The Frustrated Programmer

Generate Swim TCX files for TrainingPeaks or Garmin Connect from Swim Data

2012-01-29T21:16:00.006-05:00

I like to keep the data around from my Swimmovate PoolMate and entering the details into TrainingPeaks is very cumbersome. So I wrote a quick script to generate TCX files that can be uploaded. Its very simple:#!/bin/bashfunction do_lap() { LAP_TIME=`expr $LAP_MINUTES \* 60` LAP_TIME=`expr $LAP_TIME + $LAP_SECONDS` echo " " >> $START_DATE.tcx echo " <

Fixing Napster Album Art

2006-12-26T23:03:00.000-05:00

UPDATE: Added more diagnostics to the code. If you were having issues, run it again and post the output to in a comment.UPDATE2: Changed the second regular expression to be a little more loose. Hopefully this will resolve some of the problems.UPDATE3: Blogger was removing some code that it thought was HTML causing an endless loop in the script. If you tried the script and it was just hanging,

Promiscuous Performance Monitoring

2004-11-14T14:27:00.000-05:00

At work we have a lot of issues with monitoring and logging. We run a lot of different services as EJBs in Weblogic clusters. They get a lot of use, so much so, that logging can actually make a real performance problem. The main issues are: The logs are not aggregated in any one place. There are a lot of ad-hoc scripts to do remote greps via ssh. Any type of central aggregation will cause

Interesting Browser Trend...

2004-11-13T23:44:00.000-05:00

For the first 6 months of this blogs life, the browser usage of my visitors looked something like this: IEs: 15% Mozillas 79% Others: 6% Now that things have slowed down, their browser usings looks like this: IEs: 42% Mozillas 52% Others: 6% What is happening to Mozilla's market share? Nothing really. My analysis goes like this; When I used to post several times a week, my visitors were

On the road again...

2004-10-03T09:57:00.000-04:00

I started a new job last month, which is why I haven't blogged in a while. I enjoyed working at a small Java consulting company, but the margins are too small, and life is a little too uncertain for me. I'll never forget two quotes from the most recent project I worked on: Early on in the project, a new developer was reporting on his progress of creating XML config files for Jasper reports. He

C/C++ access to remote EJBs

2004-08-28T19:32:00.000-04:00

Last year you wrote some middleware using EJBs. This year your boss tells you that a C++ client needs to talk to those beans. You consider SOAP, but are dicouraged by reading about its performace. Papers showing http://www.sc2000.org/techpapr/papers/pap.pap261.pdf">SOAP is 100 to 1000 times slower than RMI are all over the place. Even with the newest pull parsers it still can't meet your

Why use an IDE?

2004-08-24T21:44:00.000-04:00

Kelly was a hard-core emacs user, while I used vi. We went our separate ways when Fusura.com imploded. In the last year I've fallen in love with IDEA, but the reasons I use it are common to most IDEs. Now that we are working at the same company again, I've tried to explain these reasons to Kelly with no results. This is an open letter to him in an attempt to explain why spending a few hours up

Null-less Java

2004-08-19T23:53:00.000-04:00

I was reading about Null Pointer Exceptions today, and finally read up on Nice. They had this to say about NullPointer exceptions: To prevent [a NullPointerException], a reference must be tested before use. However it is easy to forget to do so. Furthermore, there are references that are never null, or rather that should never be. Testing such references clutters the code. Nice provides the

Java's Most Wanted

2004-08-13T00:12:00.000-04:00

With 50% more votes than its nearest enhancement request, Bug #4977599 , "Provide documentation in Chinese" is the most requested out there. The author of the original request posted his thoughts on a chinese technical bulliten board. Sun's response to this request is: Thanks for the comments and support. Currently, we only localize documents into Japanese due to business requirement. We will

Oracle's TO_DATE() v. Java's Calendar - WEEK_OF_YEAR

2004-08-09T22:14:00.000-04:00

I hit an interesting bug in java.util.GregorianCalendar today. I was writing some reporting code that needed to find the number of widgets sold for each week of the year. I found the current week of the year from Calendar using get(WEEK_OF_YEAR), then selected the sum of selected the sum of widgets sold where TO_DATE( sale_date, 'WW' ) = ?. The documentation for each week of year calculation is

An Analysis of Struts's Dependency Injection

2004-08-07T22:11:00.000-04:00

Inversion of Control/Dependency Injection are still big buzz words. Popularity continues to grow for IoC "containers", notably: Springframework Picocontainer In general these reduce couplings between components, letting the IoC container piece your objects together. Struts has some built-in functionality for supporting IoC on data sources, form beans and actions. Data Sources A data source

XHTML - Not your father's HTML

2004-08-05T10:09:00.000-04:00

Dan Cederholm, web design guru, recently posted another quiz on his site. He was asking how to represent an address in HTML. The most popular was this:

ABC Widgets, Inc.
100 - 1234 West Main Street
Anytown, State
Zip
Ph: 555-555-1234
Fax: 555-555-1234

This is great if your looking for a compact solution to display a simple

Blogger.com wish list

2004-08-04T13:26:00.000-04:00

I don't want this to turn into 'The Frustrated Blogger', but here are a list of the wish list items I've submitted to blogger. If you use blogger, please let them know you want these too. Use an Open support system. Something like bugzilla, where I can see what is happening to my trouble tickets and enhancement requests. Bugzilla also supports voting, picking off new features to implement

Blogger.com preview bug

2004-08-03T23:56:00.000-04:00

This posting is used to describe a bug in Blogger.com's preview mode to their customer support. When publishing a Post in Blogger.com, the Post is converted into a single line in HTML. Whitespace doesn't matter in HTML, so its really not a big deal. Unless of course, you use the

 tag, like I do in this blog in almost every post. Fortunately, I also use 'Convert line breaks', which converts

Another Warning About Session Scoped Struts Forms

2004-08-03T00:04:00.000-04:00

This blog entry talked about some great issues with session scoped struts forms. I found another one the hard way today: When I added some properties to my session scope form in struts today, I modified my action to pass those properties to the business logic, recompiled, redeployed. But I ended up with: StandardWrapperValve[action]: Servlet.service() for servlet action threw exception

Handy Tip for Profiling JSP Tags

2004-08-01T21:24:00.000-04:00

I was profiling our application with optimizeIt looking for memory leaks when I noticed that the tag library DisplayTag was holding on to my lists of objects. I looked in the source and it was letting go of the list in the release() method, just like it should. I couldn't figure it out, so I called a friend who had done his homework and read the specs. He explained the behavior a lot better than

How do you serialize and deserialize object graphs in your UI framework?

2004-08-01T02:16:00.000-04:00

One of the beautiful features of Hibernate is that you can finally work with objects in your persistence layer. Once your mappings are setup, you can keep playing with object oriented code. Why don't we have anything like this with UI frameworks? Currently if I have the following classes in my object model. Cat is a nomal object/table, and gender is an enumeration/lookup table. public class

Email address obfuscation, who are we kidding?

2004-07-30T00:03:00.000-04:00

So picture it, as a last resort you've taken a job for your local spam house. Your task is to harvest email addresses. They need a programmer to come up with some new ways to populate their database of known addreses. What is the first thing you do? I'd go after: foo AT bar DOT com 'obfuscated' addresses Hex encoded addresses JavaScript 'encoded' addresses foo@REMOVEbar.com

Anatomy of a Regex

2004-07-27T13:42:00.000-04:00

In a recent post by Jason Bell, he asks for some help with a regex for validating email addresses. A commenter suggested this: ^[a-zA-Z0-9][_\\-\\.\\w]*@[\\w\\.\\-]+\\.[a-zA-Z]{2,4}$ If it makes sense I'm going to break it down into its pieces: 1) [a-zA-Z0-9] - Match 1 letter or number 2) [_\\-\\.\\w]* - Match 0 or more of: _ - . or a letter or number 3) @ - The @ character 4) [\\w\\.\\-]+ -

Still no Dynamic Forwards in Struts 1.2.1?

2004-07-23T10:15:00.000-04:00

It not pretty, but in large web applications, you need to pass around data in the URL from time to time. Usually it has to do with passing something about the state of the application. Its either this or put it in the session. I don't like the session because: Everything you put in the session can bog down performance if you need to replicate your session for failover. Its too hard to keep

An idea for Struts that didn't quite work

2004-07-22T11:44:00.000-04:00

For some reason I'm always tempted to cram as much as I can into a single action definition in the struts-config.xml. Its mostly due to laziness. But I also like grouping related features together like CRUD (create, read, update, delete). The thing about CRUD is, three of the four pieces (create, update and delete) can produce errors. This conflicts with my goal in two ways: 1 - You can only

Caching in web application -- A real comparison

2004-07-19T23:54:00.000-04:00

To be honest, all the web applications I've written so far have always disabled page caching. But even though this application has multiple users that access the same data concurrently, they business owners wanted to turn on page caching. I agree that the back button warning from IE is really annoying, but I let them know some of the issues that go along with caching, and we agreed to give it a

IE Bug and Struts -- Forms with one input and DispatchAction

2004-07-19T22:55:00.000-04:00

Ever have a form with multiple submit buttons? Well, if you hit enter in one of the text inputs, browsers will act like the first button on the form was pressed. Unless, of course, the form only has one text input. Then it doesn't matter if you have several other types of inputs or none at all, IE will not send any button related information to the server. Its very consistent about this across

Java for loop syntax for Iterators

2004-07-19T14:49:00.000-04:00

Recently I found myself writing for loops that use Iterators a little differently. I used to write loops like this: Iterator fooIter = bar.getFoos(); Foo foo; while( fooIter.hasNext() ) { foo = (Foo)fooIter.next(); [...] } And now I've moved to this: for( Iterator fooIter = bar.getFoos().iterator(); fooIter.hasNext(); ) { Foo foo = (Foo)fooIter.next(); [...] }

Struts 1.2.1 MappingDispatchAction

2004-07-18T03:54:00.000-04:00

As noted in my last blog entry, Struts's DispatchAction never really integrated with other pieces of the framework. That entry talked about canceling validation, this entry covers kicking off validation. We'll take a look at the MappingDispatchAction introduced in Struts 1.2.1, but lets first look at the problem it was introduced to fix. Say we have the following forms: =========buddyList.jsp=

Struts 1.2.1 Cancel Handlers

2004-07-17T00:10:00.000-04:00

When Struts introduced the DispatchAction, people initially thought it was a great idea, until it started to break down in the real world. One of those points of break down is canceling a form (and bypassing validation). See, Struts normally only looks for the parameter org.apache.struts.actoin.CANCEL to indicate cancellation of a form. But if a form has multiple buttons and uses DispatchAction

Always use ${basedir} in your Ant paths with Anthill

2004-07-16T17:26:00.000-04:00

Like most build servers, Anthill's current working directory is the directory you kicked off your build server in, not nessesarily the directory your build.xml is located in. So don't use relative paths in your build.xml, always prepend ${basedir} to the begining. should be Note:

JSP page precompiling in Tomcat5

2004-07-16T14:13:00.000-04:00

JSP precompilation is a good thing for a couple reasons: -Better error checking - Errors can be caught at compile-time rather than run-time. -Faster - Compiling pages is slow. Compiling pages during your build process means a user will never have to wait for a page to compile. For our project, speed was one of the main drivers for implmenting precompiling. At our current stage we give a lot of

Performance problems...

2004-07-16T12:02:00.000-04:00

"The app is slow in QA, can you take a look?" "Sure..." -It turns out it takes 10 seconds to load one key page in the system. -Telnet to the box, and look at the load average, vmstat and io stat - Everything is ok. -Telnet to the database, do the same - Everything is ok. -Turn on P6Spy in the hibernate.proeprties -Look at the log files - 10 queries are taking over .5 seconds. Most are related

Round trip modeling tools

2004-07-16T01:55:00.000-04:00

This is a rehash of ideas from the original extreme programming book, but the question came up again today at work. A new engineer at the company sent out a mail asking people which tools they prefer and why. Most people responded with Visio since its easy. Personally, my preferences is GML. For small designs (which is 90% of the time) I just want enough to get feedback from my peers, nothing

Time to find a new web-based RSS aggregator

2004-07-14T15:06:00.000-04:00

I've been using FastBuzz for a few months now. It had almost everything I wanted, but now its now longer giving me new content. I'm pretty bummed, so I'm searching for a new tool. Update: Fastbuzz is working again! It still has its short comings, see below, but its still better than the competition. Update: I mailed FastBuzz about this matrix and got a good response including "Thank you for the

Why I don't really like Aspect Oriented Programming (AOP)

2004-07-13T22:23:00.000-04:00

-Untyped - In all the Aspect languages I've seen, when you ccode and compile your aspect, there is no type checking to ensure the generated code will run. Strong type checking is one of my favorite pieces of Java, I don't like the idea of loosing this. -Hard to test - How can you unit test an aspect in isolation? If I can't test it in isolation, I have to system test it. This opens it up for more

Struts forms with multiple buttons

2004-07-08T08:53:00.000-04:00

If you have a form with multiple buttons on it, when your action is invoked you need to find out which button was pressed. Usually this is done by each button passing the same parameter with a different value. Something like this: [...] You could use a

Backporting Java APIs

2004-07-08T08:37:00.000-04:00

Problems like this are common in opensource projects because they want to work in as many JDK version as possible, but want to use decent APIs. I've also been on two projects now where we've had to implement a wrapper to simulate the JDK1.4 Regex APIs in JDK1.3 using the Jakarta regex package. This is slowly becoming a non-issue as people migrate past JDK1.3, but has anyone seen an opensource

Passwords in the Database

2004-07-07T14:16:00.000-04:00

I was recently tasked with adding authentication to our application. We had a database filled with users and passwords, but the old middleware vendor we were using was reluctant to give us the algorithm used to encrypt the passwords. Well, they did tell us it was DES, but refused to give us the key, or the ascii encoding algorithm used to store the binary data as a string in the database. This

Mozilla makes a (relatively) big dent in IEs market share

2004-07-06T22:16:00.000-04:00

http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp This is great news for web standards. Maybe by this time next year, we'll actually have some browser wars again. Well, some crude (Excel trend lines) analysis says that it Mozilla won't overtake IE until March 2006. But, competition is, of course, a great thing. My only worry is will it be too late with technologies like XAML gaining steam.

Database schema diff tool?

2004-07-06T20:05:00.000-04:00

Any takers from the 0 people who read this blog? Toad has a nice tool, but Toad is of course expensive. I have a shell script I hacked together a while back to solve this problem. Its oracle specific, but could be easily modified to work on another database. In a nutshell, it talks to sqlplus to get a list of tables, dumps the schema ('desc' output) to a file. It does this for each database,

Attn Java Devopers: Web standards have evolved!

2004-07-02T12:07:00.000-04:00

Good Java developers have done a great job of keep their skills up with respect to -Java APIs -Design Patterns -3rd Party Applications / Tools But man.. their UI skills are week. Most applications are still developing without CSS, with HTML instead of XHTML. This leads to sites that are less accessable and hard to render consistently across multiple browsers (amoung other things). If this is old

JspException.getRootCause() is completely unrelated to Throwable.getCause()

2004-07-02T11:23:00.000-04:00

Are you kidding me?!?!?! What a waste of an hour! Man.. that is so lame.. whats worse is the contructor for JspException takes a cause, but assigns it to rootCause, and doesn't pass it to its parent class, so your left thinking your doing the right thing..grrr Here is the code in my error.jsp to display the exception. ByteArrayOutputStream ostr = new ByteArrayOutputStream();

Struts page flow

2004-06-30T12:28:00.000-04:00

When you have a page that needs some data to display (like a list of items), you usually populate the request in your struts action. But if that page is also a form.. things start to break down. Here's what I mean:

OPML Export

2004-06-29T15:31:00.001-04:00

I use www.fastbuzz.com. Its a great site, but just in case it dies an unexpected death, here is my current reading list. Fastbuzz Subscriptions Tue Jun 29 12:30:42 PDT 2004 paulkilroy paulkilroy@yahoo.com *Name The problem is, in my validation.xml I also have this:

Blank Screens in Struts

2004-06-28T14:52:00.000-04:00

If an input is not configured correctly (typo or just non existent), the error is not propogated to the user. Instead just a blank screen is presented to the user. This bug is related.

M&M's Math

2004-06-15T15:24:00.000-04:00

So I grab a pack of M&M's from the vending machine. I pour 5 of them into my hand and notice there are only two colors present. I do this again, with the same result. And finally a third time with the same result. In this bag of M&M's there are 6 colors, Red, Blue, Yellow, Orange, Brown and Green. So the odds of this happening are???

Dynamic HTML Forms and Struts

2004-06-15T12:23:00.000-04:00

Struts is an excellent framework for simple forms with a static number of fields on them, but when you need to present a fairly dynamic form, struts starts to stumble pretty quickly. Today the customer came to me with a change request to add text inputs next to what had previously just been a dynamic list of 'options' from the database: (*new column*) [x] Option 1 ______________

Log Monitoring

2004-06-10T13:40:00.000-04:00

'We need to start monitoring our logs. There are errors we are missing and not filling as defects.'... I go on to explain the following: -Our current error log messages do not include enough state about the error. Things such as IDs of objects need to be included in the messages. -Logs files can first be monitored by hand, but later can be automated with log4j custom appenders. At my last job we

Struts 'Dyna' beans

2004-06-09T11:28:00.000-04:00

These beans seem less and less cool every day (Yeah, I know I'm the only one on the planet that is still using them). Today I get the following error: org.apache.commons.beanutils.ConversionException: Cannot assign value of type 'java.math.BigDecimal' to property 'foo' of type 'java.lang.String' org.apache.struts.action.DynaActionForm.set(DynaActionForm.java:423)

Colors on a Print View

2004-06-09T10:51:00.000-04:00

'Your next task is to clean up the print view and add the servicable grid...' 'You know, these green and red symbols we are using for indicators don't really convey the same meaning in black and white printouts.' 'Its ok, just get it done'. Do I mention that 10% of men in the United States are green/red color blind? No, I'm too beat down and its only 10:00 AM.