Sunday, 15 June 2008

Announcement: j-community.org launched

After a long time thinking on how to build a stronger Java Community in Los Angeles I started the new LA Java Community website. It is a social networking site for Java (and all Java related technologies) developers in Los Angeles (but , of course, also from outsiders are welcomed). It should bridge the gap between the JUGs in LA and the broad and widely scattered Java developers community. All of the JUGs in LA, as far as I know, have less than 100 attendees per meeting which is only a little slice with respect to the thousands and thousands of Java developers. With the high gas prices this will not change in the near future.

Every Java developer registering at:

http://j-community.org

can have their own public and community private web site, own blog, add or change content on the community websites. The only rules are to show basic etiquette and no commercial exploitation. Other than that the sky is the limit, well, as much as my server can take for now.

Consider this an invitation to join and to become a member which is free with no strings attached.

Have fun and see you there soon - Andy

keep on reading here

Posted by schaefera at 9:22 PM in Community

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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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Wednesday, 2 May 2007

LA-JUG Meeting at JavaOne

On the May's LA-JUG meeting it turned out that a few of us are going to JavaOne this year and so Matt and I was talking about setting up a meeting of LA-JUG Members. So in order to coordinate that a little bit Matt suggested that we could use Blog comments to get a discussion going. So far Matt suggested that we would meet on Wednesday (5/09) right before the JUG-Leaders BOF session.

I will update this entry about the current consent on where and when we are going to meet.

I hope to see you there - Andy

BTW due to blog spam I was forced to add comment monitoring so keep on reading here

Posted by schaefera at 10:25 AM in Community

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Tuesday, 12 December 2006

(Review) LA-JUG Meeting December 2006

This month the presentation was from Blu-Ray Disc which is more or less a high-definition (HD) format from Panasonic which is also going to produce players. Although the technology is impressing the presentation was boring, had little to do with Java and was given with so little passion that I started to work instead. The bottom line of the presentation was more to show off their product and to attract Java developers than to emerge the audience into the technology.

For sure the entertainment industry does not have the wished and desires of the customers in mind when they are devel keep on reading here

Posted by schaefera at 3:39 PM in Community

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Monday, 11 December 2006

Update Presentation @ Unix User Group in Irvine

Tomorrow, Monday, 11th of December 2006,. I will give a speech about MythTV. This presentation focuses more on how to get MythTV up and running that actually how to use it. The later is easier to figure out but to get that beast installed and configured is a time consuming and sometimes frustrating endeavor. If you cannot attend I will make the presentation available on my own website a few days after the presentation. You can find it on the madplanet.com website. If you want to join here is the link to the user group: keep on reading here

Posted by schaefera at 12:14 AM in Community

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Friday, 24 November 2006

Another WTF Experience: Maven 1.0 XDoclet Plugin broken with JBoss

In Boston I wanted to create a simple test to see how JBoss clustering behaves and to make sure that what I say is correct and not just a guess. In order to speed up the process I started to create a simple Maven project using the XDoclet plugin. A few hours later I had to abandon the endeavor and seek refugee in the good old Ant build system. Now being back in LA having some time left through the Thanksgiving weekend I wanted to drill down to the bottom of this mystery. Again a few hours later I finally could nail down the problem to actually find a solution on the Intern keep on reading here

Posted by schaefera at 11:47 PM in Community

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Friday, 10 November 2006

(Review) LA-JUG Meeting November 2006

The November meeting at the LA-JUG was about Apache's Geronimo project which is another open-source J2EE application server. The presenter Jeff Genender did a great presentation and I made sure that it did not become a JBoss bashing even though I have to admit that Geronimo has improved quite a lot and seems to be more mature than JBoss if one counts out EJB3 and Clustering support. At least it made me download and install Geronimo to check it out the details to see if they perform as promised.

The presentation was excellent until Jeff showed some benchmarks between Geronimo and J keep on reading here

Posted by schaefera at 10:48 PM in Community

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Wednesday, 13 September 2006

(Review) LA-JUG Meeting September 2006

The September meeting of the LA-JUG was another great one. Joshua Marinacci and Richard Bair were giving a presentation about Java Desktop User Interface Development or short about Swing. I was working with Swing on and off, the latest on the open-source project jPodder, and all the time I did not love the basic UI. Especially jPodder showed too much data and on the other hand it is butt ugly to look at. Podcasting clients are not really rocket science and so its UI could look simple but sexy. The first dem keep on reading here

Posted by schaefera at 1:22 PM in Community

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Wednesday, 2 August 2006

(Review) LA-JUG Meeting August 2006

Rod Coffin from Valtech gave an interesting comparison between Spring and EJB3. Even tough I have some in-depth knowledge about both technologies it was were informative and Rod excellent speaking skills made it a breeze to listen too. After discussing the goals and starting points of the two technologies he asked the audience to choose which parts he should discuss. In the second part he then tried to compare the two technologies and give an assessment which has the better support for it. To no surprise both technologies have their strengths and so if you were looking for help on deciding keep on reading here

Posted by schaefera at 12:52 PM in Community

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Thursday, 13 July 2006

(Review) LA-JUG Meeting July 2006

This month Jim White, a regular attendant of the LA JUG, gave a presentation about his project the Internet Foundation Classes eXtreme. Because I am a critic of the putting everything on the web approach I am also critical about his project. His presentation was great when Jim introduced us to the past of Software development and that there were only a few really new inventions in the past 50 years. In my view software engineering is most a repackaging business rather than a fertile ground for innovations. Eve keep on reading here

Posted by schaefera at 2:32 PM in Community

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Tuesday, 27 June 2006

Open-Source Entertainment ?

Today I found some time to relax and enjoy a new show of the original Star Trek. Yes, you read correctly: a new episode. A bunch of Star Trek fans decided to pick off where the original left off. So far they produced a feature length pilot and one regular episode. Even though the props seems to look somewhat outdated it is nice to see that they did not fall in the trap of the Enterprise series where the ship looked more modern than the Enterprise of Captain Kirk even though they were supposed to be the precursor of it. It is also a proof of what a few and motivated people can do eve keep on reading here

Posted by schaefera at 12:01 AM in Community

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Saturday, 24 June 2006

Code Camp San Diego 2006: MythTV was a success

I just finished my last presentation on this year's Code Camp in San Diego with a talk about MythTV. This presentation was the one with the biggest audience and it was nice to talk about something outside of Java and J2EE. If I give this presentation again I need to have a better live demo meaning I need to dump MySQL data into my demo DB as well as copy over some of the movies to make it more like a live experience. Later I also need to see if I can give this presentation on a Linux user group near by. At least the weather here in San Diego was much cooler than back in LA and so I enjoyed keep on reading here

Posted by schaefera at 11:52 PM in Community

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Wednesday, 21 June 2006

Code Camp is Here: Saturday, June 24th and it is FREE

This Saturday, 24th, I will speak at the SoCal Code Camp in San Diego, actually La Jolla. Check this website for directions and the schedule. I will speak from 9 o'clock in the morning through until 4 o'clock in the evening. By the way in case you did not notice this event is free, FREE and did I say Free including the Geek diner on Saturday night. Just register and come down to get your head filled with a ton of knowledge.

See you there - Andy

Posted by schaefera at 3:06 PM in Community

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Wednesday, 7 June 2006

(Review) LA-JUG Meeting June 2006

This month's session was not about Java or IT technology but about how to find a job in IT. Kay Kennedy shared with us some of the secrets of her trade and how recruiters work and how companies move through the process of hiring a software engineer. Even though some of the tips I have already heard in my career it was still good to be reminded of them just because it is so easy to forget them. Of course if you wanted to get a few more tips then you needed to go ti the get-together after the presentation at the near Chilli's. The presentation was fun to listen to and it spawned many discuss keep on reading here

Posted by schaefera at 3:47 PM in Community

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Tuesday, 30 May 2006

Jar Tools, Blojsom and Subversion

The memorial day weekend finally gave me the chance to work on some private projects again. After more than 1 year I managed to adjust a few simple tools to deal with JAR files so that I could add them to my own subversion repository and add some jUnit tests. Then I tested and released the 0.2 release of the Hit Counter plugin for blojsom which fixes some bugs and provide the possibility to create a histogram image for any type of flavors. Both gave me the chance to test and use my subversion repository and got a chance to use it from Tortoise SVN as well as from my IDEA IDE. Beside keep on reading here

Posted by schaefera at 11:33 PM in Community

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