Long time no post. I don't know where those others guys get all the time....

I installed the del.icio.us Firefox extension today. It removed all of my OTHER Firefox extensions.

So, I wasted a half hour reinstalling them. Real good.

Critical Personality Traits of Programmers is an interesting excerpt

Here is where you can get Dave's Quick Search Taskbar Toolbar Deskbar. It's a free and really useful tool if you're using windoze.
It even has an entry that will take you to the ANT task page.

I just upgraded to Ant 1.5.1 and XDoclet 1.2b2. I was getting this message:

"[ejbdoclet] Make sure the jar file containing the ejbdoclet class is on the classpath specified in the that defined {2}. These classes are needed in order to generate correct output."

Real good. The {2} tells me that they missed a message catalog entry. Not too bad but the real problem had NOTHING to do with what the message says. The xdoclet jars were indeed in my classpath. The problem was that the jar containing javax.ejb was not found (weblogic.jar or j2ee.jar for the sun RI). Obvious huh?

By the way, try running the generated source through checkstyle and see what you get :)

I was up this morning at 4:30 AM. My 18 lb. Maine Coon cat Giacomo wasn't taking no for an answer.
He likes to get on my chest and chew on my chin until I pay attention to him.

So, while I was up I went to the server. I remembered that Phillies tickets were going on sale this morning at 6 am. (Thanks 'mo for getting me up!). http://www.phillies.com/ (and mlb.com) uses a child of the Netscape Application Server (which becamse iPlanet and now SunONE). You can tell by the URLs that they use. So, here it is, 6:01am and I have my games for the year picked out. I try to book them but for an hour and a half. I keep getting redirected to a JSP that says "We're sorry, we were unable to process your request due to high transaction volumes. Please try to submit your request again". Yikes. I'm talking about the Phillies here --you know - the team that was in last place for most of last year. You might expect that from a team with fans. :)
Finally I got through. I booked 3 of the 4 games I wanted but on the fourth I get "Your order was not completed in the required time and has timed-out. If you wish to purchase tickets you must start your order over". Bang...Zoom...To the moon Alice... Is this a way to design a web site?

So, how are they doing it? Are they using Sun servers with Oracle? I can't tell. Are they using EJBs for read only data (at that point I was "browsing" available seats and not booking - which was several pages later). Who developed this site? I wonder what load testing tools/methods they used. I'd like to see their "architecture" too.

This is the Clover: User Guide which is a coverage tool that can be run as an ANT target

Here are Top 10 reasons to go with .Net but none of them
tell you why use .Nyet instead of J2EE.