18 years Ago
When Tapestry’s @Inject* Silently Fails
Published by marco on in Programming
This article was originally published on the Encodo Blogs. Browse on over to see more!
Most Tapestry programming involves writing event handlers and operations on page objects. In order to execute these operations, you need access to properties of the form and properties of the session and application in which the page resides. For convenience, developers can add references to all sorts of objects in the system using various forms of the @Inject*
annotation (like @InjectPage
, @InjectObject
... [More]
Lies, Damned Lies and The Media
Published by marco on in Public Policy & Politics
The last US election in November was widely regarded as the dirtiest in US history. The Republicans, in particular, slung nearly ceaselessly from a never-ending supply of mud. With just over 21 months to go until Americans start making up excuses for not voting for President, the first salvo has already been fired at Barack Hussein Obama, United States Senator and proud leader of an exploratory committee to determine whether his winning smile will be able to dredge up enough cash for a run at... [More]
Hidden Files in Perforce
Published by marco on in Tips & Tricks
This article was originally published on the Encodo Blogs. Browse on over to see more!
We keep our source code in Perforce, an extremely powerful SCM (source control manager). It retains multiple revisions of files and manages integrations between “branches”, or diverging streams of similar code. Read/write permissions for paths within the depot can be restricted per user.
Recently, we needed to get the history of a particular file to see which changes had been applied to it over the course... [More]
Outlook 2007. Secured.
Published by marco on in Technology
A perrenial hole in Office security has been plugged in the upcoming 2007 release: IE has been replaced by Word as the HTML renderer for mails. It’s not that Word doesn’t have security problems of its own, but that most email worms are written to take advantage of the holes in IE instead. It should be hours before spammers adjust their content to this new development. Because of this, as noted in Outlook 2007 change sends HTML email back… (Ars Technica), “e-mails that use certain advanced HTML and CSS... [More]”
Modern Day Orientalist
Published by marco on in Miscellaneous
Dangerous Knowledge: Orientalism and Its Discontents by Michael Dirda (Washington Post) is a review of the book with the same name, by Robert Irwin. The review starts with a movie-trailer–worthy introduction of “Thirty years after Edward Said’s groundbreaking “Orientalism,” a British scholar responds.” This gives the reader the impression that Said’s book from the seventies had, to date, enjoyed an unchallenged status in the world of cultural history—a status the brave author of the book being reviewed finally had the temerity... [More]
Versioned Objects with Hibernate
Published by marco on in Programming
This article was originally published on the Encodo Blogs. Browse on over to see more!
Hibernate is a persistence framework for Java. Among the many perks it purports to bring to the table is automatic versioning for objects in the database. That is, when saving an object to the database, it increments a version number. Any process that attempts to store a different version of the same object is rejected. This is all extremely flexible and can be added to a POJO using an annotation:
... [More]
Books read in 2006
Published by marco on in Books
- Song of Susannah (2004) − Stephen King (second half)
- The Dark Tower (2004) − Stephen King
- Things Fall Apart (1959) − Chinua Achebe
- Blink: the Power of Thinking without Thinking (2005) − Malcolm Gladwell
- No Longer At Ease (1960) − Chinua Achebe
- ‘Tis (1999) − Frank McCourt
- Teacher Man (2005) − Frank McCourt
- City of Light (1999) − Lauren Belfer
- Night Watch (2002) − Terry Pratchett
- Der große Boss: Das Alte Testament, Unverschämt fromm neu erzählt (1992) − Fred Denger
- Going Postal (2004) − Terry... [More]
Wanna Bet?
Published by marco on in Finance & Economy
Factors in Our Colossal Mess by Gabriel Kolko (CounterPunch) offers a nigh-panicked critique of the out-of-control hyper-captitalism found in the rarified air of the international financial instruments markets. With a name like that, it’s already clear that the intent is to hoodwink and the system does not disappoint. With the introduction of ever faster computing, ever more memory and ever tighter integration of information and communication, traders, who used to be limited in their schemes to invent money out of thin air,... [More]
Vegetarian Propaganda?
Published by marco on in Miscellaneous
The opinion piece, Why I hate vegetarians, is a typical example of hating the cause because of its proponents. The author doesn’t counter any arguments of vegetarianism—she simply claims its ok to eat meat because some vegetarians are so damned “smug and superior”. A lovely bit of deductive reasoning akin to taking up smoking because there are non-smokers who are annoying.
“People should be allowed to make their own choices and not be bullied or frightened into giving up meat. In the US... [More]”
Online Philosophy
Published by marco on in Miscellaneous
Scott Adams, author of the Dilbert comic strip and several books, including the interesting God’s Debris: A Thought Experiment (Amazon) and increasingly bitter Dilbert collections, like When Did Ignorance Become A Point Of View? (Amazon) has a blog as well and updates with ferocious regularity, almost always with a unique idea that usually freewheels into a thought experiment. Some work, some don’t.
A recent theme was free will.
- The Little Robot That Could by Scott Adams
- In this one he posits a robot, whose job it is to... [More]
Override an Implementation in HiveMind
Published by marco on in Programming
This article was originally published on the Encodo Blogs. Browse on over to see more!
If you are not already familier with HiveMind, read Setting up a Service in HiveMind for an introduction.[1]
In the article mentioned above, we learned how to set up a new HiveMind service. What if we want to replace the implementation for an existing service? Is it even possible? Why would you want to do that? This article answers these questions in the context of a real-life example from one of our... [More]
Session and Requests in HiveMind
Published by marco on in Programming
This article was originally published on the Encodo Blogs. Browse on over to see more!
If you are not already familier with HiveMind, read Setting up a Service in HiveMind for an introduction.[1]
Almost every application is going to need to have information that is session-specific. This is accomplished by adding a member to Tapestry’s application objects list and assigning it the proper scope. With a scope of “session”, HiveMind makes sure that each session in the web application has its own... [More]
Setting up a Service in HiveMind
Published by marco on in Programming
This article was originally published on the Encodo Blogs. Browse on over to see more!
HiveMind is the IOC manager used together with Tapestry; it’s in charge of bootstrapping and connecting all of the myriad objects and services available to a Tapestry application. Applications based on Tapestry are encouraged to use it to configure their application- and session-level objects and services as well.
Once it works, it works well. Getting it configured in the first place—especially when new... [More]
Consequences
Published by marco on in Quotes
“Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies in the final sense a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.”
Mashup Mime
So there’s this mime, David Armand, and he does a bit called Karaoke for the Deaf (Google Video) on HBO. His shtick[1] is acting out the song “Torn” by Natalie Imbruglia.
It’s wicked good, so he gets invited to do it at some awards show, Torn by David Armand (YouTube), in the middle of which Natalie herself joins him on stage and starts miming the song with him.
A good time was had by all.
Testing Tone Deafness
You probably shouldn’t do this one at work because it takes a full six minutes of concentration and silence—during which bizarre sounds are emitted from your speakers. Either that, or you need some headphones. Test your musical skills in 6 minutes! is a Flash-based test for tone-deafness / musical ear. It plays 30 pairs of musical sequences that may or may not differ in tone: that’s for you to decide. For the really bored, there is also Can’t dance? Test to see if you’re rhythmdeaf!, which... [More]
Daily Show on Iraq
Published by marco on in Public Policy & Politics
The Daily Show this week had a number of very good clips, mostly centering on Iraq, Rumsfeld and Bush. In particular, they highlight the high-quality correspondents that the show still has, despite the loss of Carrel, Helms, Cordry and Colbert. Oliver, Bee, Riggle and Mandvi are filling in quite nicely, as you’ll see below.
An Empire Says What?
Published by marco on in Public Policy & Politics
Instead of focusing on money spent on military budgets, World Wide Military Deployments takes a look at the number of soldiers deployed around the world by various countries. This is a relatively good measure of the degree to which a country exerts its forceful influence on other countries. The top 5 are:
- United States ~ 400,000
- 140,000 in Iraq, 74,000 in Germany, 40,000 each in Japan, Korea and Kuwait and over 1000 troops in a dozen other countries, mostly in the Middle East
- Turkey ~ 36,000... [More]
Denial Ain’t Just a River In Egypt
Published by marco on in Public Policy & Politics
There have been a flood of political cartoons covering the conference on the Holocaust taking place in Iran in the last couple of days. They almost all depict president Ahmadinejad of Iran as Hitler or a Nazi of some kind. To be fair to the normally right-leaning caricaturists of America, there have also been a hell of a lot of them depicting Bush as divorced from reality and incredibly political in all of his decisions. This reaction is somewhat expected, as Bush’s rating dips down toward the... [More]
Temple of Doom
Published by marco on in Miscellaneous
Giant Carnivorous Centipedes tells you all can probably stand to know about “Scolopendra gigantea, a venomous, red-maroon centipede with forty-six yellow-tinted legs”, which reach “lengths of over thirty-five centimeters” (almost 14 inches). They’re carnivores, but beasts of this size (lovingly described as a bitter repast themselves in Papillon by Henri Charriere (Amazon)) must necessarily seek larger prey than mere beetles and spiders.
“In an environment completely devoid of light, the centipede scurries across the damp... [More]”
Good Ideas
Published by marco on in Quotes
“Don’t worry about people stealing your ideas. If they’re any good, you’ll have to ram them down people’s throats.”
Fear of Flying
Published by marco on in Public Policy & Politics
Did you ever read the Batman comics? One of his enemies was that lawyer who liked to flip a coin, Twoface.[1] He had two completely different personalities and used a coin to decide which one he was going to be … until the next time he decided to flip the coin. It’s unclear exactly what his superpower was, but that’s Batman for you. There is now ample evidence that airport security policy around the world is being created by this guy, except his two personalities are Terry Gilliam and George... [More]
14 Reasons
Published by marco on in Public Policy & Politics
This post, Articles of Impeachment against Bush and Cheney (Daily Kos), lists the most egregious offenses of the Bush junta over the last six years. Naturally, since it’s on the Daily Kos (which isn’t necessarily so much lefty as staunchly Democrat), they note that the impeachment must affect “both Bush and Cheney … It will not do any good for us to impeach Bush and have Cheney take the Oval Office”. A relatively obvious conclusion to which any analyst (who can think at least one move ahead) would have... [More]
Welcome to the Club (Officially)
Published by marco on in Public Policy & Politics
In an interview just a few days ago, Ehud Olmert had an interesting slip of the tongue; here’s the quote:
“Iran openly, explicitly, and publicly threatens to wipe Israel off the map. Can you say that this is the same level, when they [the Iranians] are aspiring to have nuclear weapons, as America, France, Israel, Russia?”
As discussed recently in Robert Gates Confirmed as US Secretary of Defense (earthli News) (first footnote), the “wipe Israel off the map…” comment has become accepted truth. Ahmadinejad,... [More]