I’ve been busy in the after-hours helping TheWife(tm) and TheSisterInLaw(tm) get their show on the e-road. Crawling through catacombs, experiencing ruins on a regular basis. Very cool stuff for a simple Canadian boy. I love what they do and it was an honor and a thrill to hash out a simple WordPress installation for them. The site still has a long way to go but looking at it gives me the sense that I should have chosen a different career path.
Just spent the day converting a performance-dogged application from the Java Persistence API to Ebeans. If you happen to be working in a tight environment (bytes & cycles), it would be worth your while to give Ebeans a try. Despite the documentation/site being a bit on the crappy side, getting into the “flow” took me only about an hour. The app now flies (JPA can suck it) and the code is super clean.
Now I’m just wondering if I should scrap my much loved factory strategy. Who needs MyEntityFactory.listStuff() when Ebeans.find( Entity.class ).findList() is available?
Posted: September 29th, 2011 | Author:Deke | Filed under:The IT Life | Tags:IT
… because life isn’t already hard enough.
If you are a masochist (or your boss is a sadist(*); or your project made you one; or you have the ambition to be so) and need to set up job queues through Zend Framework with a MySQL database. Here’s how it’s done.
Precursor: finding any practical information/tutelage about Zend_Queue is nearly impossible. The documentation is complete shite – sorry; it just is. After fiddling around with it, I finally have a working model. Thought it worthy of ye good ‘ol fashion blog post.
My day job — these days — is hacking Java. Well, that’s an understatement. I’ve been writing what is best described as some form of multi-platform, embedded system for a MysteryProjectThatImSwornToSilenceOver with some really cool people WhoImNotAllowedToMention. It’s an audio-visual experience involving joysticks and touch-screens; it keeps my left brain in tune. My night job is, well, multi-lobal funk.
Posted: February 1st, 2011 | Author:Deke | Filed under:Why not? | Tags:Biz, IT
For the past year, Matej and I have been working hard on a new startup. We have revolutionized printing as you know it. Just kidding. We did this in two weeks. Just kidding. Matej did it in one week; I’m just stealing a breath of bragging right.
Envelopa.com is a super-simple utility for printing addresses on an envelope. It’s old school — we know — but it was one of those problems that we couldn’t find a simple and free solution for. It was also something that fit into our “if it can’t be done in a week, we won’t do it” mantra.
(Note: our next one’s a real whopper so that mantra dies now.)
Envelopa is pretty basic in its current form. You sign up, paste contacts from a spreadsheet or create new ones manually, and generate formatted PDFs for each of those contacts. You can then take those PDF files and (using only an Inkjet printer as odd as that might sound) print them directly onto your envelope. We’re, rather Matej’s, busy with adding support for importing contacts via Google and a CSV file-upload utility.
It might just save you a few minutes of time; we find that pretty darned useful. Check it out.
Posted: January 25th, 2011 | Author:Deke | Filed under:The IT Life | Tags:IT
I’m mainly a lone-wolf developer but sometimes (and more and more so) I need to work with other people outside of my dungeon. I have one el-cheapo box acting as the ssh, web, git, and backup server. I think this is a fairly typical setup. I wanted to take an existing project, add it to git, and share it with other dudes while still being able to code directly (when necessary) on the server itself. The solution turned out not to be so obvious. Well, not to me at least.
Here’s a screenshot (format matters) of an email I received this week from Telligent. There’s no pretext, just a boot and a bunch of self-promotion.
I wasn’t a user so I’m not so offended, I just find this message a tad brutal. If I need a social network for my enterprise-of-one, I’d probably use theflowr.
