Apparently “nosql” databases are becoming very useful in …

I took some time today to discuss ‘less typical’ database options with some co-workers. So apparently “nosql” databases are becoming very useful in environments that are under very high loads. (From what I’m reading it sounds like this is a very small use case, yet, interesting none-the-less.)

Here’s a good blog article my friend Bill Hathaway pointed me to.
http://www.eflorenzano.com/blog/post/my-thoughts-nosql/
(Oh, read the reason for the title of the blog… it cracked me up…)

My friend Bill Kratzer, who started me on this topic, pointed me to Cassandra and CouchDB. So it sounds like the real interesting part of these technologies is how they manage replication and high availability. I suppose when implementing complex replication, removing the complexity of supporting a fully relational database makes things easier/possible.

I think my next step is to get familiar with these and then see if once I understand these tools better, will I then be more apt to spotting opportunities to use them, and maybe do things that I previously thought would too large an undertaking.

Contract First Economic Confessions

Wow.. It is not easy to blog when work is busy…

I wrote a spring contract-first web service using jaxb object marshalling. That was fun. It looks like a really clean way to create and maintain a web service. Although removing maven and adding only the necessary jars to prevent bloat was very difficult. Seems like something like that just shouldn’t take so much time.

Finished reading “Confessions of an Economic Hitman”. Great book. It did seem a bit like conspiracy theory, but on the other hand, my guess would be that much of it is probably true. Difficult to tell. Certainly I won’t look at foreign debt or the death of foreign leaders the same again.

No Tag Commit – SVN Pre Commit Perl

So a couple of days ago, I was using the automated build process and it tried to create a tag in SVN. But the creation failed stating that I could not commit to a tag.

Then I realized, oh yeah, that’s the SVN pre-commit hook I wrote to prevent tags from being changed once created. (The tag name causing the error had previously been created.) Unlike CVS tags, SVN ‘tags’ can actually be committed to. I’m sure committing to a tag is useful to some developers, but for me, a tag is a read-only concept. I don’t want the ability to accidentally commit to a tag. So I wrote this pre-commit hook, based on some of the existing contrib examples, to prevent committing to a tag and it has saved me from myself multiple times.

View no-tag-commit-pre-commit.pl
Download no-tag-commit-pre-commit.pl

I find this hook very useful and I thought others might as well. I’ve tried submitting it as a patch to be added to the contrib folder of the SVN project, but I was told that SVN will be getting rid of the “contrib/” folder soon.

Corporate Vault

I’m having some fun trying to create an open source project on source forge for my Corporate Vault application I’ve written in Grails. I think my source forge request is in the approval stage. This should be fun, this is my first source forge project.

The blurb I’ve submitted about it is: “A roles and group based password management web application designed for businesses to store passwords. Written in Grails, Groovy and Java.”

So my co-workers and I did not find any corporate oriented password management systems available at a cost effective price. We didn’t have many requirements other then to share passwords for resources between employees in a secure way. It needed a way of granting people access to specific resources, as well as groups of people and groups of resources.

Simple enough right? I’ve written this application in Grails and had a great time doing it. The Grails Hibernate Criteria Builder rocks! I made extensive use of it to implement fairly complex security.

A huge thanks goes out to my friend Dan, (thanks buddy!). He was instrumental with getting me up and running with Groovy and Grails, and debugging issues as I progressed.

I’m not exactly pleased with the name “Corporate Vault”, by the way, so I welcome any suggestions.

It would be really neat if this were to take off, although I know I have a lot of work left to do with little spare time. Wish me luck!

RRD4J Demo Graph and Code

Neat, so I ran the RRJ4D demo and it produced this graph:

RRD4J Demo Generated Graph

Pretty cool I thought. Here’s the Demo Code that came with the project which created the that graph.

Cheap Labor

Excerpt from http://www.w3.org/TR/turingtest/

… Part of the CAPTCHA Project at Carnegie Mellon University, where the technique was developed, was a group intended to defeat new CAPTCHAs as they were created. One of the first documented attacks on the system was by a Carnegie Mellon student, who associated CAPTCHA images with access to an adult Web site, thus gaining free human labor to crack the authentication. …

Now that’s creative. Create an adult web site and use the website visitors as cheap labor with out them knowing it…. Fantastic!

RRD

RRD seems cool and useful.

Command Line RRD:
http://oss.oetiker.ch/rrdtool/

All Java RRD:
https://rrd4j.dev.java.net/