December 2011
1 post
brick and mortar retail is obsolete... it's time...
Instead of brick and mortar stores where you buy things, why don’t we just have places where you go to TRY things (and then order elsewhere). They can charge you an entry fee or make money from additional services (such as unboxing and installation for large items like TVs) or handling returns (drop it off and they box it up and send it wherever.) I’m sure someone enterprising enough...
November 2011
3 posts
2 tags
java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError: scala/ScalaObject...
Spent some time trying to figure out why sbt no longer worked for me when I upgraded the sbt-launch jar to the 0.11.0 version. It would complain about a NoClassDefFoundError on scala/ScalaObject. 0.10.0 and earlier versions of sbt ran perfectly. The problem wasn’t related to a project configuration file as this error occurred even if I ran sbt in a completely empty directory.
Since...
2 tags
the mystery of the xcode 4 upgrade, three20, and a...
Recently, I upgraded to XCode 4, and one of my Objective C programs stopped working properly. This particular program uses Three20 to manage the application’s views.
Upon startup, I would get a blank white screen. However, if I closed the app by double tapping on the iPhone’s home button, and then switched back to the already-running instance, I would then see the Three20-managed...
2 tags
cooler javaFX kreations
Oracle recently released JavaFX 2, which is a rich client API that ditches the JavaFX language from JavaFX 1.x in favor of a pure Java library. And man, is it slick. It makes it very easy to implement rich, graphical applications or applets.
Inspired by @visualrinse’s Cooler Kreator, I created my own (greatly simplified) version of it, which I called “Cooler Kreations FX”. ...
August 2011
1 post
3 tags
force create hibernate envers audit events
Recently, I had decided to adopt Hibernate Envers to audit changes to several tables on my database. I decided to attempt to force create the insert events that would have been generated had I been using Envers from the start. Unfortunately, there wasn’t an obvious way to do this, short of writing my own SQL scripts. That approach is fine, but I had several tables to migrate, and I prefer...
May 2011
1 post
2 tags
overriding rails validations metaprogramatically
I had a need to modify the validations for a model in a Rails 2.3.5 app from a plugin. I did not want to directly modify the source code; in my case, I was writing my code as a plugin for an existing Rails application so I could upgrade the base code without worrying about losing my changes, or dealing with the hassle of reapplying my patches. There are several really great Rails frameworks out...
April 2011
1 post
3 tags
building a redmine plugin
I was experimenting with the Redmine, a popular Ruby on Rails open source project management web application. It’s pretty full featured: you can set up multiple projects, each with its own issue tracking, wikis, document stores, and calendars, all within the same instance of Redmine. But it didn’t have everything I wanted.
One problem that I quickly realized I wouldn’t be able...
November 2010
1 post
something to offer besides waiting to die →
Recently I had a discussion with @SoundSystemSDC about small companies in small towns competing to attract and retain professional tech talent and stem the brain drain. This topic had come up in the recent The Combine conference here in Bloomington, Indiana. A group of Midwestern executives discussed the challenges of tech companies in the Midwest. During the Q&A session, I asked how an...
October 2010
7 posts
5 tags
i stuck my cucumber in it
We’re building out an application to support this high profile effort that involves something like 10 different teams. My team’s application has over a million lines of code, 8000 classes, and Needs To Work(tm). Or heads will roll. And mine doesn’t like to do that, because it might get all scruffed up. So naturally we decided to get down with the BDD and use the Cucumber. ...
2 tags
hello world from scalatra
There’s been some buzz lately about Scalatra, which is a Sinatra like framework for Scala. Sinatra is a very scaled down platform for web programming in Ruby. Unlike many web frameworks (such as Lift, JSF, etc.) which tend to be very stateful and try to abstract away from the HTML and web technologies, Sinatra does no such thing. It’s very low level, which can make it very fast to...
3 tags
jstl tags not working in jsf 2
I was migrating a JSF application to JSF 2 and noticed that none of the JSTL tags worked anymore. And Googling for a reason for that hasn’t been very helpful as 99% of the posts regarding “JSTL and JSF” just say “don’t”.
The prevailing wisdom used to be that you shouldn’t mix JSTL and JSF, and once upon a time that was very true. But JSF and JSTL has...
5 tags
getting a generic List from a JAXB-RS Web service
If you consume a JAXB-RS web service using Jersey, you might encounter an issue when attempting to construct a generic List returned by the service. To get a simple object, you would simply call this code:
Client client = Client.create();
Foo foo = client.resource(url).type(mimeType).get(Foo.class);
But because of type erasure, this isn’t as straightforward for returning a generic...
3 tags
hello web from ada
I decided to mess around with some Ada. This is an old school compiled language, that is popular with the Department of Defense and almost nobody else. Except me. Mainly because I like the name. It’s pretty.
So here’s what you do:
1) Download the GPL version of GNAT from AdaCore. Make sure you grab AWS also.
2) If you are using Windows, you will need to have a Unix shell prompt...
2 tags
devise 1.3.3, rails 3 #fail
I’m starting a small Rails project for a webapp that I hope to have ready by January. While working on building up the application’s foundation, I ran into a small compatibility issue with Devise and Rails 3.
Devise 1.3.3 and Rails 3.0, on my Windows development machine at least, seems to have some kind of issue where the helpers don’t become available. authenticate_user!,...
4 tags
generating ddl with hibernate, envers, and spring
So I have this Spring app that uses Hibernate and I’ve defined my model. And I want to generate the DDL that I need to run to get the database in sync with my model. I also want to get the DDL for tables needed for use with the Envers auditing framework. Here’s how you get all that:
@Autowired LocalContainerEntityManagerFactoryBean lcemfb; public void printUpdateScripts() {...
September 2010
8 posts
2 tags
#playframework, #scala, #siena, #gae fun
In my last post, I mentioned that I created a simple (very simple!) Google App Engine hosted Play! webapp, written using Scala. The webapp simply tracks people who visit my blog. More accurately, it tracks people who view a little PNG that one of the methods renders. If someone GETs the image, I capture the visitor’s IP address and the time. This won’t be replacing anyone’s...
2 tags
play!ing with scala
I decided to try my hand at learning Scala. It’s supposedly the “next big JVM language” and the “Java killer” if you believe the hype machine. Personally, I don’t think that’s true. I think the next big JVM language that replaces Java will be a future Java. If there’s one thing Oracle knows how to do well, it’s making money, and that...
2 tags
JSF Action Methods Not Invoking
I decided to upgrade one of the systems I support to JSF 2. As if that wasn’t a large enough task, I decided while I’m at it, I would switch from MyFaces to Mojarra and dump Tomahawk while I’m at it.
After removing a lot of the Tomahawk components and the ExtensionsFilter servlet filter, I started to notice that many of my forms did not work anymore. Clicking on the...
4 tags
a little sinatra oauth ditty
I have a toy Ruby webapp I created using Sinatra that I have hosted on Heroku. It’s a small little ditty, nothing fancy. It’s called “Tweet Tools” and I wrote it to make it easier to read tweets from a particular class of Twitter user who don’t seem to understand the point of Twitter: these people insist on making dozens upon dozens of rapid fire and related...
2 tags
new play! module -- paginate
One of the things I miss from JSF programming is the ability to use easily pluggable controls. Play! isn’t really a component oriented framework, so it doesn’t provide that ability out of the box. But because it’s so extensible it’s easy enough to fill in this gap.
I just uploaded a new module for the Play! framework to github. It’s called Play—Paginate and...
4 tags
multiplex iphone app →
My first iPhone app came out late last week. It was written using Monotouch in a tenth of the time it would have taken to do so in Objective C. Check it out!
2 tags
dev derby 2010
This weekend, on September 11, 2010, I took part in the Dev Derby 2010. This was a contest where teams were split up by programming language, and challenged to create as usable and fully functional a program as possible in only six hours. Sadly, some teams, such as Justin Ko’s Team Ruby, were shorthanded. However, the PHP and C# teams put up a good fight.
The challenge was to design a...
July 2010
4 posts
I bought an iPhone 4
The iPhone 4 is far from perfect, but it’s the best phone on the market in my opinion. I honestly wish that wasn’t the case: quite frankly, I would prefer a phone that I could write programs for in Java, because I prefer that language tenfold over the antedeluvian monstrosity that is Objective-C. I hate Apple’s 3.3.1 clause which makes writing software for it in anything other...
this is not the lawrence mcalpin you are looking... →
I went to a web site that claims it can tell you how many people share your name in the United States. Apparently there are five people who have the awesome distinction of sharing my name.
How many have your name?
2 tags
Playing with Play!
I’ve been playing around with the Play! framework for some time. It’s a really great framework for the Java language that makes web programming fun again. Well, fun for those of us who didn’t jump on the Ruby bandwagon several years ago. They’ve already been having fun. But now we can too, and not have to give up the things we love about Java like static typing and...
June 2010
3 posts
1 tag
Day After Day by Scale Model →
Many, many moons ago, Megan Rox and I wrote a song called “Day after Day” ages ago for my personal music project called “The Lost Mind.” It was one of my favorite songs that I’ve ever written.
A few years ago, she resurrected some of the hooks for her latest band, Scale Model, and took them to a whole ‘nother level. And I just discovered today that they...
back into the fray
Well, after a year of not blogging, I decided to give it a try again. Because what the world needs is another person blathering on about their opinions, funny things they found on the interweb, and pictures of their dog in humorous poses. Except I don’t have a dog, so you’ll have to do with pictures of my cat.