epmills.com

Evan P. Mills’ Ramblings

Note-to-Self: It’s Not ALL Misery

Filed under: Personal — Evan at 9:33 am on Thursday, September 18, 2008

Look At Me Shirts has a great take on the recent destruction here in Cincy.

Maybe when I get my power back, I’ll be able to order a few.   *sigh*

Source for Cheatsheets

Filed under: Computing, Personal, Software Development, Technology — Evan at 1:17 pm on Tuesday, September 9, 2008

Check out Added Bytes and subscribe to the feeds.

Note-to-Self: Comparison on DVCS Options

Filed under: Personal — Evan at 3:24 pm on Wednesday, July 9, 2008

Check out this blog entry for information on comparing popular distributed version control systems.

Good links to other related information.

Public Data Sets

Filed under: Personal — Evan at 12:36 pm on Wednesday, June 25, 2008

Note to self: check out this post for public data sets that I could use to develop RIAs.

Investigate This, Boy

Filed under: Personal — Evan at 5:38 pm on Friday, June 20, 2008

Note to self: check out LivePipe.

Merge Made by Octopus

Filed under: Computing, Personal — Evan at 11:58 pm on Friday, May 16, 2008

I’ve been coming up to speed on Git and swallowing up every tutorial and blog entry I can find.

A few days ago, I ran into Jonathan Rockway’s very entertaining blog entry Git Merging by Example.  Great read and very instructive.  But I was particularly amused by Jonathan’s quote:

I love the “Merge made by octopus” message; I am seriously going to have a t-shirt made that says that. I like it when sea creatures help maintain my code.

You know what?  I love when sea creatures help out as well.  So, to that end I’ve constructed a little bumper sticker in honor of Git and Jonathan.  Here’s a preview:

Merge Made by Octopus

If you’re interested in getting a hold of one of the bumper stickers, leave a comment.
Sorry it’s not a t-shirt, Jonathan, but maybe someday…

Books on the Cheap

Filed under: Personal — Evan at 5:25 pm on Thursday, May 15, 2008

Note to self: check out AddAll for good values on books, both new and used.

Background Processing in a Spring Web Application

Filed under: Computing, Personal, Software Development, Technology — Evan at 5:46 pm on Thursday, May 1, 2008

From the “Huh, well that’s cool” department…

Today I figured how to run a background process from within a web application that utilizes Spring 2.0 or greater. At first, I investigated all sorts of ways of adding multithreading to a web application before stumbling upon this gem.

The key is that Spring provides a class, TaskExecutor, that allows you to run a background task by simply creating a class that implements the Runnable interface and hooking it up to your application with some simple configuration.

In short, as Spring allows Java web developers to program using POJOs and not against a set of interfaces, TaskExecutor and its cohorts allow us to do background processing using simple classes instead of forcing us to handle the ugly details of multithreading and synchronization ourselves.

Thanks, Spring dudes! Once again, you save the day.
See Chapter 23 of the Spring Framework documentation for more information.

New Public Key

Filed under: Personal — Evan at 9:42 am on Thursday, January 11, 2007

I have a newly-minted GnuPG key that I can use to sign and encrypt emails.

Check the details out here.

Fingers, Mid-December, 2006

Filed under: Personal — Evan at 5:11 pm on Wednesday, December 13, 2006

Well, it’s the middle of December and my fingernails continue to improve.

(Read on …)

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