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"Daddy, what happened?" "It blew up, honey." My sister was five and she was the first to speak. I was seven and knew I was going to be an astronaut. We were in Florida on vacation and the shuttle was supposed to launch while we were there. My awesome parents drove us from our condo in North Palm Beach to the Cape, not once, not twice but three days in a row as the launch continued to get scrubbed due to cold weather. I remember the instant the shuttle blew up, watching it from the side of a nearby roadway, and I knew exactly what happened. I remember the crowd gasp. And I remember my sister pulling at my father's arm and being the first in the crowd to say anything. I remember being annoyed, as most typical seven-year old brothers tend to get, when she asked a question I knew the answer to. I remember the look on my parents' face. I remember feeling sad. But most importantly, I remember how proud I felt and how much more I wanted to be an astronaut...

Of course my mind first goes to typing vulgar phrases into Google's new N-gram Viewer but the results were pretty neat.

UPDATE: Ceki commented below which prompted me to rewrite the third paragraph. UPDATE 2: I have a better way of configuring Maven and SLF4J now. The mismatch between logging frameworks always seems to come up in projects I've developed over the years. Little-by-little I've learned and relearned how to navigate the nest of runtime logging that occurs in non-trivial applications. With my latest project I think I finally converged on a solution that I'll carry forward to future projects. So what am I really talking about? Have you ever been stumped, even for a short time, about where a certain log message is going and why it might not appear in your log? Often this happens when you are trying to debug an issue with a third-party library that's using a different logging implementation them your application. If you are nodding from familiarity, skip the next paragraph. Let's start from the beginning. There are several logging implementations available for Java, th...

Recently I came across a company that is forking several open source Java projects. I saw they were making a mistake that I also made a few years ago and have since learned from. In Maven's distributed repository architecture project artifacts, like JAR files, are uniquely identified by a coordinate system composed of a group identifier, an artifact identifier, a version number, optionally a classifier, and a packaging type. For instance, the most recent version of the Apache Commons Lang project has a Maven coordinate (i.e. groupId:artifactId:version:classifier:type ) of commons-lang:commons-lang:2.5::jar . A few years ago, if I wanted to make custom changes to this project I would get the source, make my changes and then deploy the result to our private Nexus repository under a new groupId such as com.jaxzin.oss:commons-lang:2.5::jar . That might seem reasonable. Then a year later or so I tried something different and changed the artifactId like this commons-lang:commons-lang-jax...

Last night was my first session as a volunteer at the Danbury Animal Welfare Society (DAWS). I had attended an orientation a few weeks back and that's when I saw the facility for the first time, learned about the standard operating procedures and policies, and got to meet some of the cats I'll be working with. Now I'm not a person that enjoys change or meeting new people, but other than my immediate family I don't think many people are aware because I try very hard to hide my discomfort. Who knows, I could be wrong so feel free to call me out in the comments! So far, this entire experience is quite out of my normal comfort zone, but I'm forcing myself to do this for several reasons. I learned about DAWS after attending their Puppy Love Ball , a fund-raiser they held in February, in support of a friend of mine who was honored as their Person of the Year. They premiered this mission video at the event and it had me hooked. To learn that DAWS is a shelter that ...

Today I drove up to Boston for the day to attend NoSQL Live . My experience so far within the NoSQL community has been limited to what we've built in-house at Disney and ESPN over the past decade to solve our scaling issues, more recently has been ESPN's use of Websphere eXtreme Scale , and the very latest has been my own experimentation with HBase which hasn't gotten much further than setting up a four node cluster. I've read a little about Cassandra, memcached, Tokyo Cabinet and that's about it. So before the sandman wipes away most of my first impressions of the technologies discussed today, I wanted to record my thoughts for posterity or, at the very least, tomorrow. Cassandra Cassandra seems to be the hottest NoSQL solution this month with press about both Twitter and Digg running implementations. My impression, I'm wary of "eventual consistency". I don't feel I understand the risk and ramifications well enough to design a system properly...

I bought the book Java Puzzlers by Josh Bloch and Neal Gafter a few years ago and enjoyed it. If you aren't familiar with it, it covers rare, odd and usually counter-intuitive edge cases of Java in a brain-teaser style of presentation. For both a Java user and an analytical mind its a fascinating book. Well today I stumbled onto a puzzler of my own and thought I'd share. Can you tell me what the main method of this class will output? 1 : public class Parser { 2 : 3 : private static <T> T parse(String s, Class<T> type) { 4 : // Simple implementation only supports long primitive 5 : if(type == long.class) { 6 : return (T) Long.parseLong(s); 7 : } 8 : throw new UnsupportedOperationException( 9 : "parse() only supports long right now!"); 10: } 11: 12: public static void main(String[] args) { 13: System.out.println(parse("1234", long.class).equals(1234)); 14: } 15: } So what gets written to standard output? ...

So I hope you don't think I'm a complete loon, but I've always been interested in the paranormal, cryptozoology and lights in the sky. I think it is driven by my need to try to answer all those unanswered questions in life. Lately I've been watching various 'reality' shows on these topics like MonsterQuest, Paranormal State and Ghosthunters. Don't get me wrong, I'm not gullible enough to believe these shows are finding evidence of anything, its just some good ol' fashioned mind-numbing popcorn TV for me to fall asleep to. Watching them has reminded me of a few unexplained incidents I've had in my life and I wonder if you've experienced anything similar? I've got three that all happened to me over a decade ago but were so unnerving that I remember them vividly. So here are my campfire ghost stories, feel free to share yours! Incident #1: The Mysterious Flash I don't remember the exact date or even the season of this first incident,...

Unless you've been living under a rock, you have heard that last week Google demonstrated their Chrome OS for the first time in public. They also open-sourced what they have so far as the Chromium OS project. You can watch an overview video here: I followed the event, watched the YouTube videos and even played with a copy of Chromium OS via gdgt . So here are my thoughts on my limited experience so far. It seems like a perfect fit for the netbook market. "Living in the cloud" seems like a great idea for the ability to access your data anywhere. A verified boot system will be a godsend to anyone who has ever had reinstall an OS because it just got 'crufty'. But I don't understand why they have, so far, omitted the concept of a desktop. One of the coolest features of Chrome is its ability to turn a web app into a 'desktop' app , which prompted me to to find Fluid for the Mac . Why force new users of Chrome OS to live in a browser when they could ...

Recently I've been helping a colleague introduce a dependency on a legacy project that hasn't been "Maven-ized". Often the "easy way" to add a legacy dependency is to throw the JAR into our Nexus repository and be done with it. But this legacy project was a little trickier and is my new poster child for why taking the easy way can lead to headaches and frustration. Your legacy project might have compile-time dependencies you need. Maybe your legacy project implements an external API, or maybe it uses a library and exposes that usage in its API. "So what", you say? "I'll find it at compile-time for my project and I'll add the dependency." Well, now every project that wants to use your legacy project is going to go through the same discovery and embed the dependency in their POM. The right way is to define this dependency in the pom.xml for your legacy project so all dependent projects retrieve it transitively. Your legacy pro...

I think its undeniable that one of the hottest topic of this year is health care. While I've been casually following the political discourse, its far from my inspiration for today's post. My one year old son, Wally, had a reaction to penicillin this week and I question why current medicine is still so reactive rather than proactive. Since allergies are something that can change and fluctuate, that led me to also wonder why we don't have more frequent testing too. Standardized testing I'm looking forward to the day when there is a standard battery of tests for allergies and conditions. It's beginning with the prenatal screenings available during both of my wife's pregnancies, but why, for instance, is there no standard allergy testing post-birth? From the perspective of a patient, current medicine waits for a reaction to an allergen which seems so dangerous to me. Continuous diagnostics When can I get my little implant that continuously monitors my blood-wor...

In a surprising update to my post earlier this week about what REST is NOT , I just spoke with Rooly Eliezerov , the President and co-founder of Gigya. We had a nice conversation about the goals of Gigya, primarily that they want to aggregate these other social web services and their design philosophy is to mimic Facebook and Twitter's API. I expressed that using GET to change a resource isn't a REST principle either company's API breaks. He was surprised to hear it and said he'd follow-up with his team to validate that and get back to me. Whatever the outcome, I really appreciate that a company with their goals and reach is interested in what little ol' me has to say. It speaks volumes to their passion and customer support.

When I got 'Wanted' on DVD as a gift, it was the first movie on disc (DVD or Blu-ray) that included a Digital Copy. Since my home media setup is all iTunes/Apple-based I easily popped in the extra disc, entered the included key and added the "Wanted" to my media collection in less than 5 minutes. It was beautiful and enlightening. I'm on the side of the fence that copying a movie onto a private home media network is an ethical, though not currently legal, fair use of copyrighted works. Usually ripping a DVD for me is a 'set it and forget' operation using Handbrake that takes several elapsed hours but little interaction. But with the latest copy-protection features of DVDs it can be a hit-or-miss prospect which has caused me to add a few corrupted movies to my collection. And if I want to take the time to attempt to circumvent the copy-protection using Mac the Ripper or RipIt , it's again hit-or-miss and makes the process that much more labor-inten...

Update : I spoke with the president of Gigya . Having only familiarized myself with REST a few months ago, I still struggle to explain to colleagues what REST is. My best one sentence summary so far is that it's "using HTTP as it was designed". Not a perfect or even complete summary, but I think it covers the highlights. This week I've been reviewing Gigya's REST APIs for an upcoming project at work. And I've found it to be a shining example of designing an API incorrectly and calling it RESTful. It solidified a couple of REST anti-patterns for me and I wanted to capture them: REST is not RPC, though RPC can be done RESTfully. GET is not for state changes. If you're operation has side effects, don't use GET. The response body is not the only way to send the client information. Don't duplicate information in the HTTP headers in the response body. Authentication is not part of your resource. Don't create a query parameter to do authen...

So Sunday night (Sept 20), I realized my three year old daughter Penelope is either extremely manipulative or extremely sweet. We were doing bedtime, reading a book and bedtime was over. She was supposed to lay down and go to sleep. I went to get a drink before heading up for the night and as I walk past her room again I see her standing at the foot of her bed in the dark. She calls out "Daddy, daddy! Poopies are coming!". Now I've learned this is a common stall tactic with her. So I said, "No! Poopies are not coming. Go to sleep". But she insisted and so I threatened, that if she didn't really have to go to the bathroom I was going to take away her favorite bunny, which has become her security blanket. So she agrees and gets out of bed and goes to the bathroom. So she's sitting there and nothing's coming out. And I'm like "Penelope, I told you what would happen right?" So I give her some more time and then come back. I open the door an...

Today I posted a Facebook status that I've come around and consider 1Password a must-have app for every Mac user. A friend commented that he didn't get it, much for the same reasons I held out for a long time. So here's how I explained my new love: Yeah I didn't 'get' the benefit for a long time. But recently I've been frustrated with the countless number of passwords I've got and how every site has a different policy that forces me to rethink my password scheme. I started to feel like my scheme was becoming too simple just so I can meet the lowest common denominator. Also, I recently find myself forgetting the less frequently used password and needing to reset them. I needed a solution. The killer features for me: Killer browser integration, replaces Firefox and Safari password managers Password generator, now I don't need to fear that my online passwords are crackable. Again #1 makes #2 awesomely simple. Slick iPhone integration. I can take and ...

So I signed up for a Google App Engine account a while ago, almost right after it's Python version was released last year. Of course, life prevented me from taking the time to learn Python, and so the learning curve prevented me from building or deploying anything. Fast-forward to two weeks ago when Google released the Java API for the Google App Engine (GAE from here on out). Being a full-time Java programmer for the past 10 years, now we're running on all cylinders! I applied for a Java account on the day it was released and my Java GAE account was approved within 24 hours, but it took a few days for me to make some time to start writing some code. After about 8 hours of development I had my first working prototype of a web application running on the GAE. My first GAE webapp is a service that connects to a set of social web sites that provide user names and profile pages for their users to see if a username you are interested is still available across those sites. My ...

Finally http://www.jaxzin.com is back online after almost a week outage. I'm still trying to get http://jaxzin.com back online, unfortunately the Google Apps hosting doesn't play nicely with Blogger.com.

Tonight I watched the "Beach Trip" episode of Jon&Kate+8 and was inspired to find out exactly where they went since it looked so much like where my parents own a condo. It turned out to be close but no cigar. This googling session happened to also lead me to a video from Aunt Jodi. After dismissing Aunt Jodi's sister's blog a couple weeks ago as jealous ramblings, I finally took the time to read it through which took me about an hour. The latest entry which includes this video of Jodi verifying the claims her sister has made 'in print', was what changed my mind. I read the posts in chronological order this time which helped me to better understand her tone, rather than just reading the last entry as I did previously. So for those that haven't taken the time to read it here's the summary.  Keep in mind this is just my recap of her posts (in case the Gosselins see this little post and get pissed):  The production company offered to pay Jodi for...

Something about this new commercial for the Discovery Channel got me. I don't if its the catchy song, or seeing all their main personalities singing it, or having Dr. Stephen Hawking in it. Whatever it is, I like it.