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Burned by MLB and DRM
I know this isn’t really business related, but I thought I’d write a post about this problem just in case anybody knows a solution. In late 2004, after the Red Sox won the World Series, I purchased the downloadable broadcasts of all of their playoff games from Major League Baseball. That came to about 20…
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WebSphere Portal isn’t as horrible as I thought…
I remember several years back I was flipping through the pay cable channels and lucked into a stand-up show by Paul Rodriguez at San Quentin prison. Through the magic of Google, here’s a link to the DVD. The concert was in 1995, apparently, so I guess it really was a while ago. As I recall,…
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The Spring Framework outranks private
I’ve been using the Spring framework for about a year now (or maybe more — it’s amazing how fast time goes by these days). I’ve also been teaching courses in it using Capstone Courseware materials. As is normal with Capstone materials, they tend to skip quickly through the “Hello, World!” version of whatever technology they’re…
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When is EJB not Java EE?
The answer is, when it’s and EJB3 plug-in inside JBoss 4. I’ve been playing with the EJB3 spec a lot recently, especially working with the Java Persistence API (JPA) portion for entities. I’ve said it before here, but I’ll say it again — I really like the way it’s put together. (With one exception, of…
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Quick moment to gloat before the Yankees start hitting again…
Everyone says you should stop and smell the roses, right? My own variation on that line is, whenever you find yourself in a good position, be sure to enjoy it, because everything changes. Well, the Red Sox are currently 36-15, the Yankees are 21-29, and the difference between them is a whopping 14 1/2 games.…
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My winding career path
I got a question today about why I left the aerospace engineering to become a software developer and trainer, especially when the aerospace field is so popular at the moment. I’ll assume for the sake of argument that the questioner is right about the popularity of aerospace engineering. I don’t know any more, for obvious…
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Groovyness with Excel and XML
Today in class one of the students mentioned that they need to read data from an Excel spreadsheet supplied by one of their clients and transform the data into XML adhering to their own schema. I’ve thought about similar problems for some time and looked at the various Java APIs for accessing Excel. I spent…
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Brush with (semi-)greatness
This week I’m teaching an XML class in NYC. It’s actually a basic XML class along with some XML schema training, in order to help the client work with data coming from external sources. I’ll know more when the class starts tomorrow, but I expect to work with fairly sophisticated schemas. Since the class is…
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The SOA bandwagon
Just a quick post this morning from sunny Dover, Delaware. I’m doing an XML class this week with a brief introduction to web services. Web services is hot, but mostly because the buzzwords “service oriented architecture” is hot. I can understand the motivation: high level IT executives see all these systems they’ve spent so many…
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Focusing on what’s important
At the No Fluff, Just Stuff conference I attended last week, I managed to talk to a couple of the presenters and quietly ask about the rates they charge. That’s always a dicey subject, of course, but it’s very hard to get good information about that. Software trainers don’t have a union, or anything like…