Archive - page 22

Preserved and Catalogued

Previously on Lizard's Asylum
  • Feb 3, 2004

    Coffee

    I have a weakness/affinity for coffee. I can’t explain it— programmers seem to have this craving for caffeine/nicotine/chocolate that seems totally unreasonable.

  • Apparently, it isn't that terribly difficult to add users to an MS AD via LDAP; you just have to set the right attributes, and MS AD will do the rest and set sensible defaults for the other attribs.

  • Jan 30, 2004

    No Subject

    Just wanted to test the rich text edit control for LiveJournal. Don't be alarmed; we will return to your regularly scheduled blog.

  • Jan 29, 2004

    Moving...

    Eventually, I'll be posting my personal and non-tech entries here. And maybe, just maybe, I'll reboot Asylum into this journal. Or something. Don't count on it though.

  • From David Flanagan, author of the Java in a Nutshell series:

    The other day I tried to come up with a Java hexadecimal literal that was cooler (and less tainted by sexism) than the ubiquitous 0xCAFEBABE. 0xCAFED00D is misspelled, and 0xDEADBEEF is not suitable for vegetarians...

    My favorites?

    I thought it was pretty cool that pair BADE and ACCEDED were both legal hexadecimal literals

  • Why I love Java:

    • The fact that I don't have to worry about dynamic resource management— GC's the way to go, baby!
    • Each topmost class has to be in a separate file— cleaner code, easier to read class file source, and best of all I don't have to declare the interface of my classes in a separate .h header
    • Large class library— no need to worry about coding up a home-brew solution to the most common tasks, such as regexps and I/O
    • Object-orientation, single rooted inheritance tree, and interfaces— I like the interface concept. Clean, I'd say. And I can treat everything as an Object safely. And Arrays actually know their length! I can write a generic array for loop!
    • The reflection API. I did a home-brew ORM layer once, and originally using it meant having to declare a method returning an array of Strings representing the database fields of a particular object. I toyed with the idea of using reflection on the base class, tried it out, and was amazed that it actually worked. Wow. Smart objects.
    • Hibernate— a tool I recently discovered. Quite amazing... I'd say the above home-brew ORM layer would have eventually evolved into this, what with the reflection stuff I did. (Right... dream on).
    • JDBC— clean, easy to use, and dammit, I don't have to worry about DB-specific APIs! Oh, and PreparedStatements rock, especially in a webapp.
    • The String class. I couldn't ask for anything more. No more trying to figure out whether or not a char * fits.

  • Jan 27, 2004

    Work Is Fun

    ... well, almost fun. I'm enjoying the fact that I'm doing what I want to do: write code, develop programs.

    Currently working on (what can be termed as) an application server— okay, it's not really a heavy-duty application server. Basta. I got a barebones prototype up, and I am supremely happy. Java is definitely my language (and I still hate Java). And the server uses the Spring Framework to perform a lot of the component glueing, so to speak. I am starting to get IoC, and man, you should too.

    On an unrelated note, I will be moving my non-technical posts off to . So, if you don't want to read anything remotely techie, go friend me. Or something.

  • Jan 25, 2004

    Weekend Report

    Things that went on during the weekend:

    • Several students of my high school figured in a car accident; one has died. IIRC, most of them were SRCC (student council officers, with the lone death being the treasurer.
    • Accompanied my sister in shopping for a party dress. Not exactly interesting, but at least now I know I have some sense of fashion.
    • The wayward old 486 (also known as Ye Olde Dirty Bastard) lives! I thought I had fried bastard's video card, but apparently I was wrong— the card works fine, and the only thing wrong with it now is the apparent lack of a decent hard drive. The 1 GB drive I've been using on it seems marginal now for some strange reason, though, and I think I have to nuke it and reinstall Slackware. You win some, you lose some.
    • I am definitely not doing Avalon. Avalon is too heavy, IMHO— good concept, but too heavy for my tastes. I'm looking at the Spring Framework and PicoContainer instead.
    • I have a pretty decent idea of why a lot of Java folks hate detest dislike EJBs. They're really heavyweight.

  • The new SM56 kernel modules (version 6.02) are badly broken, and don’t work on custom compiled kernels. They may, in fact, be dependent on the RedHat-patched kernels they were built on. Damn. And not that I’m giving up— I just have too many things to do, so I won’t be able to try objdump(1)-ing it, nor will I be able to attempt any kludges and fixes. (Not any time soon, anyway)

  • Notes to myself, re: take note, use:

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Lizard's Asylum

Opinions and musings of JM Ibañez, a software engineer from the Philippines, as he tries not to go insane from everything.