spring - hibernate - ejb3

I am looking for work since my contract at Object Consulting in Sydney is up in two weeks. There are some interesting jobs out there but very few. Australia, it seems, has been hit by the global crisis pretty hard. Given the current situation I am slowly giving up on finding myself something in the Mobile area and there are very few jobs for Swing/GUI developers as well.
So, as usual, we're left with crappy jobs for insurance companies and banks, chasing around and persisting the oh-so-important transactional business data. How exciting. But man's gotta do what man's gotta do. Looking at the market, EJB3 (with which I have some experience) is losing to Spring (in employer demand at least) and/or Hibernate. Pressed by reality I've decided to start with Spring and I've gone through a few tutorials. So far I am not too happy with the fact that Spring functionality seems to be configured by XML - I love XML for passing data around but pretty much hate it for everything else. Hopefully as I dig in deeper I'll find that EVERYTHING can be done through annotations :)

Talibanistan

It is not everyday that a country is born, but here is a new one that I have discovered only recently.
So it is with great pleasure that I welcome all the players from the new country of Talibanistan who play Cotopia games into our community. It is with hope that we can bring relaxation into their otherwise strictly disciplined lives.

Project Darkstar 0.9.8 incompatible changes a pain in the butt

Some time ago I've created a Netbeans plugin for project Darkstar. I've had good fun writing it and for the most part even maintaining it. The trouble with writing a pluging that depends on a piece of software with version number like 0.x.x is that it's external interface (the way it is started/stopped etc.) is bound to change often and sometimes quite drastically :)
There have been some minor changes in the past but mostly I was able to deal with them inside a few hours, this time however, I got blown away. Darkstar version 0.9.8 completely changes the way the server is started and stopped as well as the way applications are deployed. It has changed the internal directory structure so that version 0.9.8 is no longer even recognized by my plugin (just as well since none of the other functionality would work anyway).
Despite the fact that I will have to rethink the whole plugin UI and internal workings I am very excited about this development because it is definitely for the better. It is now easier for anyone to work with Darkstar even from command line, and the fact that application.properties file is now included inside the application JAR, rather then a separate file, means everything makes more sense and will fit better with the NetBeans way of doing things. It is good to see that Project Darkstar is moving forward in the right direction. It makes me feel that my decision to support it and invest my time was the right one.
I already have some ideas as to how I will approach the new UI which should make the NetBeans plugin more useful and powerful.

Good work Scott Sigler

I love books, but I find it easier to have someone read to me than to read myself :)
I have been following the work of Scott Sigler for a while now, his Earthcore novel was the first podio book I've listened to and it turned me onto some pretty good stuff, but I've blogged about this a bit in the past.
The reason I am mentioning Scott Sigler is that, to me at least, he is quite an inspiration. He's been an aspiring writer for many years but had bad luck getting published. After being reduced to (and I quote here) "giving ****jobs for food stamps" he's figured out how the Internet can help in promoting his work. Some years later now Scott has given out a number of very entertaining books in the audio format for free and is aiming for the NYT best seller list with his latest published book Contagious.
If you like a fun light book that will entertain give Scott a listen/read.

iPhone development

Tom has been saying that we should have iPhone versions of our games to attract more crowd. I have been reluctant to take this on board since I have no clue about iPhone development. Today I got curious however, and so I downloaded the iPhone SDK (1.6GB btw, wtf??). The sheer size of the SDK was one shock and Objective-C was another shock. Are they serious? I would have to learn not just an API but a whole obscure language to throw an app together. If it was a language or a framework that I could reuse elsewhere (eg. Flash) I may give it a shot, but not this.

I am sorry to say but at this point it seems like too much of an investment. So as far as I can tell, there will be no iPhone support for some time to come. The Google phone on the other hand is a different story.

Can you smell it?

Cotopia Go is so close that I can :)

Book review - Anathem by Neal Stephenson

Unlike the book it self - I'll make this short.

The book basically sucks and I was very disappointed.

I think that most people who read 'Snow Crash' and loved it will agree with me. I got through about 80% of the book and I just couldn't be bothered to read it any more. It seems that Mr. Stephenson has gone to extreme lengths trying to convince the reader of his own cleverness. The book is full of never ending "scholarly" dialogs about nothing, most of which are not nearly as engaging as I imagine they were meant to be.

While the book is not all bad I found most of it to be dry, boring, pretentious, and lacking humor (except for one "fire/counter-fire" scene which made me laugh). I am sorry to say this as I was hoping for much and got very little.

For a longer and less blunt review check slashdot.

My Apple tech support experience

Since I've posted the rant about not buying apple products because there was no Java 1.6, Java 1.6 became available and so I bought 2 Apple notebooks this year. Unfortunately my 2008 early model MacBook got some hairline cracks in the casing so I called up Apple tech support, got a case number, and showed up at the Apple store to drop of the machine for under warranty repair. The somewhat lengthy post below describes my experience:

1. Encounter with a tool

When I made it to the genius bar (3rd floor of the Sydney George st. Apple Store) I was approached by John a concierge. He asked me re-enter all the information I already submitted over the phone (this I had to do in order to get the case number).

I did that.

Then he asked me to sign a paper stating in a nutshell that:

- I have a backup of all the data (I do)
- I have removed all the private information from the computer (I most certainly did NOT)

I refused to sign.

My notebook, like most notebooks I imagine, is full of private data. I told him that if the technicians remove the hard drive and give it to me I'll sign the form and let them work on the repair without having any privacy concerns.

Now, John refused.

John informed me that they will not remove the hard-drive nor lend me the tools to do so myself. Instead he advised me to go home, remove the hard drive myself and then come back. The other option he gracefully offered was for me to go out, buy a screw driver then come back and remove the hard drive myself right there at the Apple store. But there is no way they would do it for me or lend me the tool.

I went down to the second floor to ask at the hardware sales desk if they, by any chance, sell the tiny screw drivers needed to take out the hard drive from a MacBook. The sales guy there told me that they don't sell those since removing the hard drive voids the warranty.

Interesting.

He told me however that the "guys upstairs" would surely help me with taking out my hard drive. Given my recent experience I was in doubt so I asked him if he could help me sort that out with the "guys upstairs" to which he agreed. Back upstairs I went, and we ran into non-other than my old friend John. I explained to John that he has effectively advised me to void my warranty by telling me to remove the hard drive myself, at which point he finally caved in and hooked me up with a "Genius" called Alex.


2. Encounter with a Genius

Alex didn't need to be an actual genius to see my point. He took the notebook of my hands promised that in 15 minutes he'll be back either with the whole thing fixed up or the hard drive for me to take home. I signed the papers, on good faith that within those 15 minutes he won't break or copy my hard drive (but hey I can be reasonable), I sat down at the Genius Bar and used my MacBook Pro to write this blog. In about 45 minutes Alex came around with my MacBook fixed and good to go. Though it took him a bit longer than he estimated I would like to thank Alex for being a human with a brain and common sense (at Apple this apparently is called a "Genius") he saved me from going home buying a tool I don't need and voiding my warranty. Thank you Alex.

3. Conclusion

How would I quantify my experience tonight.

Firstly, it's obvious that it takes much more effort to encounter a tool (John) than it does t0 encounter a Genius (Alex).

Secondly, even a otherwise capable organization like Apple with it's very cool stores has it's weak links (John) and it's strong ones (Alex).

Thirdly, the paper Apple made me sign before any work was done is completely silly. I had to agree that my notebook contains no private data (which it does like any other notebook) and the 2 ways I know of to ensure no private data are:
- remove hard drive (but also void the warranty)
- reformat hard drive before submitting to apple and restore data from backup upon return (not very convenient and lenghty)

So perhaps offering to remove the hard drive and then fix the computer may be an option that is more acceptable to a customer concerned about time and privacy such as myself.

gmail feature request: show me the video

Wouldn't it be nice if we could view videos attached to emails right inside the web client? Since Google owns www.youtube.com I cannot see this being a big problem for Gmail. The UI could also make exporting videos to Youtube a single step operation. It would save me time with having to download large email attachments and with looking for codecs to play the downloaded videos (though to be fair with VLC the second point is not so much). The transcoding of videos from * to Flash may be a bit resource intensive but an organization size of Google could just be up to it.
Of course if Google doesn't step up soon, I may just decide to implement this feature myself :)

hacking cotopia

Lately we've been receiving emails about malicious players cloning other login names of other players by exploiting that we use unicode where different characters look the same (e.g. an ASCII 'C' looks like the Cyrillic 'C' for instance)
This is forcing us to restrict login names to the ASCII set.