03.02.12

3,000+ Page Views a Month!

Posted in Blogroll, News, Photos, Random Thoughts at 12:22 am by Liv

In case you haven’t guessed it, yup, I’m talking about this very blog hitting a new milestone and hitting over 3,000 page views a month! I know this doesn’t sound like much for a “serious” website, but for something like this blog it IS a lot! Even more so as a lot more of the traffic nowadays seems to hit my technical articles — though, granted, there’s still quite a bit of traffic from people (my mates I guess?) looking at my pictures from what I can see…

This statistic was pulled from my beloved WassUp WordPress plugin — which this morning (PST) showed me this:

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17.01.12

Advertising or Information?

Posted in Blogroll, News, Photos, Random Thoughts, Tech at 10:52 pm by Liv

This goes out to all you ad skeptics out there who bang on about how useless the internet advertising is and how it should be banned / destroyed / 101′d etc: it is sad that not often advertising is delivered as a complement to the content being viewed, and as such it doesn’t come across as an intrusive piece on the page. However, when it happens, it creates something useful!

I have just experienced something like this just now, looking at some technical article online — and even though I worked for Vibrant Media before, there’s no hidden agenda in highlighting this ad unit I spotted as one such piece of great advertising. (I know I slagged them off in the past as well, hope they don’t take it personally : guys, I’ve slagged off Google more than you, so don’t read too much into it! )

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23.12.11

System Console Support — JDK 1.6

Posted in Blogroll, News, Tech at 12:26 am by Liv

I’m sure some of you have found the need occasionally to use the “console” input/output support provided by the JDK via System.in and System.out — if nothing else just to implement an occasional more complicated command-line “scripty” app to be run in a Linux environment and piped input in or out from/to another program.

The problem so far has been the fact that while System.out is a PrintStream instance — System.in is an InputStream implementation! So while the output deals with characters, the input deals with bytes — and you have to start wrapping it up (through a few layers!) into a BufferedReader so you can read input line by line.

Luckily, JDK 1.6 introduces a nice function on the System class : console() — which does solve these problems.

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19.12.11

Dealing with Java Beans via Apache Bean Utils

Posted in Blogroll, News, Tech at 2:03 am by Liv

Ok some of you are probably already familiar with the Apache Commons‘ BeanUtils framework, so this might not come as a surprise, but I have just discovered recently a class which I found myself in the past implementing bits of, one way or another: the BeanMap class! I swear, when dealing with loading random properties from properties files and trying to map those onto bean properties — going through the whole Reflection API, this can turn into a nightmare. Having worked with the Commons Collections in the past, I spotted the BeanMap class there first (yup, that’s where it started!) and then noticed it’s been deprecated and will be removed. Luckily, Apache Commons team is doing that because this has been (rightly so!) moved now into BeanUtils.

So with that in mind, here’s a nicer way of dealing with setting bean properties on-the-fly.

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11.10.11

I’m a Pretty Good Software Engineer, Me! :D

Posted in Fun Time, News, Photos, Random Thoughts, Tech at 11:20 am by Liv

As some of you know it, there’s been recent discussion about my moving to Silicon Valley. I won’t bore you with the details of what and how and when, but 2 of my colleagues, Rowan Jacobson and Denis Lowe are in the same boat. So being the absolute ejits we are and not having a clue about cost of living and salaries there, we found ourselves recently looking into this using indeed.

The first obvious search to do was “software engineer” — and this is what the site informs us:

OK, cool, so out come this idea — that’s the average figure, right, but how much am *I* going to make? And this is what indeed.com tells us:

(Rowan, sorry bru, you should have known by now that Denis is waaaay above you! )

However, here’s what it looks like for “Liv” (aka me!):

Not only do I rise above Rowan and Denis (who’s your daddy now, boys? ) but I think we can safely say I’m way above average, right?

So as I said in the opening of this entry: I’m pretty fucking good software engineer, me!

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