Wednesday, 31 October 2007

Halloween: Shows the Scary Side of the US Housing Market

We are living a little bit more than a year in a new development with a house that is not even 4 years old. Last year's Halloween trick-n-treat walk yield so much candy that the kids could hardly carry them home. Nearly every house was giving candy out. This year was quite a contrast. Many houses were empty especially the ones with a dying lawn in the front but also many houses with lights inside were not giving out candie. So the kids did not have to carry that much but had to walk quite more in order to get some candy. Even though our neighborhood is still quite nice the keep on reading here

Posted by schaefera at 10:12 PM in Personal

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UML is Only for Painting Nice Diagrams

I have a strong aversion against UML except for some of the diagrams. But for anything else especially code generation UML is completely useless. If a developer or developer team needs class diagrams to generate Java classes then they should attend a beginners class for Java. The only UML diagram I like are Sequence and sometimes Use Case diagrams. Yesterday I wanted to illustrate how a demo application works that uses ServiceMix as service bus. So first I had a look at ArgoUML even though my past experiences weren't that good. Along the way the bad experiences resurfaced and I abandoned it. Then I had a look a Poseidon and even though they call it their community edition they still want a user to register even for the trial and start immediately charging you every year after the trial except you cancelled it. I don't like that model and off I went. Finally I found a nice little tool called sdedit, an open-source, all Java Sequence Diagram editor.

keep on reading here

Posted by schaefera at 3:36 PM in Java

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Tuesday, 30 October 2007

Microsoft's XBox 360 Support: Ahh, these Annoying Customers

Quite often in the US the website that wants to sell something is flashy with a lot of eye-candy. But as soon as you need some support then you enter the grey area which seems to fit quite nicely with the upcoming Halloween: Who has the scariest Support Web Site. Of course, our friends at Microsoft don't want to stay behind the trend. This is the XBox website:

XBox.com Website

keep on reading here

Posted by schaefera at 3:49 PM in Annoying

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Monday, 29 October 2007

Upgrade to IntelliJ Idea 7.0: Not So Fast

Update: It turned out that I used an old Hibernate Plugin that was causing the issue. In addition I was told (see comments) that it is not possible to let the Plugins run in a Sandbox to avoid repercussion on the IDE. This way installing a plugin seems to be at your own risk.

This week I got the announcement that IntelliJ IDE 7.0 is available and I luckily only downloaded an evaluation version. As for now I would not recommend that anyone is upgrading to 7.0 and if he/she has to that he keeps a 6.0 version handy. At least with the version 7.0.1 some of the most prominent issues were resolved but there are still severe problems around making me to keep using 6.

keep on reading here

Posted by schaefera at 3:55 PM in Madplanet.com Inc.

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Sunday, 28 October 2007

Changes all around Me

This weekend we made some changes here and there which are not major but one never knows. First we decided that it is time for the oldest to move into the upper bank bed so he and the middle one could share a room. For security reasons we thought that we take the upper bed down and see if he is comfortable in it and that he does not fell out. This way we can also see if they go along together even though we expect some fights along the way but sometimes they surprise us with this:

A rare occasion

keep on reading here

Posted by schaefera at 9:56 PM in Madplanet.com Inc.

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Wednesday, 24 October 2007

Halo 3: Review and some tips on How to Play It on Legendary

Well, I played Halo 3 through several times on every level and slowly but surely I come to the conclusion that it is #3 in every aspect and I can apply the installment number as its standing to all games of this trilogy. Halo 3 is great when it comes to graphics, animation and the number of weapons but the game itself is the shortest, the easiest and the least exciting. What is maybe the worst is that the story line is screwed up in my opinion and that it does not provide any more details on the forerunners, the halo system or how the covenants took it so wrong. The purpose of the game is keep on reading here

Posted by schaefera at 3:20 PM in Personal

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Saturday, 20 October 2007

Checkstyle Annoyances

I talk about Checkstyle for sure already but when I checked out the source from the subversion trunk of ServiceMix I was stumped by it and all the frustration with Checkstyle resurfaced again. I used Checkstyle from time to time to enforce some rules that prevent people from adding code that is prone to errors in the future like overwriting members (except they are private), single line blocks (because just a single line comment can screw over the code) and others. But I am opposed to any form of enforcing code format. The reason for that is that the readability of code is not improved by keep on reading here

Posted by schaefera at 8:06 PM in Community

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Thursday, 18 October 2007

No Advertising through Comments, Period

Even though most blogs have ads on the side of their blog web pages I still resist that but even if I would I am not going to approve any advertising through comments, period. That said if someone participates in a discussion and contributes to it I will give him / her the chance to mention their product as I did for Boris Kraft and others. Because I have comment monitoring switched on I am just going to disapprove an unwanted comment hoping it would discourage these low riders. Yes, low riders because they want to make a buck out of highjacking a blog for their personal g keep on reading here

Posted by schaefera at 8:21 AM in Annoying

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Wednesday, 17 October 2007

ServiceMix, Groovy and Spring

UPDATE: I created a request for enhancement on ServiceMix: https://issues.apache.org/activemq/browse/SM-1112 which if you like could vote for.
Unfortunately during debugging and developing this idea I forgot completely that I changed the ScriptExchangeProcessorEndpoint and added the getChannel() method. So, until this method is added this idea is not going to fly, sorry.

Today I had a look into the ServiceMix Script component and discovered that I could create a keep on reading here

Posted by schaefera at 5:47 PM in Madplanet.com Inc.

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Tuesday, 16 October 2007

Knowledge does not come Easy

Every time I hear consultant talking about some piece of software I often have the feeling that I am screwed over because many of them don't know what they are talking about because they never had to bang their head against the code and trying to understand the what actually is happening. For the last few months I was in a similar situation dealing and speaking about ESB and ServiceMix even though I never sold it as the greatest since the famous sliced bread. This week I finally found the time to delve into ServiceMix's code base and trying to really understand how it work keep on reading here

Posted by schaefera at 6:00 PM in Madplanet.com Inc.

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Ohh, for Christ's Sake -- F*** Maven 2: Part II

My Woes with Maven 2 don't seem to stop. Today I downloaded ServiceMix 3.1.2 and tried to build it from the source. Well, after Maven started to build it finally aborted with a strange error inside the ServiceMix Script component:

[INFO] Trace
java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError: edu/emory/mathcs/backport/java/util/concurrent/atomic/AtomicBoolean
at java.lang.Class.getDeclaredConstructors0(Native Method)
at java.lang.Class.privateGetDeclaredConstructors(Class.java:2328)
at java.lang.Class.getConstructors(Class.java:1446)
at com.thoughtworks keep on reading here

Posted by schaefera at 5:12 PM in Annoying

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Monday, 15 October 2007

How to Morph from a Apple Hater to a Mac Addict

Since James Duncan Davidson started to show off his Mac at the No-Fluff-Just-Stuff tour I was a hard-core Apple Hater. It always annoyed me that Apple had this "we are better than you" image and though that they invented Windows. Well, time has gone by and one day I started my own company where time is money and wasted time also means wasted money. Looking from this angle the price of a Mac is not that high anymore. Looking back buying a MacBook Pro laptop maybe was the best investment I made for my own company and just working for a brief time on a Windows box makes me shiver.

Now keep on reading here

Posted by schaefera at 3:34 PM in Mac

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Friday, 5 October 2007

Ohh, for Christ's Sake -- F*** Maven 2

As most of you already know I don't like Maven2 / Maven 2 but the more I have to use it the more I hate it. It is 10:45pm I tried to compile the JBoss Deployer for ServiceMix. Because I ran into issues with incompatible classes I wanted to upgrade the deployer to the latest ServiceMix and my current JBoss version 4.0.5.GA. The freaking POM is not that long but I was unable to compile because of missing dependencies and plugins.

I realized that ServiceMix matured away from an incubating project so I updated the repository and version numbers appropriately. But then the problems star keep on reading here

Posted by schaefera at 11:06 PM in Annoying

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Tuesday, 2 October 2007

In any God We Trust all other do Code Reviews

In my current project I learned once more that if a project looks suspicious and developers start to stall that it is probably failing. This time I realized that after the developer responsible left and contrary to his affirmation that it works the project did not even build but even after that was fixed the test failed indicating that the implementation is faulty as well.

The biggest problem for our team was that there was no real project lead and so we were left in a power vacuum which is especially bad when the team is only consultants. If I had started to take over the project keep on reading here

Posted by schaefera at 8:03 PM in Madplanet.com Inc.

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