Weekly links for 14-20/12/2009

Woot : What Was Popular Mechanics Thinking?
The comments are very funny

Presentation Summary “High Performance at Massive Scale: Lessons Learned at Facebook” « Idle Process
More than 3.9 trillion feed actions per day ??????!!!!!!???????

28 Rich Data Visualization Tools - InsideRIA
It seams that data visualization is no more a problem

Όσο ζω, μαθαίνω
Greasemonkey script to unveil the full urls of shortened urls in twitter and identi.ca

SmartGWT 2.0 Released - Sanjiv Jivan's Blog
Great tool if you want to make web apps that look like native

Weekly links for 7-13/12/09

How to Make Developer Certifications That Matter | The Single Founder

What I learned from Startup Weekend Athens

This year I took part in Startup Weekend that was organised for the second time in Athens by Andrew Hyde and the kind hospitality of Microsoft. Panagiotis has told the whole story, so I will just fill the gaps and post some photos.

First of all, I have to say that I started to like the iphone. I still believe that it is more an internet device and less a mobile phone but working with it (or should I say "for it") made me feel an attachment. If you are a developer, you know the feeling when you develop for a specific hardware. You either hate its guts or love it. So, as I already said on twitter, if anybody cares to sponsor my iphone purchase .... :-)

Google app engine is fantastic and what Panagiotis forgot to mention is the Eclipse plugin which makes your life much easier. The application was created, built and deployed in seconds.

Last and more important: I realised that in the process of creating a new business, developers are kind of commodity (I borrow this saying from a friend of mine :-)). Well, I don't want to be misunderstood here. Panagiotis already said that the business aspect is very important but after SWA2 I am starting to think that the technology/developer thing is not considered as important as I would like it to be. My feeling is that according to most people 's belief all you need is a good business plan. Later, you can always find someone to throw some code in. I doesn't matter if they are good or bad. Nobody knows or cares about you superior technology and if problems emerge in the future due to bad technology, it is equally easy to find someone else and fix them for you. Don't get me wrong, I don't mean that we are useless. I just realized that we are not appreciated as I thought we should be.

So next year, I hope we will be there again better organized this time with our own business people (I already have some candidates) to prove that if you master the technology you can always find someone to write you a good business plan :-)

Now the photos
Shshshsh, the team is working...

See what you can do with an eeePC ?


Business development consulting

Weekly links for 30/11-06/12

New IEEE/CS Fellows « Blogs are like opinions. Everybody has one…

What a coincidence

After reading this
Φάε ένα μαλάκα!: Πού είναι τα ιπτάμενα αμάξια; (only in Greek)

I saw this
xkcd - A webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language - By Randall Munroe

Strange!

GWT incompatibility with Karmic Koala

After upgrading to Karmic Koala, the GWT Hosted mode browser stoped working (it couldn't even launch) due to a missing libstdc++5 library. Obviously Ubuntu 9.10 uses version 6 of the library, so a temporary but working solution was to install version 5 too from the Jaunty repositories.  I found the solution here and verified it with past.

Ubuntu 9.10 upgrade

The home pc has just been upgraded to 9.10. Every time I install a new ubuntu I try hibernation. I have never managed to make any of my linux machines hibernate correctly. This time it was different. The machine seemed to hibernate and power off. Well my joy didn't last though. When a tried to resume, a blank screen was all I could have. Never mind, Karmic Koala seems nice and a night of exploration is ahead.

Links for 2009-10-15

Put.io is an innovative new cloud storage service

October 7, 2009

JDK7 do escape analysis by default | Java.net

GO2WEB20 Blog: Google Wave: First Impression
... and not a good one

September 24, 2009

The Duct Tape Programmer - Joel on Software
This is absolutely right (and funny). I would like to copy some good extracts here but there are so many, I would have to copy the entire article.

Google Web Toolkit Blog: Delivering faster, richer GWT applications to your users
GWT is ready to use the webkit inside IE, provided by the Google Chrome Frame plugin. I wonder if our corporate clients with the strict policy on software they use, are willing to install the plugin...

What Did I do for One Web Day (aka. Why Should the Government Advance its FTTH Plans)

September 2, 2009

blog dds: 2009.09.02 - Job Security
Really funny HOWTO make yourself indispensable by writing code that noone wants to maintain. Of course, dds is obviously joking.

Links for 2009-09-01

Aza’s Thoughts » You Can’t Multitask
"The net effect is that it takes more time to multitask a set of actions than it does to do them sequentially."
True.

Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal
How science reporting works
(where 'science' can be replaced by 'any')

Applications meme

I usually don't take part in these kind of meme games (actually I have never) but this time I thought I could make an exception. Not that this meme is less silly or less absolutely useless than others but for some strange and unexplained reason I found it interesting to try and answer those questions about software I use. So here it is:

1. Which desktop manager do you use more often ?
I use Gnome just because it is the default in Ubuntu and experience has taught me to keep the defaults otherwise trouble is lurking in the shadows.

2. Which desktop application you would not like to see implemented again on linux? And why?
Normally, I wouldn't answer this one because I couldn't care less. At the very last moment though I remembered how annoying it is to have 4 or 5 different media players on my linux machine, each one designated to play a certain type of files. Plz don't create another one. Instead try to make one of the existing ones play everything.

3. Which desktop application you definitely would like to see implemented on linux? Describe it briefly or point out to a similar application.

A decent application for synchronizing my mobile device (phone or other) with evolution or the google calendar.

4. Write the name of the last project (not the very best, the last!) that made you wish to thank their developers so you can thank them now!

The scrobble function in MediaPortal :-) I know it 's a windows application but the question doesn't say it has to be linux.

5. (Optional) Link the blogs of 1-3 people you’d like to take part to this meme. (no more than three). you can skip this question if you like.

What? You mean the others were mandatory?

The case of the WrongClassException

Yesterday, one client reported a strange bug in his application. It was an org.hibernate.WrongClassException during loading of some pojos from the database. I should mention here that the application is EJB3-JPA based with SmartGWT for the front-end. The exception was thrown when trying to load a specific object of class A and hibernate reported that the object was already loaded in the session but it was of the wrong class (class B). After playing around the database and the pojos annotations I saw that the two classes were subclasses of a common class and that the @Inheritance(strategy=InheritanceType.TABLE_PER_CLASS) annotation has been used on the parent, meaning that the two subclasses were mapped onto separate tables. I luckily remembered that in that case the primary keys have to be unique among the two tables even though we are talking about separate tables, otherwise hibernate will get confused when an object from table A is already loaded and it tries to load an object from table B with the same id. It thinks that the object is already loaded but it is of the wrong class. The odd thing in my case was that the two tables actually had different keys!!! What had happened as I discovered later was that the client had added some lines in one of the tables without caring about the key uniqueness between the two tables, thus leading to the WrongClassException problem.

Conclusion: Never allow the client touching the database!!!