All this to realize that Maven is already installed on my Mac by default. It is version 2.2.0 and not the latest 2.2.1 but for the book I am reading this is perfect.

A little bit of testing before starting to do all sort of crazy things would have simplified my life.

I installed the m2eclipse plugin in my Eclipse so I can get ready to see how it simplifies my life by not having to write the pom.xml.
http://m2eclipse.sonatype.org/installing-m2eclipse.html

After reverting everything back to synergy I am back to a productive environment.

Five tips for starting a programming career
http://blogs.techrepublic.com.com/programming-and-development/?p=2231&tag=nl.e055

The tip to work on more projects and getting involved with an existing project are ones I will put in practice in the coming days. I am expecting that it will make life a bit harder but I am certainly ready to learn a lot from this.

I had to setup a forwarding DNS servers today and since I had never done it before I was looking for a quick way.

I installed the bind rpm package that comes with RHEL5 and was puzzled since it did not create the /etc/named.conf. So I created one with this content:

options {
directory “/var/named”;
forwarders {10.1.1.1; 10.1.1.2;};
forward only;
};

After reading a few different posts in forums I tested the idea to use the synaptic package manager. The installation worked much better.

To finalize the install I ran a few commands at the cli:

sudo update-java-alternatives -l

This listed the fact that I now have the OpenJDK and Sun Java installed on my workstation.

sudo update-alternatives –config java

This allowed me to specify to use the Sun Java as my default JVM.

java -version

This now reports the Sun Java JRE as my JVM.

I can now use Maven to compile some test projects.

I guess there are still a few issues with the OpenJDK to be fully compatible (might just be some configuration that I am not aware of).

Magical number to it so more motivation to create and learn, or so I hope. It is easy to have grand plan for the new year since it is a new start. Everyone loves a new start.

I certainly hope to create more with new technologies that are out there and report more on them here than I have done before.

I should commit to numbers so I can measure my success but that is always a scary idea. It means you have the potential to fail and everyone prefer success stories.

Groovy, Scala, AJAX, more web app coding… There is plenty to learn more about.

http://www.javapassion.com/j2ee/

I decided to register and we will see if I can follow it all the way through. Certainly looks like the course material is quite exhaustive so I should certainly learn a few things from this.

We do queries to country.netop.org to quickly know which country an IP is from. I am not sure of all the details but it seems quite simple to use. The only catch is that netop.org mentions that they have a single server answering the queries and that it can’t take big loads.

So why do we depend on it?

Someone decided that it was simpler to use this service to add the requested feature. It was probably not highlighted in the dependencies of the system or someone did not understand the full value of the dependencies.

I am not blaming anyone because I am ready to bet that we have many more dependencies like that, some that I have put in place, that we can’t fully value until an outage hits us.

The ITIL CMDB is a useful idea to try to catch these but it is one thing to know a system to help identify these dependencies and an other to make it work in real life.

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.