at work, we've got an application that aggregates rss feeds, and stores the posts for republication. we've been having ongoing problems with character encoding. special characters from blogs (mainly “, ” and ’...which look like normal quotes you type out with your keyboard, but they're not) have been making their way into our database as ? or #. ( Read more... )

as part of my company's deployment strategy, we decided to set up a redundant tomcat server instance behind a load-balancing mod_jk worker to handle the load when the main server instance was being updated. the mod_jk load balancing was easy - by the numbers, right out of the docs. getting two instances of tomcat running to my satisfaction was a ( Read more... )

"Merchants and captains of the world; Sailors, navigators too; Will weep and mourn this loss with their sins piled up to the sky."

double shot of joy today when, in the mail, i received both my copy of mechademia issue 1, and my recently reacquired g1 license ( Read more... )

"Ambition makes you look pretty ugly; Kicking, screaming Gucci little piggy"

tonight marked the start of yet another attempt at a) game development, and b) test-driven development (hey...it's called a practice for a reason). i decided to go back to my mousey game, and start over from scratch ( Read more... )

stumbled on microsoft's guidelines for test-driven development today, courtesy of testdriven.com and scott bellware. now, i'm no expert tdd'er - i'm a novice practitioner, and in sore need of much more practice - but even i'm disgusted by the way these "guidelines" completely ignore the fundamental precepts of tdd. generating tests from pre- ( Read more... )

"存在証明を鳴らせ; サイレン、サイレン （せんざいしょうめいをならせ;　サイレン、サイレン）"

Translation (from ajikan): "Wail out, proof of life; Siren, siren"

after a long, not-so-patient wait, the release of eclipse 3.1 has finally arrived. support for java 5.0 features like generics and typesafe enumerations...what java geek wouldn't be happy? just need to wait on exadel to get their ( Read more... )

"ひかりつずけようあのほしのように"

Translation (from www.animelyrics.com): "Let's shine on like that star."

today, i came up with this brilliant way to decouple a singleton from its construction. i abstracted the instantiation to an abstract singleton object within a singleton proxy, so that the concrete singleton which the proxy was constructed with would be ( Read more... )

so i arrive at work this morning, my usual 5 minutes late, and bound down the steps to the elevator where the cleaner is going about his daily duties. i push the call button, and...the cleaner almost immediately takes the spray bottle to the elevator button, and wipes it off ( Read more... )

"She loves me, and her body keeps me warm; I am happy here."

vo·ca·tion (v
( Read more... )

"It started out with a kiss, how did it end up like this? It was only a kiss, it was only a kiss..."

blogging as a form of studying? O_o talk about desperate...

anyway, here goes.

( abandon all hope ye who enter here )