TSSJS: Day 1.

Posted on by kylar

I had the fortune to be able to attend The Java ServerSide Symposium this year, a great forum/convention about java server technologies. Some of the speakers that I had the fortune to see were:

Eugene Ciurana: Mission-Critical Cloud/Enterprise Hybrid Deployments
Dan Diephouse: RESTful SOA with Mule
Andrew Lombardi: Architecting Applications Using Apache Wicket
Jason Whaley: Rapid Large-Scale SOA – Connected Products at Leapfrog Enterprises
Heath Kesler: Navigating the SOA Mine Field: Optimized Application Architectures
Josh Long: Enterprise Application Integration, and Spring
Rod Johnson: Spring & The Death Of App Servers.
Jeremy Deane: Resource Oriented Architecture Protocol (ROAP)
Neal Ford: On The Lam From The Furniture Police
Bill Burke: Scaling RESTful Services with JAX-RS

Most of these I’ll be breaking out into individual entries, but generally, the quality of content this year was very high.

One of the things I like most about TSSJS, as opposed to most of the other conferences/symposiums I attend (as an attendee or blogger), is that most of the presenters are talking from a real-world experience, having architected, refactored or built a real-world product or solution, instead of just talking about some open source project that other people use, or working on theoretical things. This is something that is really applicable to me, given that most of the work I do is in the ‘real world’ :)

A/B Box

Posted on by kylar

Last night I built an A/B box for my guitar setup (to switch between two signal paths, usually effects->Amp A/Amp B or Guitar -> Signal Path/Tuner. It was a first little foray to see if I could do something like this. It worked out pretty well – I got a diagram from www.fulltone.com and pretty much copied it – I got most of the parts from pedalparts – although with the exception of the 3pdt switch you could get them all at frys for about $15. if it’s not plugged in to power, the LED’s don’t work, but for some reason, the power seems to add a tiny bit of noise. I’m not sure why yet.
ab box inside
A/B Box

Technical Books, Languages, and Project Euler

Posted on by kylar

First things first:
Hi. How have you been? Ok, Honestly, I don’t care.

Moving on.

I just got some new tech books: Programming Erlang (semi-work related), Programming Pearls (2nd edition) and Beautiful Code.

I started working on Programming Erlang but stopped a few chapters into it. For someone that has thought exclusively in OO for the last 10 years or so, trying to remember that = is a pattern matching operator is f’d up.

Anyways, a couple weeks ago I started to do Project Euler to learn a bit of python, and plowed my way through a bunch of the first problems (20-30) – they were mostly easy, even though my math stops at grade 12 – a few I ran into constraints issues where I actually had to think my way through the problem, or, even more rarely, find a mathematical explanation of the problem in order to write an algorithm. (the two triangle problems caused this. )

Python is a pretty cool language, very easy to learn.

Anyways, I had originally started this post with the desire to write a list of books I can’t do without, but I kinda got sidetracked. By Work.