08.03.13

What Most Schools Don’t Teach…

Posted in Blogroll, Random Thoughts, Tech at 9:44 pm by Liv

If you work in IT, you have probably by now have seen the famous video on YouTube labelled “What most schools don’t teach” — where Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates and a few other prominent figures are talking about how easy it is to program, and how only 10% of the USA schools teach programming. It goes on more to bombard the viewer with some scary figures about how 1,000,000 jobs or more will go unfilled because there are not enough coders — I’m guessing as a motivational message to inspire people (kids?) to start programming.

The thing is, watching the video, I cannot but cringe at the hypocrisy employed in making this video! If the purpose of this message is to increase education efforts (at school level or individually) in the programming sector, then I’d say it probably does it job — in a very lame way, but it sort of does. If however this is intended to be a call to arms for “everyone” to start programming and either change their jobs to a programming job or if they are at the beginning of their career, to set their career path to be in programming, then I’d say the message is a hypocritical one. Even worse, it is setting up the targeted audience for a harsh comedown!

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06.03.13

Goodbye Palo Alto, Hello San Mateo!

Posted in Blogroll, Fun Time, News, Photos at 3:29 pm by Liv

From Cognitive Match‘s new offices in San Mateo:

We say goodbye to our old ones in Palo Alto:

Check out the view from the new office:

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28.02.13

S3 Utility on SourceForge.net

Posted in Blogroll, Tech at 1:48 am by Liv

Only a day after I’ve published the S3 utility for buckets with versioning enabled, I took the time finally to put this on SourceForge — woohoo! Still early stages, as I still need to figure out really how to properly release versions into their file system, but as it stands right now at least there is a basic project page, a wiki and issue tracker — not to mention a Subversion repository with the source code.

So let’s start with the basics:

First of all, the project main page is here: https://SourceForge.net/projects/awsversionmgmt/ . This includes links to the download area: https://SourceForge.net/projects/awsversionmgmt/files/ as well the standard SourceForge issue tracking system: https://SourceForge.net/projects/awsversionmgmt/tickets/. I am still working on planning the releases for this, but for now I’ve just added a few issues I have found for the first official version of this (which would be 1.0.0 — naturally!) — if you’ve already tried this tool (unlikely, it’s only been one day since I put up the original post ), feel free to suggest some enhancements using the SourceForge tracking tool.

Also I have created a wiki here: https://SourceForge.net/projects/awsversionmgmt/wiki/. The idea behind it is to make this a dev-oriented wiki — i.e. propose upcoming features and architectures etc. And last but not least, I’ve also managed to deploy the maven-generated site on the project website: http://awsversionmgmt.SourceForge.net.

With that in mind, I think I’ve successfully manage to transfer the project to SourceForge so I’ll maintain it there — though quite likely you will see the occasional blog post here when a new milestone is reached. drop me a line if you want to get involved.

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27.02.13

Utility for Version-Enabled AWS S3 Buckets

Posted in Blogroll, Tech at 8:01 pm by Liv

OK, Amazon, I have to tell you something: you dropped the ball a bit on this one! I absolutely love AWS and every day I seem to find something new about them (though, granted, not sure if that says something about the innovation in Amazon or it says something about my ignorance!?). However, having used S3 for a while, I have been waiting for a while for an utility like this that in the end I had to write it myself!

The problem that I have is that I use a few buckets where I have enabled Amazon’s versioning feature on the bucket. This means every time I write a file, S3 stores all the versions of a file, which is so cool because I can keep a full trail of each file changes, together with metadata around it. However, the problem arrives when you delete a file: any S3 file browser you get (including Amazon’s own web based one) shows that the file is no longer there, however, if you proceed to delete all the files in the bucket and then try to delete the bucket, you will get an error message which informs that in fact the bucket is not empty (and as such it cannot be deleted)! If you start digging into it, you will find that AWS API offers a specific set of functions for versioning — and once you employ those you start seeing that your bucket is far from empty and has lots of versions in it; unfortunately those versions are not visible because the file has been deleted, however, unless you delete these versions you cannot delete the bucket (not to mention that they are being stored in S3 in stealth “ninja” mode taking space — and costing you money).

That’s when I started looking for an utility who can deal with this, but up to now, I wasn’t that lucky. And the rule of today’s software tools says that if it’s not there it’s time to write one! Hence this utility — and the post here where I’m offering it for download.

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25.02.13

First Steps with Jolokia

Posted in Blogroll, News, Tech at 2:36 am by Liv

In a (rather old) previous post I have talked about using Sun (ahem Oracle!) JMX/HTML bridge to manage and monitor your applications. As it happens, that agent has been discontinued and due to various licensing issues (I’m guessing) one can’t even download it normally from a maven repo, and has to rely on all sorts of hacks to include the required jar in the application. Also, one of the downsides of that — while a small price to pay though! — is that you have to write some code to start the agent when your app starts.

In exchange of the (rather small) piece of code that you write to start the agent, you get in exchange a fully-fledged HTML-based app which allows you to inspect and change your managed beans. The trouble with that though — while a very handy tool otherwise! — is that it provides all the data in HTML and all the requests made to the agent are HTTP GET only. This means that if you need to query one attribute of one of your beans, you will have to employ some curl-ing (eeeeassy!) and some HTML parsing (ouch!). Do-able, even more so as the agent uses very simple HTML and the structure of the pages is always the same — but a bit cumbersome at times. Also, unfortunately complex data structures cannot be set or displayed easily using that tool.

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