Exception in thread “main” java.lang.UnsupportedClassVersionError: Bad version number in .class file
at java.lang.ClassLoader.defineClass1(Native Method)
at java.lang.ClassLoader.defineClass(ClassLoader.java:620)
at java.security.SecureClassLoader.defineClass(SecureClassLoader.java:124)
at java.net.URLClassLoader.defineClass(URLClassLoader.java:260)
at java.net.URLClassLoader.access$100(URLClassLoader.java:56)
at java.net.URLClassLoader$1.run(URLClassLoader.java:195)
at java.security.AccessController.doPrivileged(Native Method)
at java.net.URLClassLoader.findClass(URLClassLoader.java:188)
at java.lang.ClassLoader.loadClass(ClassLoader.java:306)
at sun.misc.Launcher$AppClassLoader.loadClass(Launcher.java:268)
at java.lang.ClassLoader.loadClass(ClassLoader.java:251)
at java.lang.ClassLoader.loadClassInternal(ClassLoader.java:319)

So I have this application that accepts syslog messages and process them to generate daily stats.

The glitch with the current way the code works is that it has hard coded separator for the messages. Just one hard coded separator. It may have worked somewhat fine for a period of time but since I have been monitoring the situation I can say that it is dropping quite a few messages every day because of that limitation.

While looking at the code to determine the scope of the change I was getting less enthusiastic to address the issue as I was discovering more and more places with the hard coded value.

I put that aside and found something more fun to do for a few moments.

Then I started to get motivated by laziness…

So the current idea is to parse the syslog messages that it gets and replace the different seperator by the one that is hard coded. This requires the least amount of energy to get it fixed. What I am not sure is how much technical debt am I accumulating with this idea.

Does this raw power at pennies make the programmers less efficient? Lazy?

Does it matter?

I will answer yes to both questions. I think that it makes programmers lazy because you don’t have to face the consequences of your laziness. What does it matter that it takes 10% more time because you did not optimize every line? 50%? 90% when the cost is a couple of dollars a day?

Yes it does matter. I inherited an application that the previous programmer did a very good job at putting up and maintaining while he was with us. Now that I took over I have a hard time seeing all the moving parts but as I have to fix and change things I can see wholes in certain places. Lately I have found the code that produces the last 6 months quick view of performance. It goes through the last 6 months of data and does a daily average. Every day. So the code needs the last 6 months of data to be present on the server to go through it over and over to produce a single file that has a 2 lines difference from the previous day. I takes 4 to 5 hours each day. Can it get any funnier? The management answer to this issue was to throw more disk space at the issue since the batch processing is done at night and does not impact the system. Hard disks are cheap.

Imagine this application in the cloud and management asks for a 12 months history view. Everyone would have said no problem we need to provision an other 300 to 400 Gb of space and change 1 configuration file. The cost is minimal.

I personally want to address it in the code and get this optimized. Do you think I am getting any time dedicated to this issue? I am too costly for that option to make sense.

Because I am on physical hardware in our own data center it does matter and it will get addressed by fixing the application. We are restricted since we can’t had any drive to the server. If this application was in the cloud it would not get any attention?

I can see both sides of the coin and the reasons for the business to make the choice it would but I still think that fixing the application is what need to be done. The technical debt that this has cannot simply be ignored.

I have this application that was done a year ago and I guess that in the rush to get it to production I forgot to import the code in SVN.

A year later we have changed a few things and now I have to change a few lines in the code and add a method to it.

I remembered using a command line tool under Linux to decompile but since I could not remember the name of it I had to search for it. In the first few results of my google search for “java decompiler” came this site:

http://java.decompiler.free.fr/

I tried to install the JD-Eclipse but I don’t see how to use it so I simply downloaded and used the JD-Gui for Linux and it works beautifully. I can see my source code in the .class file in 2 seconds and now I can easily change it. This is so convenient.

http://codemonkeyism.com/generation-java-programming-style/

Interesting and if I do any code with this I will post an other entry to let you know how it went.

http://java.sun.com/developer/technicalArticles/javase/mvc/

This explains a few things that should be done differently if you want your application to perform well. Very interesting!

[bash]$ python
>>> from datetime import datetime
>>> from datetime import timedelta
>>> datetime(2009,2,9,10,48) – timedelta(seconds=159565)
datetime.datetime(2009, 2, 7, 14, 28, 35)

The datetime object is initialized with the date I want. In this case it was February 9, 2009 at 10:48. The timedelta object is initialized with a number of seconds but it could be days or min.

Very quick and convenient.

http://www.poromenos.org/tutorials/python/

There are quite a few things that I will need to test to fully understand.

As a small time programmer I am always looking for ways to improve the code that I do and I also look at ways to improve myself as a programmer. Code kata is certainly a generic approach at these goals that is worth reading about.

Not everything they propose I will be able to try right away. It all depends on your environment.

It is more than just practicing at solving specific coding puzzle. It is about learning the tools that you use, communicating with the people that are around you, reading code that others do and try to maintain it, getting code reviews and much more.

I have to sit down and write what I will do to improve my programming ways. What I think easily make sense and that I can do rapidly:

1. read about new features in Eclipse
2. read about codig algorithm in Java
3. learn Python
4. I have to ask a programmer at work to review some of my code

If I can get those done in the next month I will see some improvement for sure.