NFJS Fall 2011 day 2

Presentation of the day: 'Gradle: Bringing Engineering Back to
Builds'.  Gradle seems to be the cool build tool this year.  I'm
always lagging a couple of years behind as I'm finally getting
comfortable with Maven.

Brian Sletten's HTML5 presentation was also pretty good.
HTML5 is here, although technically the spec is not final yet.

Ken Sipe's Continuous Delivery presentation was also good,
though in my case he was preaching to the choir.  The
importance of repeatable builds, automating every step of the
process, etc.

Matthew McCullough did an interesting and thought-provoking
presentation on game theory and economics.  Not about coding
so much as about managing your career or your business.

Again, IntelliJ IDEA not in sight anywhere.  I think it's because
none of the presenters is actually working in the Java language
these days.  Tim Berglund was using The One True Editor (Emacs),
though he mentioned that STS (what I use) has support for Gradle.

Some frustration today with multiple presentations I would have
liked to attend scheduled at the same time.  It was helpful that I
could cross several presentations off due to having already seen
them at Denver JUG.

Links

HTML5 browser test
Smashing Magazine
HTML5 Presentation
Canvas Demos
Sublime Video - HTML5 Video Player (kind of a misnomer...)

NFJS Fall 2011 day 1

Cool presentation of the day was Matthew McCullough's
'Cascading through Hadoop: a DSL for simpler MapReduce'.
See Cascading.  We're using Hadoop at work so I'm looking
into this.

Two presenters were using Eclipse rather than the JetBrains
IntelliJ IDEA IDE that was formerly ubiquitous among the
NFJS presenters.  Go, free software!

Links:

Toward a Commodity Enterprise Middleware (AMQP)
Simple Made Easy
ThoughtWorks Technology Radar

JPA query language

Oracle's tutorial made this seem really difficult
with all the high-level-of-abstraction discussion of
traversing over relations between entities,
but then I looked in the Hibernate book and it's
not that bad... there are only some small differences
between HQL and JPA-QL.

Spring Roo database reverse engineering

This is me, answering my own question on the Spring Roo forum:
http://forum.springsource.org/showthread.php?116012-Database-reverse-engineering-problem.

Oracle SQL Developer 3.0 and MySQL

Recently I noticed I was getting frequent ‘Vendor code 1317’ errors
as I tried to browse table schemas in MySQL databases.

This error is described here:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2669439/oracle-sql-developer-vendor-code-1317

and here:

https://forums.oracle.com/forums/thread.jspa?threadID=1129518

These articles indicate that going back to earlier versions of the
MySQL JDBC driver will fix the error. However I tried this and
it didn’t seem to work.  I still got the error with
mysql-connector-java-5.0.8 and mysql-connector-java-5.0.4, as
well as the JDBC driver which is available through
Help -> Check for Updates.

What did finally work for me was to downgrade SQL
Developer from the latest version that I was using
(sqldeveloper-3.0.04.34) all the way back to
sqldeveloper-1.5.5.59.69.

Legacy SQL Developer versions are available at the bottom
of the page at
http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/developer-tools/sql-developer/downloads/index.html

Update (12/12/2012): These days I'm using Squirrel SQL as my general purpose SQL IDE for a lot of different databases.

Git

Here's a pretty good article about git:
Understanding Git Conceptually

Virtualization

When I got my laptop 3 years ago, it came with Windows XP on it.
Rather than blow away an actual licensed copy of Windows, I
configured it to dual boot Windows and Ubuntu.

Until recently this worked OK, but lately something in Windows kept
blowing away the GRUB boot loader.  Every single time I booted
Windows, I'd have to reinstall GRUB afterwards.

Finally I had enough of this... over the weekend I used VMware
vCenter Converter to virtualize my Windows partition.  Now I can
run it from Linux with VMware Player. 

There were a few little hitches. For some reason bridged networking
didn't work, but NAT networking did work. It made me re-'activate'
Windows with the original key.

Both Converter and Player are free downloads.