan Schwartz.

It actually makes me want to take a couple of more road trips to get to have time to listen to more interviews and talks like this.

Something I just noticed as I was creating this entry was that as I did Google searches and right clicked to copy a link, the link is no longer the pure link text. It now contains a link to Google that then redirects to the link returned in the search. Is the something new or did I just notice it finally? Don't really want to redirect everything through Google, so looks like I'll have to write a quick GreaseMonkey script to pull those out.

Starting a Mobile, AL .NET Users Group

2005-05-23T18:06:00.000-07:00

So through correspondence with a friend I was connected with a local group that wanted to start a .NET user group in the Mobile area....again. Now there was a group a couple of years ago that got together when .NET was first hitting the scene and had meetings about once a month. Unfortunately like happens many times, people lost interest after awhile and after about a year it ended.

Our Microsoft contact Joe Healy, the south-eastern US technical evangelist for .NET, scheduled a conference call for 6:00pm this evening to gauge interest and go about organizing a user group. There were about 15 people that I saw on the conference call e-mail list that were interested in such a group.

So as I dialed into the call at 6:00pm expecting to be greeted by many happy .NET user voices eager to come together and learn as a group, I only found one voice. That was Joe Healy's. So there we were, Joe and myself talking about starting a local user group.

He begins by asking if I'm the main organizer of this group. Now I'm very eager to keep my skills fresh, and any learning is good learning, but I had to let him know a couple of things. For one, as most of you know from reading here, by day I am a Java, Oracle, PowerBuilder guy. I play in the .NET world some on the side, but not my main area of experience these days. Second, I was not the main organizer, but am more than happy to take the initiative. But, I have to admit I don't think he was too excited to here that someone that works mainly on competing platforms and technology would be trying to rally the troops.

After about 10 minutes we were joined by a local consultant who was eager to get involved. Good to have at least one other person, and it helped make us not look so bad by not having any participants at all. So here is the plan so far.

1) Get a website set up for the user group (have it listed on Ineta.org once set up)

2) Get a calendar of events and set a first meeting (Joe will be in town around August 25 and offered to be the first speaker, so probably some time around then)

3) Find some place that will allow us to use their space for meetings. I will check with the University of South Alabama Department of CIS to see if they will offer up a classroom once a month (or once a quarter depending on interest). It would be a good opportunity for the students to get involved if we met on campus. If that does not work out, I could check with my old/new employer (Oh, did I not tell you where I'm working again these days :-) )

4) Get the word out to the local technology companies and get some involvement commitments.

5) Of course get an RSS feed setup to keep users aware of what is going on and give us a way to have conversations. Right Scoble?

I think this is a great opportunity for learning and networking in general, so even though it isn't my full time technology, I will try to be as involved as I can. Plus since I'm not teaching these days, this will give me something to do in that vein....

Alternative to all_objects in Oracle 9i and Up to generate rows

2005-05-10T20:34:00.000-07:00

As Oracle guru Tom Kyte says of his daily Oracle experiences, I have learned something new about Oracle today. This trick works in Oracle databases 9i and up (like a fine wine this one will actually get better as you move to newer versions).

From a fantastic post on asktom.oracle.com entitled Can there be an infinite DUAL? I found a great alternative to using all_objects to generate X number of rows in a table.

Oftentimes, say for a Pivot Table, we will want to generate a table with X number of rows which we will Cartesian Product with some other table. To do this using all_objects (or some other table that is guaranteed to have a sufficiently large number of rows) it would look like this:

select rownum rn
from all_objects
where rownum < 10;

rn
--
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9

9 rows selected

Now using a cool trick with 9i and up we can produce the same thing like so:

select l
from (select level l
from dual connect by level < 10
);

l
--
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9

9 rows selected

Why do we care if the results are the same? The consitent gets for the second approach are much lower and they scale fantastically. Guru Kyte says that this will be even faster in 10g thanks to something called FAST DUAL. If you don't believe me try it for 10,000 rows and check out the trace for both approaches.

Very cool stuff. Also did you know that Tom Kyte is blogging now at tkyte.blogspot.com? Very interesting to see a different side of this technology wizard.

Papers, I must see your Papers...

2005-05-09T19:14:00.000-07:00

It appears that the battle has all but been lost regarding a National ID card in the United States. Through a tacked on bit of legislation to a military appropriations bill that is considered "must have" the Federal government is mandating the REAL ID program. This will require the States to standardize driver's licenses with all kinds of wonderful bits of identifiable information and have it read via some electronic means (magnetic stripe, RFID, you make the call). Yeah, sounds like a National ID card to me. And if burying this legislation in an unrelated spending bill that is seen as a must for passage wasn't a good indication that something slimy was going on, then check this out. The legislation doesn't go into effect until 3 years after passage. In war I believe they call those landmines, or in terrorism terms I think this would be a sleeper cell.

Unfortunately the media discovered this a bit too late (funny how things get overlooked when they are buried deep in spending bills with 3 year lags on taking effect) and it has already passed the House and the Senate will vote tomorrow (Tuesday May 10, 2005).

For what it is worth, please write your elected officials and tell them that you oppose any such legislation dictating a National ID card, and that research has shown repeatedly that such legislation will not make us a safer, just further erode our personal privacy and freedom (sounds like an ongoing theme these days). You can write them through UnrealID.com or as always through Congress.Org. Of course the way the erosion of privacy and freedom is going in DC you will probably get audited and put on a watch list for expressing your opinion.

Security guru Bruce Schneier has posted on this and has some great links on the subject. Goodbye freedom and democracy, hello communism, eh comrade.... And the saddest part is we elected these officials to protect us and look out for our best interests (I know statements like these will keep you rolling on the floor laughing for hours).

Sun Certified Java Programmer

2005-04-25T18:07:00.000-07:00

Well at long last I finally received the results from the Beta version of the Sun Certified Java Programmer for Java 5 certification test I took last February. The great news is that I passed. I am now a fully certified, card carrying SCJP. Now I can move on to the Certified Java Developer test. That one is pretty interesting in that you are required to develop an actual program to given specs. More exciting than just taking some test :-).

Also if you haven't seen it, check out Tom Kyte's new blog. He is the man behind AskTom.Oracle.com. Which is THE place to go if you are doing Oracle development. The man has forgotten more about Oracle than I will probably ever learn. Very interesting read.

Brave New World

2005-04-13T19:24:00.000-07:00

Well as I mentioned in earlier postings some great new things are happening soon for me. April 29 will be my last day with my current employer DailyAccess Corporation. After 2.5 years with DAC I have decided to accept a fantastic position with a company called Filters-NOW.com.

Filters-NOW is a local company that distributes and manufactures all manner of filters. We have Air, Vacuum, Water, HEPA,... pretty much anything that ends in the word filter we have. I will start my new position on May 2.

While I am extremely excited to begin my new job, it has been a very bittersweet experience. Working at DAC has been the most fun I have ever had at a job. The people I worked with were great. I will really miss that group. This is just going to be another test of how well I can keep in touch with my friends there (has never been one of my strong suits).

One of the exciting (and I admit a bit scary) things about the new place will be a whole new development environment. I will be saying goodbye to PowerBuilder, Java, and Oracle and saying hello to Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP. Always good to get familiar with other technologies, so I can't wait.

I will keep you all informed of the goings on at the new place.

Also on a side note, with my group of co-workers at DAC we have submitted 3 proposals to Sybase's TechWave 2005 conference. We should know by mid May if any/all have been accepted. I spoke there last year and it was an amazing time. I look forward to being able to attend again this year.

Design Patterns Study Group

2005-04-11T20:49:00.000-07:00

I read a great article over at OnJava.com regarding the new head first book Head First Design Patterns

I have flipped through these books before and was fascinated by the unique approach to learning that they take. I have read other books by Kathy Sierra and Bert Bates and am a faithful subscriber to their blog Creating Passionate Users. These guys really have a fantastic writing style and are not afraid to stretch the boundaries of what a technical book should be like.

So after reading this article I finally broke down and ordered this book. I have the classic GoF (Gang of Four) Design Patterns book, but it is really one to be studied more than read, so I am looking forward to a different presentation of the material.

The OnJava article got me thinking about whether I could start a study group like this up at my local university, the University of South Alabama. Well let's break it down on how I would sell it to the CIS department.

What I would need: I would need class space on a weekly or semi-weekly basis for meetings. I would expect the department to publicize to their students.

Other than that they would not have to provide too much. I would send out info to local companies to try and bring out people. I would prepare to present material each week. (I actually see it as a half lecture, half discussion type environment. That way the students and other developers that are not familiar with the material can get up to speed and we can all share ideas).

What is the upside for all involved: Networking opportunities for the students that attend and those employed in the field that attend. Opportunities for the CIS Department to try and convince those working in the field to finish Undergraduate degrees or begin Graduate degrees in CIS. Overall learning of good, reusable design principles that improve the quality of the developers and students (plus sharp students give the department a good rep once they get out).

Well I'm still in the planning stages, and I'm about to take on some big new responsibilities (which I can tell you about after tomorrow), so I'm not sure how this will play out, but it is a thought. Let me know what you think.

You What???

2005-04-04T19:15:00.000-07:00

A conversation today with a friend I've been trying to get on the phone for a couple of weeks:

"Yes I'm alive. I went to Paris, Got Engaged, Came back, and Got Fired."

Now that is definitely more eventful than my last vacation. Makes me wonder what boring things I've been doing the last two weeks. Definitely nothing to compare to this pal's adventures.

I myself will have some exciting news to share soon, but not just yet.

So what do you get for the baby that has everything? Well of course Johnny Cash clothing:

Got to send this to some friends with young ones.

Kikkerland Clocks

2005-03-28T18:15:00.000-08:00

Ran across some very cool clocks on a site called Kikkerland. You can view them at this site but must purchase them through other retail outlets. Here are the two that really caught my eye.

The first is an Hourglass Clock

The second is a Flip Clock with marching legs

Very neat designs. As good as this knife rack that I am dying (pun intended) to find for sale somewhere.

If you see this knife rack anywhere, please pick one up for me.

Lookout Mobile

2005-02-22T17:15:00.000-08:00

Heard an interview this morning on the radio from a fascinating group. The group's name is Lookout Mobile. It was founded by a Mobile transplant as a place for people to come together and interact with new interesting people in their own city.

A very neat idea that solves the age old question for people living someplace new.... How do I meet people? I recommend checking it out. Once registered you can post new events on the calendar that you would like others to attend, or you can sign up to attend current events posted by others. And the best part, it is absolutamente free!!

The Taming of the Roth

2005-02-15T18:00:00.000-08:00

A friend at work asked me to put some information together on the Roth IRA and taxable investment accounts, so I figured since I went to all of the trouble to write it up, I might as well share it with my adoring public.

We don't need no stinking retirement accounts: Ok, face the facts, Social Security will not be there for you. Regardless of what the politicians say, forget about it. Even if it is still around and maybe by some miracle is still able to cut you a check one day the realities are:
- You will probably be 80 years old before you reach the new and improved retirement age if the government has its way
- The amount you will receive will be a pretty tiny monthly check compared to what you put in
- You will never get out the amount that you put in and that was put in on your behalf (remember that your employer was matching your Social Security contributions when you were working)

The textbook retirement plan approach: The book says that retirement plans should go like this (in this order too):
- Employer sponsored 401(k) plan up to the company match - You really, really want to put in enough money to get the full company match. Remember the Employer's matching contributions are like free money. Don't you like free money? Or think of it this way, if you put in a dollar and they put in 50 cents match, you just made a 50% return on your investment. Try to do that consistently on Wall Street. Don't forget this is Pre-Tax money so it will lessen your taxable income, but you will have to pay taxes on the money when you withdraw it in retirement.
- Roth IRA up to the yearly contribution limit - The limit for 2005 is $4,000.00. These are after tax contributions meaning you put in money that has already been taxed. Beauty of these babies is 1) the money in this account will never be taxed again, 2) You can always remove your original contributions without any penalty (Uncle Sam already got his tax money so he doesn't care), and 3) The contributions and any growth they achieve over the years will not be taxed when you start withdrawing money.
- Back into the company 401(k) plan up to the yearly limit - the limit for 2005 is $14,000.00
- If you still have money left over - then you place it in a taxable investment account......or give some over to me since you seem to have plenty to spare

How do I open a Roth - You must go through a third party company to open a Roth IRA account. The best companies to go through are those that only deal in No-Load Mutual Funds and those that charge extremely low expense ratios for those funds (Less than 1%). Here are some that I like along with their minimum requirements.

The Vanguard Group (www.vanguard.com) - $1,000.00 minimum to open an account. Thereafter a minimum contribution size of $100 if contributing via check, exchange, or electronic bank transfer. The minimum for additional contributions through an Automatic Investment Plan (monthly debit of bank account) is $50. There is a $10 annual maintenance fee until your account gets over $5,000.00. A couple of nice funds are:

VFINX Vanguard 500 Index Fund
VTSMX Vanguard Total Stock Market Index Fund
VGSTX Vanguard STAR Fund
VWELX Vanguard Wellington Fund

Fidelity Investments (www.fidelity.com) - Offers the SimpleStart IRA Account which has no minimum to open an account and no account maintenance fees. The only requirement is to set up a recurring contribution of at least $200.00 per month from your bank account. Very nice that there is no minimum to open an account. Some nice funds:

FFNOX Fidelity Four-in-One Index Fund
FFFFX Fidelity Freedom 2040 Fund

TIAA-CREF (www.tiaacref.org) - No minimum and no account maintenance fee. The only requirement is to set up a recurring contribution of at least $50.00 per month from your bank account. Nice funds:

TCEIX TIAA-CREF Equity Index

Taxable Investment Account - For those with just too much money lying around or that just want to play and get a feel for the market. Look for no account maintenance fees, low trading fees, automatic dividend reinvestment, and ability to purchase fractional shares. Here are some I like:

Scottrade (www.scottrade.com) - $500 minimum to open an account. No account maintenance fees. $7.00 trades. No automatic dividend reinvestment. Only allows purchase of whole shares

ShareBuilder (www.sharebuilder.com) - No account minimums or inactivity fees. $4 trades if done via an automatic investment plan. Able to purchase fractional shares. Automatic dividend reinvestment

Now I know that was a good bit to take in all at once. Maybe I'll break it down further later, but that is it for now. Hopefully my co-worker will be able to take this information and decide to join the elite group of those who Roth.

American Roulette

2005-02-01T16:30:00.000-08:00

Just finished reading a fascinating book called American Roulette : How I Turned the Odds Upside Down---My Wild Twenty-Five-Year Ride Ripping Off the World's Casinos. The book details Richard Marcus's 25 year career stealing from the casinos using slight of hand type moves with casino chips. Of course first and foremost, I would not advocate attempting anything you read in this book (that is if you enjoy the nice, fairly normal life of freedom you currently have).

I found out about this book one day from an online article that mentioned Richard's online weblog. Here he details various stories and thoughts on the gaming industry. What I read sounded fascinating so I had to pick up his book.

To buy the book I used Amazon.com's used book purchasing capability. It has worked great in the past for CD's so why wouldn't it work well for books.....

Well it worked great. I found the book cheap, it arrived in under a week and was in great condition...all the way down to the Baltimore Public Library sticker on the front of it. Surely this was purchased from the library and not just stolen, but who knows.

I was held hostage for 3 days while reading this book because it was so enthralling. I would highly recommend it. Of course if you are in Baltimore, you probably will not be able to find it at the local public library. Now that I have just finished it I can go back to the main task at hand. Finishing preparing for the Sun Certified Programmer Java 5 beta exam. I have less than 2 weeks left, so let the cramming commence.

It was nice to break away from reading the techie stuff for a bit since I rarely read anything that isn't technical or financially related.

Speaking of that, are you going to file your taxes online this year? No you say, why not? Did you know that many of the online tax preparation sites have made deals with the IRS to offer free federal filing online. You get your refund faster than mailing and there is no way your neglect in carrying the one can put you in hot water. Follow the links on the IRS site

Sun Beta's Java 5 Exam

2005-01-19T18:15:00.000-08:00

Sun is offering the Beta version of the Java Certified Programmer exam for Java 5.0 through February 13, 2005 for the bargain price of $49. It is over twice as long as the standard exam, but if you pass you get full certification and bragging rights as a JCP on Java 5. You can also be the first on your block to have the Java 5 cert.

Even if you don't pass, you can look at it as a 5 hour and 15 minute 166 question practice test for around $50 bucks. Plus you get to help Sun fine tune the exam before it goes to primetime.

Here is a Sun blog entry describing the beta and another link with more information

Go register now through Prometric it is Sun's test number 311-055.

Happy New Year

2005-01-04T18:22:00.000-08:00

Happy New Year to one and all.

I hope everyone has big plans for the coming year. Just be sure you haven't gotten too comfortable where you are in life. You should never stop learning, never stop enjoying new experiences, and never stop having fun. Life is way too short to just sit there comfortable in your situation.

Hopefully this year I will be adding lots of new technical content, so stay tuned. If you are in the Java fold, the JavaOne Call for Papers is now open. Get your submissions in before the 1/31/2005 deadline.

Also, 2004 is over. The W2's and other tax documents should start pouring in. If you are going to be owed a refund, file as soon as possible. Uncle Sam has been partying on your excess tax money all year, so be sure and get it back. You need it more than the government anyway, they'll just spend it.

Sybase Success Story

2004-12-24T15:20:00.000-08:00

News flash, DailyAccess Corporation written up for Sybase Success Story. The IT department at DailyAccess Corporation had the distinct pleasure of being interviewed for a Sybase Success Story detailing the work we have done using Sybase products to advance our business processes.

The summary of the article has been posted on the Sybase website and a longer version should be posted after the New Year. I will post a link when I get it. There are some nice quotes from yours truly, Doug Porter, praising the Sybase products we have worked with. For us this is the PowerBuilder development language and the EAServer Application Server. I encourage you to read the article and leave me a comment with any feedback you may have.

Sybase makes some wonderful products and has one of the best user communities and some of the best newsgroup participation I have seen. If you have had the pleasure with working with any of their products you know what I'm talking about.

Merry Christmas. I hope you are all on the Nice list this year.

Butch Walker - Rock God

2004-12-05T20:28:00.000-08:00

If you have never heard of the amazing Butch Walker, you are really missing out. Butch Walker first got some publicity from his band The Marvelous 3. They had a great radio hit in the mid-nineties with "Freak of the Week". Their body of work is some of the best rock and roll I've ever heard. Their albums were great, but nothing compared to their live shows. Butch and the rest of the band put on an amazing show. Few bands are able to get the crowd into the show like Butch and his bandmates. Even if you had never heard their music before, you would have a blast at their live shows.

Butch has now gone solo (in addition to being one of the most sought after producers in the business, producing the likes of Avril Lavigne, American Hi-Fi, Sevendust, The Donnas, SR-71...). His first solo effort Left of Self-Centered was a great rock extravaganza reminiscent of his days with The Marvelous 3. His sophmore effort Letters is a much more emotional introspective work, but it still has an edge and fantastic musicality that is awesome.

Butch is currently on the road touring for Letters. He just finished a gig opening for Avril Lavigne on her tour and is now on his own tour with American Hi-Fi. If he is coming anywhere near you, you really should check him and the Hi-Fi out. His stage presence is a must-see. He will definitely be the standard which you compare other live shows to after seeing him. I happened to be lucky enough to be in Orlando last August (speaking at Sybase's TechWave 2004) at the same time he was playing The Social, a local club. Amazing show. I would be traveling back there to see him in a couple of weeks if I could, but unfortunately a wedding falls on the same day. So hopefully Butch will hit the road again after the first of the year.

Give him a listen if you get the chance.

PowerBuilder Market Share

2004-12-03T20:26:00.000-08:00

Oh PowerBuilder where fore are thou market share? For those that do not know, Sybase's PowerBuilder was the it thing in the mid nineties. During the Client/Server rage PowerBuilder was one of the first on the scene that provided this capability.

Unfortunately as we have seen time and time again, getting there first doesn't always mean that you will become or stay the most successful in a market. As competing technologies from Microsoft and Sun played catchup throughout the late nineties, PowerBuilder started to lose market share. During the internet boom Microsoft and Sun had very deep pockets that allowed them to throw massive amounts of money at development and marketing. It really seems that they bought their market share by marketing the public to become convinced that their technologies were the ones to develop on.

I came to PowerBuilder fairly recently (~2 years ago) at PowerBuilder version 8. The die hards out there remember PB version 1. I had worked in all of the Microsoft languages and also Java. While they were quite good and allowed me to do some amazing things in development, I was shocked when I was introduced to PowerBuilder. Or I should say I was shocked to discover one of the main features of PowerBuilder. The object known as the DataWindow.

For those that do not know, the DataWindow is an object which allows one to very rapidly create forms and reports based on SQL queries. It is the closest thing to black magic I have seen in a long while. Lets compare it to say classic VB.

Say we want to create a form which allows us to perform all of the basic CRUD operations on a table containing employees with the following columns (ssn, firstname, lastname, address1, address2, city, state, zip).

VB World:
First we create a form with text boxes for each of our columns. We add a datacontrol to the form that has our selection query from the employees table. Then we must link each text box to its appropriate column. We must add buttons and then actually write the code to perform the insert, update, delete operations......and on and on and on... too much work.

PowerBuilder using the DataWindow:
Create new DataWindow object based on our query (select * from employees;) The DataWindow automatically generates a form for us prepopulated with input fields for each column in our table. We set the form up so that it is visually pleasing to us. We click Save. Done. You now have full CRUD capabilities from our datawindow. The DataWindow object full encapsulates the functionality for Executing our query, Deleting Records, Inserting new records, and Updating records. Pure brilliance.

Now Sybase has quite a few things going for it when it comes to PowerBuilder that I hope will move things back towards the way things were:

Many Legacy Applications - There are many applications in Government agencies, Financial institutions, and the Insurance industry that are written in PB. Porting them to a new language is a major undertaking

Incredible User Community - I have not seen a community more devoted and involved in spreading the good word of PowerBuilder than the Sybase community. From an amazingly active set of newsgroups forums.sybase.com to their very own set of "Super Users" called Team Sybase to the formal user group ISUG

PocketBuilder mobile development environment - the pocket version of PowerBuilder has been turning quite a few heads. It has the power of the desktop application software in the compact form.

DataWindow.Net - realizing that MS had made some serious inroads on the development community, the power and wonder of the DataWindow has been ported to function as an object in the .Net environment

I am quite pleased with the success of PocketBuilder and DataWindow.Net. I think that these two things could really bring PowerBuilder back to the masses in a huge way. Always nice to see that the skills one has put time in to gaining maintain their importance in the technology market. As a certified PowerBuilder 9 Developer working here in Alabama I look forward to PowerBuilder getting the credit they deserve for creating fantastic tools that allows rapid application development.

If you have never checked out PowerBuilder. Take a peek at the Sybase webpages linked here. You will be amazed at what it can do. Feel free to leave me comments with your thoughts.

Great Review on Mozilla Firefox

2004-11-30T11:44:00.000-08:00

Through The Amazing Scoble I have found that Scot Finnie has done a review on Firefox that is fantastic. He points out all of the wondeful things that makes Firefox the best browser out there right now (in my humble opinion of course).

If you have not checked it out, go grab it at www.getfirefox.com. Once you have experienced tabbed browsing, you will never be able to go back. (Plus it is just a ~4.5 meg download so give it a go)

The Mozilla group also has an e-mail client that is quite good called Thunderbird. I said goodbye to Outlook at home and have started using it with an IMAP account at www.runbox.com and am quite pleased so far. The things where I see it lacking currently are in the works (mainly better Calendar support is what I've noticed so far along with some quirks when using it to read newsgroups). But a very good client nonetheless.

Also if anyone has some recommendations for a newsgroup reader let me know. I use Outlook Express and haven't found anything else that fits the bill as well as that. You can usually find me lurking over at forums.sybase.com in the PowerBuilder and EAServer groups.

Schneier talks about Google Desktop Search

2004-11-29T16:48:00.000-08:00

Bruce Schneier is a well known authority in the security world and he makes some very good points about Security and the Google Desktop Search Engine.

I downloaded and installed the desktop search engine and was quite impressed with the information it was able to provide after indexing the disk. Those Google guys really have it down when it comes to indexing and retrieving data.

I eventually uninstalled it because of many of the things that Bruce points out...not Google doing anything wrong, just that it highlighted the insecurity present on my system. Kind of freaked me out so it had to go. Plus I'm not a big fan of a local proxy server running on my box (who knows what that thing is doing).

Typically when an employee gets canned at a company, the sysadmin usually grabs a copy of their harddrive before the user gets the word that they have to go. This is so they do not lose important data and can check up on what the employee has been up to. I see the Google Desktop Search as a perfect tool to posthumously analyze the dearly departed employee's disk for any "interesting" information.

So do you really think you are computing anonymously at work???

Do you know The Porter Method?

2004-11-28T21:04:00.000-08:00

What is The Porter Method you may ask. It came about from my Sophmore chemistry class at Mobile Christian School. One of my absolute favorite teachers of all time Alvin Simmons was the instructor that would enlighten me about many things and really spark my interest in the physical sciences (I went on to get a Minor in Chemistry).

In our Chemistry class we constantly worked problems. Mr. Simmons would write a problem up on the blackboard and then we would all individually begin to work it. While we worked, Mr. Simmons would walk around taking a peek at each student's work and seeing if they had found the correct answer. Eventually he would have one of the students with the correct solution work the problem on the board for everyone's benefit.

Now I must say that many times I did achieve the correct answer.....but somehow I was often able to find the correct answer without having the correct solution (or maybe I should say the preferred solution).

This caused Mr. Simmons to often wonder how I could come up with the right answer the wrong way. Some of that Dr. Hain Magic Math I suppose (if you went CIS at USA you know what I'm talking about).

Thus he came up with the methods that one could take to find an answer.
There was:

The Right Method
The Wrong Method
and The Porter Method

2 of which would yield the correct answer (just in entirely different ways). So really you have Mr. Simmons to thank for what is known as The Porter Method and that is where the name came from. (Thankfully over time my answers AND solutions started to match his...)

Introduction

2004-11-28T20:13:00.000-08:00

And so it begins. To introduce myself, my name is Doug Porter. I am currently a programmer with DailyAccess Corporation based in Mobile, AL. The development environment I work in consists of Java, PowerBuilder, EAServer, and Oracle. I am a proud graduate of the University of South Alabama where I also am an adjunct instructor in the Department of Computer and Information Sciences.

Mostly my interests center around the technology industry, but I do tend to branch out and have very strong opinions about things ranging from finance, taxes, movies, to just plain life in general.

Here I will hopefully share to the world my thoughts and the latest goings on and things of interest to me. Cheers.