Aaron Douglas

apple

Installing MySQL 5.5.8 on Mac OS X Snow Leopard

Installing MySQL should be a no brainer on any operating system, especially with how mature of a product it is.  Apparently that assumption is incorrect.  I tried installing the most recent GA release of MySQL on my new Snow Leopard machine, and found I couldn't start the blasted

hibernate

Flush THIS Hibernate!

I've been working with Hibernate 3.3.2 and Hibernate Search 3.1 for the past few months.  We finally got to a point in our project where we are sucking in mass amounts of data into our application from a large business application via JMS.  Suddenly, I&

eclipse

Eclipse & Properties Files / ResourceBundles Editor

The current project I'm on is pretty heavy into internationalization aka i18n.  I found a pretty decent resource bundle editor for Eclipse that makes creating synchronized files across all languages much simpler. http://sourceforge.net/projects/eclipse-rbe It installs in a snap and provides a simple, yet powerful,

hacks

Mac Screen Sharing (VNC) & White Screen

I've had problems connecting to my Ubuntu 9.10 server via Mac OS' built-in VNC client, "Screen Sharing".  Frequently when I connect, I get a white screen with no indication that the connection is working.  If I type characters or click the mouse, it does

ehcache

Spring 3.0 + Hibernate 3.3.2 + JBoss Cache 2 + JTA = Fail

I've spent the past two days trying to get a distributed secondary Hibernate cache working with a Spring 3 application.  The application is web-based running on JBoss 5.1 so I figured the best approach would be to use JBoss Cache, since it's automatically configured and

apple

iPhone Migraine Diary

I may have mentioned it before, but I created a Migraine Diary application for the iPhone as my master's captone/thesis project.  The school year finished out for me and I submitted the application to Apple on the 29th.  Two days - TWO DAYS - later they approved

xcode

Xcode WTF are you doing?!

I didn't start developing in Xcode "for real" until this year but I've played around with Xcode for a number of years.  Over that time, I've screwed around with settings and changed defaults.  It got to the point where following screen shot

Google

Google Voice voicemail for your cell

Google just announced today (or yesterday?) that you can now have Google Voice's voicemail replace your cell phone's voicemail. http://googlevoiceblog.blogspot.com/2009/10/google-voice-with-your-existing-number.html What this means is you can now have all of your voicemails handled by one service provider.  This feature

xcode

Xcode 3.2.1

Xcode 3.2.1 was released today and is available for download with iPhone SDK 3.1.2.  This release is mainly a bug fix release and I've confirmed it does fix the Unit Testing issue I reported earlier.

iphone

Xcode & Snow Leopard - Logical unit tests hanging

I haven't written unit tests before in Xcode.  I started to read Apple's article on unit testing with iPhone development because I wanted to follow sound development principles with an agile approach.  Not long into the guide, I got stuck.  Literally.  Using Xcode 3.2 on

project management

Software Project Management Plan Template

I'm currently using Scrum in my school capstone project.  The advisor, however, designed the deliverables around the Unified Process and still expects some things like a Software Project Management Plan (SPMP).  While it's a little late in the game, I've decided to fill one

apple

Xcode SCM & build directory

Xcode has a build directory inside of your project, which you shouldn't be including in your source code management repository.  Simply said, those files change so much and are "discardable".  There is no way to easily exclude this directory from your repository.  The accepted way to

ethics

Stealing Music

I admit, back in the day I stole a lot of music with peer to peer sharing programs like Napster and WinMX.  I stopped after I realized that most times the MP3s I was getting were subpar and the metadata associated with them was crap.  I spent more time fixing

google voice

Two Weeks with Google Voice

I finally got my Google Voice fka GrandCentral invite last week.  I have to admit, I got really giddy like a kid getting candy when I saw the invite come through e-mail.  So, I signed up, put my phone numbers in and have had two weeks to try it out.

apple

Thoughts on the iPhone 3GS

Everyone is giving their two cents about the iPhone 3GS.  I'm excited to see that Apple is releasing a faster phone that still feels like the first generation iPhone.  Developers are used to a specific screen size for instance.  Drastically changing the environment will create the discord other

howto

Loading a UIImage from a bundle

I've been scratching my freaking head for an hour trying to figure out how to load an image from my application's bundle.  Doing this in Interface Builder is easy as pie, but not so straightforward. [UIImage imageWithContentsOfFile:[[NSBundle mainBundle] pathForResource:@"thefilename" ofType:@"jpg&

App Engine

Google App Engine & Java

So I've spent a few days going over Google App Engine for Java.  So far, I have to say, I'm impressed.  Google has created a really cool service that lets anyone write a Java web application and host it on their multitude of servers.  This is

.net

Microsoft WCF Web Services & Java

I spent a good 50+ hours on trying to consume a Microsoft WCF secure web service with a Java solution.  I tried Spring Web Services, Axis2, and looked at Metro/Tango and decided Axis2 was the "easiest" solution.  The web service I'm connecting to implements WS-Security,

social networking

When YOU are on the Internet

I've never been one to give a shit about what of "me" is online.  I have blog(s), am on Twitter and many other social networking services.  Up until now, I've pretty much said my mind and didn't care about the audience.

afp

Getting Macs to play with Ubuntu

I'm a fan of Unix operating systems in general.  That's what got me interested in switching to Mac OS X because it's Unix-based.  It was inevitable that I would eventually get a server-class machine again that wasn't Mac-based.  The new Dell machine

Top 25 Most Dangerous Programming Errors

The SANS Institute released a report on the top 25 most dangerous programming errors in the industry on January 12th, 2009.  Items such as SQL injection, Cross-Site-Scripting problems and input validation top the list.  The issue brought up isn't necessarily the errors themselves but rather the education of

JUnit

An idea for a college course :: Unit Testing

After spending a significant amount of time this week on writing JUnit tests for a Spring Web app, I've come to a conclusion.  College courses, even in the grad classes I am taking don't spend enough time on the concepts behind unit tests.  Granted JUnit and

JUnit

JUnit Testing

I'd like to point out that writing JUnit tests after the fact is a pain in the ass.  I like to think I know enough about software engineering to develop software that has high cohesion and limited coupling.  Not following test-driven development allows me to forget some of

spring framework

Springs of a Different Color

So I spent most of the past few months learning the bleeding edge of the Spring Framework, 2.5.x.  The training I went to covered this version, the books I had covered the same.  My first assignment?  Using Spring 2.0 and Web Flow 1.  Talk about crushed.  Now

domain driven design

Domain-Driven Design

In my Thursday night graduate class, Enterprise Data Modeling, we're working through Eric Evans' book, Domain-Drive Design.  The book is taking us through the concept of designing an application based on the domain, or business use, rather than through UML and directly with objects.  So far, it&