Had the fantastic Christmas Eve 'Feast of the Seven Fish' (a Roman Catholic/Italian tradition). Its a meal I wait for every year.

And 4 is the best age so far. Jenna was old enough to open presents, but Joey had the:
*gasp* SCREAM OUT THE NAME OF THE PRESENT I JUST GOT, then say how happy I am with it.

Actually it got pretty annoying after about the 5th present, and he got a lot of little presents, so it was a looong morning ;)

Anywho, just wanted to wish everyone a Merry Christmas...

The project I'm architecting is using EJB3 with Hibernate3 and spring2. Been loads of fun, as I was permitted to use Java5[1], so I'm annotating the crap out of stuff (Adding "@Transactional" above a method with all the params instead of in the app-context.xml is not only convient, but makes for easier reading of code!).
Today I needed an interceptor, but you can't have an annotated driven transaction manager with interceptors, so I had to do a quick AOP learning session, and made a pointcut and advisor to do my dirty work.
The interceptor will intercept any service call and catches the hibernate exceptions, wrapping them into a nice version of the exception. Unfortunately, due to all the if-then-else, I'm tempted to make a visitor pattern, but it'll be a pain in the rear to have to imp each type of exception visit for every service.... I'll have to figure out a better way...
Anyway, the whole aspect thang I can see as extremely powerful. Being able to register in interceptors to deal with the before and after happenings of methods. But I also can see a lot of developers seriously shooting themselves in the foot with that type of behavior. Anyone else done any type of AOP?


[1]: As for the other features of 5 that I've used? Generics are essential and make life so easy. For-each loops, though, I've not had much success with. There are too many times you want to check a 'iterator.hasNext()' which isn't available with for-each loops...

This may be a bit of a biased opinion (I'm a nintendo fanboy) and not fair competition, but its what I experienced....

I went to a gaming night at my old consulting firm. We had a cube, a Wii, and 2 XBox 360s.
The cube I spent some time on, since its what I'm familiar with, and I can play it well.
From there, I went to the Wii (4 players!)... played some bowling and some tennis (Wii Sports). I thought it was fun, even ended up with a touch of sweat on my head.

Then I moved to the room with the xboxs... they got them networked and were playing 2 against 2 in gears of war, both on projectors in HD.
All I can say is WOW! And I do mean WOW! Extremely impressive graphics, a little extra gory, and fun to play online against others. I spent the rest of my night there. We eventually played 4 player basketball which also had extremely nice graphics.
I'm guessing I have these feelings cause all I got to play was Wii sports, which wasn't that impressive of a game, more like a demo of the wiimote, but still, I had the most fun with the XBox 360s...

Hey folks, been a while.

Been pretty busy with work, and all that.

Anyway, the wife and I are moving.

I was hoping some of you out there have experience moving long distances (state to state)...if so, care to share some wisdom?

Thanks.

I'm a supporter of open source (I even use it at work), and a supporter of linux, as its what runs my server.... But I've come to a point in my computing life...

I have played most of my games multiple times, and won't be buying any new ones anytime soon....
With development and standard 'day-to-day' things (web browsing, etc...) I am much more productive in a Linux environment....
So the question is, do I make my machine a Linux desktop or not?

I've used Linux as a server and always a backup machine... never for my main machine (cause I've always been a hardcore gamer in the past). Another question I have is what about portability? iTunes doesn't work for linux, yet, so what do you people use to sync up your podcasts?
Maybe I should just get another harddrive and dual boot? Any decent windows emulator to just do everything in linux with? Try to help someone familiar with linux in the server environment get adjusted to linux in the desktop environment....

For the record, my distro of choice is SuSE, though I'm leaning towards trying ubuntu...

Its an espn radio podcast called '1st and 15'. My question was chosen as one to ask Jeremy Green for tomorrows episode. I'll be taking the call at 9:15am tomorrow morning, and it'll be available later that day. So keep an ear out for it tomorrow.

Put your viking helmet on!
Spread the mayonaise on the lawn!
Don't ya know its ....


Yeah, that's Weird Al, and its from his new CD that totally KICKS ASS. How do I know? Even my wife (the anti-geek) loooves it (the 'Pancreas' song sold her. She even wants me to make a ringtone with it for her cell phone).

1. What is your occupation?
Software Engineer/Architect
2. What color are your socks right now?
None
3. What are you listening to right now?
MadTV (the Colbert Report just ended)
4. What was the last thing that you ate?
IHOP, which is probably why I'm at home trying to take my mind off my gut...
5. Can you drive a stick shift?
Yup
6. If you were a crayon, what color would you be?
Don't care
7. Last person you spoke to on the phone?
My boss (calling in sick)
8. Do you like the person who sent this to you?
Ethelred? Of course, as I plan on having a small piece of the universe to own once he rules...
9. How old are you today?
30
10. Favorite drinks?
Dunkin Donuts Decaf with cream (heavy cream, not milk, not half and half)
11. What is your favorite sport to watch?
NFL football
12. Have you ever dyed your hair?
Nope, and there is little left to dye.
13. Pets?
One dog Alex (half German Shepard, half stupid dog), and two kids. 14. Favorite food?
Lately its been "Quaker Steak and Lube" wings, but I'm always up for any type of hot, garlic wings.
15. What was the last movie you watched?
Casino Royale (which kicks ass, kids, no joke)
16. Favorite holiday?
Christmas?
17. What do you do to vent anger?
Kill people........ online
18. What were your favorite toys as a kid?
Transformers
19. What is your favorite: fall or spring?
Fall, when everything is dying (part of George Carlin's 'football' routine)
20. Hugs or kisses?
sure
21. Cherry or blueberry?
blueberry
22. Do you want your friends to send this back?
Probably won't read that many more... meme's die quickly with me
23. Who is the most likely to respond?
No idea
24. Who is least likely to respond?
Probably someone who hasn't even seen it
25. Living arrangements?
Wife, two kids, and a dog in a house
26. When was the last time you cried?
No idea... probably when my son was born.
27. What is on the floor of your closet?
I don't have a closet (live in the finished basement... next remodeling project will be a closet, though ;)
28. Who is the friend you have had the longest that you're sending this to?
this isn't an email, but on the list of users, I've known glh since highschool
29. What did you do last night?
I have a stomach bug, and I'll be happy to go into detail if you'd like....

Stolen from Fark.... check this out! Watch it to the end. Fa-reeeeky, eh? This was made a good 5-10 years ago, right?

As embarassing as this is to say, I, a web developer, don't know CSS. Any good books to learn this quickly? I know the high level concepts, just not how to put them into practice. I usually work on back-end systems (spring/hibernate/daos/business logic/etc...), which is why I never even attempted to learn it. Its not a requirement for me to learn it, but I think I've ignored it long enough...

Oh, and in Java 1.5, I'm using enums to their full potential. Great little things, those enums. Can have their own methods, implement interfaces, and even have constructors! I even use a visitor pattern in the enum to seperate some sql building from the enum logic...

I am a big Bond fan. Seen them all multiple times, know the trivia, etc... Sean Connery is the best Bond, followed by Pierce Brosnan. When Daniel Craig was selected as Bond, I hated the idea... Clive Owens was meant for the role. I even considered not going to show my displeasure...
Well, my inlaws were in town and watching the kids, we wanted to see a movie, and I was outvoted. We saw Casino Royale.
Having said all of that, I was going in to hate it and hoped to maybe be surprised and it wasn't terrible.

While I STILL think Clive Owens would make for a great Bond, Casino Royale is easily one of the best Bonds ever! Yeah, I said it... one of the best. Right up there with Goldfinger.

While there was a lot of action, there was a ton of character development. This movie was really a big character development. It is the first story of Bond, and even starts BEFORE Bond is a 00 agent. They wanted to change things around, so you won't see Q (or R), no martini's are ordered shaken and not stirred (in fact, he orders his martini exactly how Ian Fleming wrote it in the book), and the comic relief is few and far between. Even without all of the traditions, its one of the best Bonds. Even if you don't like Bond, this is a great movie, if you have only seen a few, you will understand all the subtleties. Really a quality movie, IMHO...

While I'm working from home today, the heater guy comes in to clean the heater. I have them come in every spring and every fall to clean the heater/ac/water heater...

It should be noted that I just replaced my roof a few weeks ago and replaced my water heater last week...
So I find out there is a crack in the heat exchanger. That brings carbon monoxide into the house and spreads it around. My daughter puked last night, and I can't help but think this could be a reason (or at least a factor).
So I have to replace my furnace. So much for having a Wii anytime in the next year.... My bonus next year should handle the roof, but it'll take another year bonus to handle the furnace. When it rains it pours, eh?

Yeah, I watched the big game, but it was nice to see my alma mater play on ESPN during primetime... ALMOST over, and THEY PULL THE UPSET! Heard about the possibility of Rutgers playing in the BCS championship? IT AIN'T HAPPENING!

Yeah, a football fan went to a basketball college (I went to UC instead of OSU... better engineering program).

Ugh, I just spent hours of research to find something. I know this only pertains to <5 people that read this, but I wanted it to be available to the rest of the net in case someone else has the same issue:
If you are using a 'like' clause in hql (I use spring's hibernate template), this is wrong:

getHibernateTemplate().find("from Upc upc where upc.upcNumber like '?%'", new Object[]{param});

HQL doesn't like the look of %'s in its queries... so you have to change it to:

getHibernateTemplate().find("from Upc upc where upc.upcNumber like ?", new Object[]{param + "%"});

The error message I got was out in left field:

IndexOutOfBoundsException: Remember that ordinal parameters are 1-based

REALLLL helpful, there.... sheesh...

In my new job, I have to review consultant resumes.
As I've mentioned before, we use the powerhouse three in the java world:
Struts
Spring
Hibernate

As I page through these resumes, I see quite a bit of struts, and that's it. Those with spring/hibernate experience are powerhouse architects (probably too expensive).

So if someone has WORK EXPERIENCE in spring and/or hibernate, they are getting an interview. Its that simple.
Blathering idiot? But you used spring at your last job? Come on in!

And for god sakes, don't make up design patterns then put them on your resume (or say that a core GoF pattern is a J2EE pattern)... if I interview you, I will embarass you in front of the other interviewers. What you put on your resume you should be able to talk with me about, in depth, and I will ask lots of questions ranging from what I expect a correct answer to architect type questions that have no right answers.

But, seriously, just having java experience for 20 years doesn't fly... someone with 3-5 years experience with those new techs will get you a great job with great pay (at least in this area). So for you aspiring Java developers (here's looking at you Sam), consider learning those techs when you feel ready for them... or consider switching to using them in your current job:
Struts is a front end web api, spring is a transaction/middle tier api, hibernate is an object/relational mapper (DAO/DB interaction). Hibernate is a stiff learning curve, but you can learn it very quickly. Struts takes time and maybe some guidance. Spring is, by far, the most complex, but when you learn how to use it to its full potential, you will be heavily coveted.

Update: Oh, and don't put you have 'spring experience' at the top of your resume, then not have it in any of your work experience of hobbies. You have spring experience? Where? How?