In the old testament Bible in the book of Genesis, Chapter 20, Abraham was told by God to take his son to a mountain in Moriah and sacrifice his child. He travels to the mountain with his son, builds an alter and then binds his son and prepares to sacrifice him, but God sends an angle to stop the sacrifice and provides an animal to be slaughtered instead, telling Abraham that this was a test to see if he feared God by not withholding his only son.
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Often you may hear devout followers in a afterlife based religion saying something to the effect of, “Though tough times may come, they will only last for a little while, heaven is our home.”
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Recently I’ve seen unsolicited SPAM e-mails coming directly from other peoples’ e-mail and social networking accounts. They’ll often post messages afterwords claiming that their accounts had been hacked. I’ll usually ask these friends, “Do you use the same password on multiple websites?” and the ensuing “Yes” response from them is followed by, “Change your e-mail password, and also, you need to learn something about password security.”
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When writing J2EE web applications, web services, enterprise Java beans (EJBs) or other pieces of code that run on a Java application server such as RedHat’s JBoss, IBM WebSphere or Apache Tomcat, a developer typically doesn’t load database drivers or connect to the database directly. Instead, a context lookup must be made in order to get a DataSource, and from there a Connection. However what if one needs to run existing code locally, outside of the web server? This guide shows developers how to setup a local context so application server code can be run in a stand-alone application without modification.
When creating new Java web applications within an IDE such as Eclipse or NetBeans, the IDE creates a directory structure and uses its own internal builder to create WAR and EAR files. While these build tools may be convenient when starting to develop J2EE applications, when working on production grade projects, it’s important to create your own directory structure and build scripts to automate the building and deployment process. This tutorial will take you through automating the build process of a web application using Apache Ant as well as giving you a better understanding of exactly how web applications are laid-out and built within the EAR file.
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Anyone who has programmed with Java should be familiar with the concept of Checked Exceptions. Although C++ and OCaml have optional support for exception checking, Java seems to be the only major programing language where it is a built-in and required part of the language. Enforcing at compile time that certain exceptions need to be caught may have seemed like a good idea at the time Java was developed, however no major languages developed since have adapted the concept. Many view Checked Exceptions as a design flaw. In this article, I attempt to show how this flaw can be overcome using a base exception class to encapsulate exception handling.
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I’ve never been a huge fan of certification. Although I understand it is supposed to help gauge an industry benchmark in a given field, I often feel like it’s given the IT world a generation of good test takers who are not necessarily good designers. Still, I’ve programmed with PHP on my own for years and want to eventually move my career path towards that direction. I decided to get a one up and try for my Zend PHP5 certification. What I came away with was a massive sense in disappointment in Zend’s entire certification process.
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I just finished my latest web application project: TweeFlood. For those of you on Twitter, TweeFlood is a way to see how much you and your friends tweet. It displays statistics for how often your friends tweet per year, month, day and hour. Try it out and follow @TweeFlood.
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Two weeks ago a new health care bill, H.R. 3962, passed the House. Many prominent democrats voted it down saying it did too little while health insurance companies denounced it claiming it did too much. Between this mess includes several awkward provisions and amendments which include removing funding for abortions from publicly subsidized plans while allowing medical reimbursements for prayer services.
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I’ve been using Media Temple for web hosting for a while. Like any other host, they have their advantages and disadvantages. One of the biggest problems with Media Temples is that their basic grid-server (gs) package only allows for very simple statistics gathering using Urchin. It is so simple that it combines hit counts from all websites into one graph unless users purchase additional grid-server units. Although Media Temple provides raw access logs, the way virtual hosts have been setup causes difficulty when attempting to use their logs with a log analyzer.
The following tutorial goes through how to install and configure the free and open source web statistics program Awstats to be used with Media Temple’s grid-servers to provide analytic data from the Apache logs per each individual domain.
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