tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-70386142012-01-08T12:50:31.932-05:00A discussion about server side programming (particularly, but not exclusively related to Java), plus other bits about the software development life cycle, quality assurance / bug tracking, the IT industry, and life in general...Chrishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04997759264201832380noreply@blogger.comBlogger411100tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7038614.post-67362930684799826262010-07-26T21:05:00.003-05:002010-07-26T21:14:46.522-05:00

One of my main servers running a Debian distribution of Linux is having it's 1000th day of uptime today:Thanks to Netsonic.net for the nice stable data center. Wisconsin - no earthquakes, no hurricanes.Another cool thing - one of the servers running on here, written in Java has been up and running since 2008 - not a lot of people can say they've written software that has run over 500 days

Chrishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04997759264201832380noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7038614.post-38995975720000321502009-08-02T20:04:00.003-05:002009-08-02T20:09:41.284-05:00

Top Lessons Learned from Dave Thomas talk at Lead to WinDave Thomas is an entrepreneur and former professor who started Object Technology International. To understand what kind of person Dave is, Dave and his wife owned 50% of the company each. When the company was bought by IBM [I couldn’t find financial details, but my understanding from friends of friends that this was on the order of tens

Chrishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04997759264201832380noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7038614.post-39244503644906989812009-06-17T20:30:00.003-05:002009-06-17T20:39:37.439-05:00

Well... It's been a long long time since my last post. A quick update as to what I'm up to. I have enrolled in Carleton University's Technology Innovation Management (TIM) program as of January. I'm loving it Thanks to Ian Graham at The Code Factory for pointing me towards TIM, and thanks to my mentor Ross Blaine for pushing me to return to school to get a Masters. Studying entrepreneurship,

Chrishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04997759264201832380noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7038614.post-47932770246658757422007-10-01T14:37:00.000-05:002007-10-01T14:43:17.118-05:00

I have decided to move on from Alcea Technologies to pursue interests outside of the company. Going forward I will be making myself available to the Alcea & FIT team as needed.I wish the best of luck to the Alcea team, as I look forward to working on solo projects and short term development projects as the opportunity presents itself.Watch the space to see what I’m up to. I’ll be putting my

Chrishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04997759264201832380noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7038614.post-42311377267300980482007-06-26T07:22:00.000-05:002007-06-26T07:28:17.064-05:00

I had the good fortune to get invited to RIM's WES conference to speak about making our FIT issue tracking software work with a BlackBerry. I have taken the presentation I gave, and gone into a good deal more detail, and I am putting it up in an 8 part series on my product blog FitTrackingSolutions.blogspot.com. The first part went up yesterday, and there will be a new part posted every day.

Chrishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04997759264201832380noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7038614.post-7918473548555624632007-05-14T12:42:00.000-05:002007-05-14T12:48:54.266-05:00

I was fortunate enough to get invited by RIM to speak at their annual conference, called the Wireless Enterprise Symposium (WES2007). I was discussing our experience as we begin to implement a mobile interface for our enterprise issue tracking software, FIT. It’s been a terrific four days, with RIM keeping everyone generally educated, fed and entertained. I’ve met and talked with dozens of

Chrishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04997759264201832380noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7038614.post-1169870905701174652007-01-26T22:58:00.000-05:002007-01-26T23:08:25.716-05:00

Read a great article today about the architecture of mailinator. Very interesting reading. Paul Tyma's end product really lines up with my own core values:To be ultra-efficient, where necessary, build it yourself.Code for software survival.Understand how your software is used to make things more efficient (ex: Mailinator compresses all inbound emails - 99% are never read, compress once,

Chrishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04997759264201832380noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7038614.post-1163535604048038842006-11-14T14:34:00.000-05:002007-01-04T09:15:16.910-05:00

Over the past few months, we've rolled out a new website for our product, FIT, at http://www.FitTrackingSolutions.com/First of all, we're pretty much a Google shop... We're blogging on Blogger (owned by Google), and we exclusively use Google Adwords (vs. any other ad driven competitors) to promote this site, as well as links from a few blogs, and a press release.However, Google seems to be slow

Chrishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04997759264201832380noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7038614.post-1157235474408358072006-09-02T17:13:00.000-05:002006-09-02T17:17:54.423-05:00

Joel of Joel on Software suggests that one of the only ways deliver a web application in a platform independent way is to create a compiler that can generate code that runs on different platforms.We have taken a different approach in terms of delivering platform independent web applications. In our case, we have implemented a webserver within our product. We also have a mechanism to save data

Chrishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04997759264201832380noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7038614.post-1148489565181295482006-05-24T11:50:00.000-05:002006-05-24T11:52:45.206-05:00

A good friend of mine spent the weekend messing the Google's Web Toolkit, and put together a good write up about it... His first pass with the toolkit could save you some time down the road...

Chrishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04997759264201832380noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7038614.post-1146885359581904052006-05-05T22:03:00.000-05:002007-02-27T13:10:44.293-05:00

Got a new latop. What software did I install?Firefox and Thunderbird - I've been using Mozilla up to this point, but Firefox is where all of the plugin action is at, so I've now switched.Microsoft Office 2003 - I had been happy with Office 97 up until now - but people keep telling me to check out Powerpoint templates from this decade, so I've upgraded.Eclipse - the development environment of

Chrishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04997759264201832380noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7038614.post-1146884544282050932006-05-05T21:55:00.000-05:002006-05-05T22:02:24.300-05:00

My ThinkPad R40 finally degraded to the point that I couldn’t use it anymore. I’m a very heavy laptop user – ten to twelve hours a day, five days a week, moving it between home and work every day. Friends that saw my last laptop were asking me why I was still using it last year [the H fell off… network was a little flakey – last week both the ethernet connection and wireless became extremely

Chrishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04997759264201832380noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7038614.post-1141270211091495992006-03-01T22:27:00.000-05:002006-03-01T22:30:11.106-05:00

I had the good fortune to be interviewed by an IEEE magazine in February to comment on the demise of Java (vs. PHP). A 45-minute interview turned into a paragraph in the article, but I thought that I might put all of my thoughts up on my blog. Why Java won't be superceded by PHPObject-oriented principles (encapsulation) and tools (javadoc, UML) mean that over the lifetime of a software project,

Chrishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04997759264201832380noreply@blogger.com10tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7038614.post-1138765212601351442006-01-31T22:30:00.000-05:002006-01-31T22:40:12.620-05:00

On February 1st, we're officially releasing version 6.0 of Fast BugTrack (our bug tracking software), and Fast IssueTrack (issue management software).This is last minute, but we're having a web conference and there are still a few slots available in our 8am EST time slot. We're going to be giving away an iPod Shuffle during the days events, and will be giving away a year of support - however if

Chrishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04997759264201832380noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7038614.post-1130465081366490092005-10-27T20:50:00.000-05:002005-10-27T21:31:15.730-05:00

Here's the first MiteSite - MiteSite Chat. Consider it beta and it may work / fail / be gone at any given moment. I've been playing around with this for the past week. It's interesting because there is nothing better than chatting to generate lots of dynamic data. This will be an excellent test of our server framework that Alcea Fast BugTrack and Alcea Fast IssueTrack are built on. There is

Chrishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04997759264201832380noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7038614.post-1129856343836017172005-10-20T19:57:00.000-05:002005-10-21T09:22:31.126-05:00

[OK - I had come up with the name parvosite without talking to anyone ... especially dog owners - so the team here talked, and the new and improved named is MiteSite - I'm editing this entry to change it...]Years ago, I worked at a company called Spidertop. The founders had an interesting idea that they called a StickyAd. The idea being that an entire website could be embedded in a banner sized

Chrishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04997759264201832380noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7038614.post-1128450756294658602005-10-04T13:29:00.000-05:002005-10-04T13:32:36.306-05:00

I had the good fortune to be selected as a beta-tester of 24 hour laundry just a few months ago. If you haven’t heard of this organization, 24HL’s co-founders include Marc Andreesen and there was a great deal of speculation about the organization not too long ago. Their product / tool / concept: Ning.So what is it? It is a development / computing platform for delivering social networking

Chrishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04997759264201832380noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7038614.post-1121977692304693072005-07-21T15:16:00.000-05:002005-07-21T15:28:12.313-05:00

Before AJAX (version 1.0)At one of my client sites, we have built an internal web application with a relatively complex interface - corporate look and feel wrappering our web application which has a right-hand side tabbed context bar, plus the main area of the page provides a tabbed interface, with tabs up to three levels deep. We are using Struts tiles to assemble the page, with the main area

Chrishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04997759264201832380noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7038614.post-1119318417474237562005-06-20T20:33:00.000-05:002005-06-20T20:46:57.486-05:00

So we went to a presentation last week given by David Yach @ RIM - makers of the Blackberry. We weren't sure what to expect - David gave an excellent talk about wireless technologies in general. He drove home that the following 3 points have to be taken into consideration when working with wireless devices - three limiting factors:Spectrum - there is only so much, and it costs money to

Chrishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04997759264201832380noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7038614.post-1110949668786272982005-03-16T00:06:00.000-05:002005-03-16T00:07:48.790-05:00

Hundreds of companies - big and small - are all racing to replace your cellphone / MP3 player / digital camera / video camera / PDA / PC / gaming platform / etc with a single device. I've been waiting years for this device to emerge, and it finally occured to me that it is not ever going to happen. When did this epiphany occur? I was reading Wired magazine a month or two ago and somewhere in

Chrishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04997759264201832380noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7038614.post-1109824426724456902005-03-02T23:25:00.000-05:002005-03-02T23:33:46.856-05:00

A9 is Amazon's search engine, and if you haven't yet seen it, I suggest you check it out. In particular you should checking out some of their cool interface features - I’m interested in the drag and drop functionality and resizable tables in particular. I've glanced a few times at the code - it isn't obfuscated, although it isn't commented - so many people will be able to read through and

Chrishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04997759264201832380noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7038614.post-1103598029347999292004-12-20T21:44:00.000-05:002004-12-20T22:00:29.346-05:00

Thanks for all of the feedback, good and bad - if I couldn't take criticism, I wouldn't be posting things publicly, right? My New Years Resolution is to think about what I am writing, and improve my writing ability. I just wanted to make sure that everyone understands that what I was writing about in my last post was an attempt to learn, and in turn teach people about the client-side

Chrishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04997759264201832380noreply@blogger.com13tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7038614.post-1103373304045606032004-12-18T07:34:00.000-05:002004-12-18T07:35:04.046-05:00

Sweet...

Chrishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04997759264201832380noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7038614.post-1103000888644277602004-12-14T01:05:00.000-05:002007-03-14T17:45:21.616-05:00

People have been contributing their two cents to how this works, but I have un-compressed (ie. re-written) Google's compressed javascript, so that the average web developer should be able to get a detailed understanding of how this works.... My final rewrite is available from my website here. I saw the coolest thing I've seen since realizing that Mozilla was embedding a wsdl-enabled SOAP client

Chrishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04997759264201832380noreply@blogger.com166tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7038614.post-1095435757883436822004-09-17T10:06:00.000-05:002004-09-17T10:42:37.883-05:00

I've been talking to various friends, and I'm constantly reading blogs about people out of work, and thinking of starting up their own business... As someone who's started a couple of businesses, I don't claim to know everything, but I've learned a thing over two either directly, or through observations of clients I have worked with... First of all, for most people, money doesn't just fall into

Chrishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04997759264201832380noreply@blogger.com10tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7038614.post-1095106556218514652004-09-13T14:58:00.000-05:002004-09-13T15:15:56.216-05:00

Well... I've been thinking about spam further the past few days... In particular, how there are so many ways to spell various spam words. It reminded me of a project I was working on to do data clean-up of some address information for a database of addresses that spanned the country... Customer Service Reps (CSRs) were essentially creating multiple address records by entering data inconsistently

Chrishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04997759264201832380noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7038614.post-1094738275604390992004-09-09T08:29:00.000-05:002004-09-09T08:57:55.606-05:00

I've had the same email address for about 10 years, I use it publicly, and I get a lot of spam... over 1000 messages / day ... I use several layers of spam cleaning (my mail routes through 2 ISPs with 2 and 1 mail filter each), plus I use Mozilla with it's built-in junk mail filter (which I love because it has learned what I consider spam or not...) ... BTW: Mozilla folks... After marking

Chrishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04997759264201832380noreply@blogger.com25tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7038614.post-1093293875828895892004-08-23T15:39:00.000-05:002004-08-23T15:48:28.553-05:00

I had been looking at the Mozilla Babelfish webservice query button - wondering why this extremely cool feature of Mozilla wasn't everywhere - and then I rented "The Whole 10 Yards" - which, had I checked IMDB, would have seen that this movie wasn't worth renting... It would have saved $5 and my feeling of embarrassment for the actors/actresses in this terrible movie... But I digress... What I

Chrishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04997759264201832380noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7038614.post-1093026492789705542004-08-20T13:01:00.000-05:002004-08-20T13:28:12.790-05:00

This Mozilla WSDL Example page shows how cool Mozilla can be... There is an on page example in which I can type some text, press a button, and it uses the BabelFish web service on xmethods to translate the text... Neat trick you say... This is cooler than you think because it's using Mozilla's built in web service functionality to make the request - There is no server side interface to xmethods..

Chrishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04997759264201832380noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7038614.post-1090614624425182842004-07-23T15:20:00.000-05:002004-07-23T15:30:24.426-05:00

I missed a tool in our list of tools we're using for unit testing ... We also use Xalan J - A little 15M library for XSLT stuff, that the ant junitreport tool needs to covert the xml output generated by the testcases into nice html output... The process for checking code coverage: ant clean - start from a clean slate :) ant [jarfile] - compile everything, obfuscate the library and generate a

Chrishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04997759264201832380noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7038614.post-1090287818620101562004-07-19T20:27:00.000-05:002004-07-21T08:20:59.606-05:00

Note: I have edited this entry on July 19, 2004 to clean-up the code after someone pointed out some of the errors below. A bit of reading lately about code coverage, and aiming for 100% and whether that is realistic or not... It's important for people to step back and not just a code coverage, but the quality of the unit test cases that they are writing... We'll look at a function to take 2

Chrishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04997759264201832380noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7038614.post-1089834446272575962004-07-14T14:32:00.000-05:002004-07-14T14:47:26.273-05:00

Well... We've had a SOAP interface built into our bug tracking software (FBT) for some time, but we've had very little time to play with it ourselves... I had been intending to use it to (among other things), integrate our CVS source code repository with our bug tracking system... I spent the past week creating a perl command line tool that uses the soap interface of FBT to: 1) Get the details

Chrishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04997759264201832380noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7038614.post-1088525338285213082004-06-29T10:41:00.000-05:002004-06-29T11:08:58.286-05:00

So we're starting the push to get our unit / system test cases as automated as possible... We've already got a set of test plans - but as the system has grown in complexity, testing is now taking over 2 man days per release of manual testing... We're driving the running of testcases from Ant... Ant 1.6.1 - we've already got our build / packaging process in place here, and it's working well ...

Chrishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04997759264201832380noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7038614.post-108727341146502872004-06-14T23:06:00.000-05:002004-06-14T23:23:31.466-05:00

We've outgrown our existing Aktiom server.. Pseudo server really... they take a great big box, and create a bunch of smaller virtual boxes... we get root, and it appears to be our own box except when we're checking free memory running "top" we see 6 gigs, and we still get out of memory errors - ah well... So I spent the weekend looking at alternatives ... They include building our own box and

Chrishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04997759264201832380noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7038614.post-1086829631851905892004-06-09T20:05:00.000-05:002004-06-09T20:07:11.850-05:00

I would have to say that I couldn't disagree more with this blog entry I read today - I spent most of my day shaking my head ... Perhaps this is a joke - but others are chiming in in agreement, so I'm left shaking my head... I'll start by saying why comments are important ... Code changes (as is mentioned in the blog above)... And because it changes frequently (diverging from all documentation

Chrishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04997759264201832380noreply@blogger.com9tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7038614.post-1086359710879418632004-06-04T09:27:00.002-05:002004-06-04T09:35:10.880-05:00

Today I read a blog entry discussing why they thought big company open sourcing policies would be bad for small companies in the open source community... I'd like to comment on the open sourcing of an IDE (like Eclipse)... And how the open-sourcing of Eclipse is great for small companies... 2 examples: A small company building a tool for developers that wanted to provide an IDE had to build it

Chrishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04997759264201832380noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7038614.post-1086052629728616432004-05-31T19:54:00.000-05:002004-05-31T20:17:09.730-05:00

We develop a commercial bug tracking system, Alcea Fast BugTrack... We've been building and improving it over the past 3 years, and while we've always been very happy with it, it's grown to be a pretty full featured defect tracking system... Occasionally, we will come across someone wanting the source code when they buy our product... We've almost always refused and I'll outline why you don't

Chrishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04997759264201832380noreply@blogger.com10tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7038614.post-1085620239967742452004-05-26T20:01:00.000-05:002004-05-26T20:10:39.966-05:00

Following the excellent comment I got earlier today to my last entry, I took a look at P6Spy - a tool for capturing jdbc information within your application... Looks solid and mature... For those interested about how it works, it's a proxy pattern - it wrappers your (real) jdbc driver ... so when I call DriverManager.getConnection() it's calling P6Spy's getConnection (which in turn proxies this

Chrishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04997759264201832380noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7038614.post-1085536292647718592004-05-25T20:17:00.000-05:002004-05-25T20:51:32.646-05:00

We had a problem today... A bit of background - we build the Fast Suite on JDK 1.1 ... We chose it, because after many many years, the jre's are rock solid, so our server will stay up for months, and the small size of the jre keeps our download size down... In JDK 1.1 land, when you're using sql PreparedStatements, with logging turned on, there's no way to see what the actual sql is that is

Chrishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04997759264201832380noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7038614.post-1085460794449836472004-05-24T23:46:00.000-05:002004-05-24T23:53:14.450-05:00

Very busy the past few days... We've just released our new Issue Tracking Software -- Alcea Fast IssueTrack ... The "Enterprise" (database vs. flat file) version of our software engine is nearing completion - we're testing with as many databases as possible to ensure that we don't produce something that will require a tricky patch down the road for customers that start using the enterprise

Chrishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04997759264201832380noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7038614.post-1084980628746651802004-05-19T10:23:00.000-05:002004-05-19T10:30:28.746-05:00

Who is writing this? My name is Chris Justus, and I'm a geek who's been using computers since getting a Vic-20 back in 1982/83... I went to the University of Waterloo (Canada) from 1990-1995, and have been getting paid to program computers since 1991... I have several passions, beyond computers, including my family, business/marketing stuff, and various other interests and hobbies... But the

Chrishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04997759264201832380noreply@blogger.com