Archive 2/2008

Today somehow felt like Xmas. First thing I read in the morning: Adobe released AIR 1.0. Next thing: Adobe released Flex 3.

[via heise.de]

A few hours ago, Heather Champ of Flickr made this post on the official Flickr blog and introduced me to something that I absolutely want to give a try: Scattered Images. That's basically a single image composed of tons of other images (all of the same object or scene) but thanks to different weather, light conditions or camera settings it looks like a mosaik (or in some cases as if seen through a crystal). On the left side you can see my own first attempt with this (sorry, had nothing better within reach right now :P).

For some examples, check out Rob Birze's astonishing collection.

Burnout Paradise is probably one of the biggest time-suckers of all times. Since I bought it about 3 weeks ago, I've been spending most of my free time on it. So far it took me about 25 hours to complete around 65% of the game. It was definitely a risky move by Criterion to make Burnout more an open-world game, but at least for me, Burnout Paradise could become my favorite installment of the franchise. I started with Burnout 2 on the Playstation 2 and so far only missed out Burnout Dominator, which I still plan to get, but none of them (perhaps with the exception of Burnout 3 got me that excited).

For the last 2 years I've now been a Dreamhost-customer. I initially moved there simply because of the price. It's really hard to beat 9USD per month for tons of disk space and bandwidth, not to mention FastCGI support in addition to the usual LAMP-stuff. But then the first problems started when I noticed that it was kind of a rocky road to a mid-size configuration marathon to get for instance Django running there probably due to a really weird server config.

[Picture based on Sailing by Bob Jagendorf (cc)]

Sometimes I'm really blind. For the last couple of months I was all the time having some problems with serializing JavaBeans that I get out of Hibernate into JSON and often got an error like this:

java.lang.NoSuchMethodException: Property 'delegate' has no getter method

I always knew that it had to be something with the whole proxy-layer Hibernate uses for handling for instance lazy referencing, but for some reason I never really actually did anything against it but rewrite the code to build the JSONObjects more or less manually.

As part of a project I'm working on I'm currently moving tons of data between servers and clients using JSON. Since all components are written in Java I was looking for a simple yet customizable JSON library and eventually ended up using Json-lib which let's you easily serialize a JavaBean into a JSON-string. While looking through the network traffic yesterday, I noticed a small problem, though: When you convert for instance an Integer property of the bean and this Integer is currently a null-pointer, Json-lib will make a 0 out of it. While in most cases probably a good idea, in my particular case it's simply the wrong way of handling the null-reference since 0 has a different semantic in that particular bean.

commons-httpclient is for me perhaps one of the most useful libraries in Java when it comes to doing HTTP requests. It not only abstracts HTTP logically but at the same time keeps you at a low enough level. That said, it still abstracts some stuff perhaps a little bit too far away for some use cases.

The 2nd day started with quite a surprise when I came to the university at about 0830 just to find out that I had forgotten that the actual meeting time for the organizing team had been set to 0900 instead of 0830 I was also really sad when I noticed, that in the end so many people either didn't come at all or came only for the first day (or even only for a couple of hours on the first day). That said, the 2nd day was still great fun again

Big day, not so big presentation My primary goal here is, to introduce the idea of CSS frameworks as described for instance by Jeff Croft et al. After that, I also started giving a really brief overview about Blueprint, YUI and YAML.

Enjoy

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Puh, first day of BarCamp SenzaConfini 2008 in Klagenfurt is over. Tons of presentations by people all over the region (Austria, Germany, Italy, Slovenia, ...) and a couple of really stupid outages of Twitter