Recent entries...

I was reading the Atlassian Developer Blog and in the latest entry the author mentions the word throbber. I've never heard of the term before so I thought I'd perform a quick search. Doing so brought me to this Wikipedia entry . Throbber - "A...

If you do a lot of CSS work, you are probably familiar with the fact that every web browser has its default styles (and ever browser has different defaults).   This can make it difficult to format content consistently across browsers... unless you ...

SpringSource acquired G2One, which means a lot of great stuff for Groovy/Grails.  You can read some stuff on the lead developer's blog here which also has links to official announcements, etc.

Robert Glass posted a great article on the IEEE online journal - Frequently Forgotten Fundamental Facts about Software Engineering.   Robert is also the authors of one of my favorite books, Facts and Fallacies of Software Engineering .  ...

Hi there, OK, so if you're like me your worst enemy is silent failure.  Things better just work or fail fast.  So I wanted to blog about my latest battle hardened tool: the Sun JVM "OnError" option.  This option has been around for...

Craig Walls made a great post on how easy it is to build the Spring Framework from source code.   I tried it, and it works like a charm.   In under five minutes, I checked out the project and built the jars.   In a world of...

When I am talking to someone who is looking at getting started with ZFS, I typically recommend they hit the following resources: ZFS Administration Guide (previous link was for Solaris users, if you are using OpenSolaris/Solaris Express, look here ) --...

Glenn Fawcett (Sun) and Andrew Holdsworth (Oracle) gave a presentation on Optimizing Oracle on CMT machines at Oracle Open World today that is freely available.  It is a good read if you have Oracle or another RDBMS and want to run it on one of Sun's CMT...

I recently installed Google Chrome and I like it. However one thing has been bugging me and that is the way it does not let me save a password for a site, once I have blacklisted it with the 'Never for this site' button. Today, with a little effort, I was...

Well, I feel compelled to talk about the third topic so shortly after writing my second recap entry on Groovy scripting.  A majority of the reason for me attending Chicago was not for Groovy (though I got a lot out of that), but looking for the answer...

Upon my return to the office after my week learning Groovy and Grails, I've often been asked how it is that I began learning the "syntactical sugars" it offers.  So, I felt it would be beneficial to blog quickly on my experiences with Groovy...

During the week of Aug 24th, I had a great opportunity to go to Chicago, IL for the week and take part in G2One's Groovy/Grails training session, taught by Jeff Brown.  Groovy/Grails has already taken hold of me as a developer, but this was an opportunity...

I've been writing more JavaScript-heavy user interfaces lately, using frameworks like Ext, YUI, Prototype, etc.  As a result, I've been wondering about what potential JavaScript has for memory leaks. The following provides a decent article on the...

So it's been a while since I put in a "plug" for the Grails framework.  And, since I'll be receiving a boat load of information next week on Groovy and Grails, I thought I'd unload this food-for-thought to the programming community.  I'm...

For the CSS-impaired (like myself), here's a nice little article on how to do really nice table designs using CSS.

The T5220 is one of the first SPARC based servers to use the ILOM lights out management software.  The interface is a bit different than ALOM, which is what most of Sun's volume SPARC servers have used in the past.  If you need to send a break to one...

Glen Brunnette (security guru from Sun) has just announced an updated version of his excellent Solaris 10 Security Deep Dive presentation.  It covers lots of good topics, such as: minimization executable stacks SMF Process Rights Zones Secure by...

I was working with a colleague recently trying to track down a jumpstart issue and thought this might be helpful to other people. The Problem A T2000 had a pair of 146G drives (c0t0d0 and c0t1d0) and a pair of 73s (c0t2d0 and c0t3d0) Each pair was...

Eclipse is a nice IDE that many of us use to develop Java apps.  Eclipse has many plug-ins to do various things such as source code control and database interactions. Hopping between these different 'Eclipse Perspectives' can get cumbersome, so I thought...

There's a nice article on IBM Developer works that demonstrates how some tools can be used to generate documentation from your codebase systemically (rather than manually up-keeping it yourself).   Enjoy!

x4[12]00s appear to have a default power policy of 'previous' which means if the machines were off when they lost power, they won't automatically start back up when power is restored. You can change that to 'always-on' which will always start the system...

If you want to turn on or off the white locate lights on a Sun machine that uses the ALOM service processor firmware (entry level SPARC and CMT servers) it is simple, use: setlocator on or setlocator off   If you want to do the same for...

Apache Commons DBCP is a very nice database connection pool API. It's easy to use and works flawlessly. Did you know that it has a validation feature? Consider this DBCP configured in Spring: <bean id="dataSource" class="org.apache....

An article got posted showing the steps for installing OpenDS and using it to provide name services for Solaris.  Right now generating an SSL certificate is a bit more complex than it will be in the future, but once you are past that, the rest of the...