Category Archives: technical

How to do variable/conditional SQL sorting order of results

Posted on July 25, 2010 by patrick

I was jazzed today. I figured out how to conditional order of SQL results. Specifically being able to vary change the sorting order within the results based on a database field. Specifically, Create two tables Main and Secondary create table … Continue reading →

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Where to start learning Java if you are a PHP person?

Posted on June 9, 2010 by patrick

Over at StackOverflow, the question was asked : Where to start with Java when coming from PHP? PHP5 has the concept of objects, interfaces and exceptions. These are similar enough to Java’s version of objects, interfaces and exceptions for basic … Continue reading →

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Multi-threaded Homework Problem

Posted on June 1, 2010 by patrick

Occasionally I have been asked about learning multithreaded programming. My standard suggested problem is to create a “simplistic” TCP/IP block ordering library. This is a variant of the standard producer/consumer problem that shows up in interviews. This problem is a … Continue reading →

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… and I nailed the javadoc

Posted on January 7, 2010 by patrick

Yesterday was a red letter day. I found multiple bugs in the javac and javadoc. (1.6.0_17) This javadoc issue occurred when there is a class that has no package line ( it is in the default package). Annoyingly enough it … Continue reading →

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Woot! I crashed the javac

Posted on January 7, 2010 by patrick

My javac crash: An exception has occurred in the compiler (1.6.0_17). Please file a bug at the Java Developer Connection (http://java.sun.com/webapps/bugreport) after checking the Bug Parade for duplicates. Include your program and the following diagnostic in your report. Thank you. … Continue reading →

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Generic annoyances in java

Posted on January 6, 2010 by patrick

For some reason, the type variable <O> cannot flow through from an external caller through a callee to another called method. This compiles just fine in eclipse, but once again sun’s javac is temperamental. The three solutions seem to be: … Continue reading →

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Gmail and the Electrical Grid: Looks the same

Posted on September 2, 2009 by patrick

GMail had a large-scale cascading failure yesterday: At about 12:30 pm Pacific a few of the request routers became overloaded and in effect told the rest of the system “stop sending us traffic, we’re too slow!”. This transferred the load … Continue reading →

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Mac OSX — the most insecure OS around

Posted on August 7, 2009 by patrick

A year ago, I gave up on Windows. I was tired of the nervous eggshell feeling with anti-virus software, security patches, and a machine that would mysteriously be slower and slower no matter what I did. Because of MacOSX Unix … Continue reading →

Posted in broken, how to, technical | 2 Comments

Code Review #8: When to comment

Posted on March 16, 2009 by patrick

The last ? in a series of posts about commenting. See “the why”. See “not commenting is career threatening”. And the comment that started this off! This post should have really been the second one I wrote. The first post … Continue reading →

Posted in code review, management | 1 Comment

Why and when to wrap external library classes

Posted on March 16, 2009 by patrick

At some point, every developer starts using an external library. They then have to decide if that external library should be wrapped in their own custom interfaces and classes. If the external library would be pervasively imported in throughout the … Continue reading →

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