Discursive

Yesterday, I decided it was time to test out some ideas about storing content in CouchDB. I just wanted to get some preliminary numbers on performance, but I also wanted to see how the thing would scale after loading 10 GB worth of data. So, I went about this by...

As a co-author of Harnessing Hibernate, I get to hear about some of the feedback the book has received from time to time. James recently shared a letter he received about the book, a real "letter": signed, sealed, and delivered by the United States Postal Service. How archaic? Someone decided to read a computer book, type up a letter, and mail a physical artifact.

Steven Pinker has cardiac hypertrophy (or Ventricular Hypertrophy also known as althlete's heart). On it's own this is a wholly uninteresting fact to most people, it isn't something you'd bring up in normal conversation, "Oh, hey did you know that the esteemed cognitive scientist Steven Pinker has athlete's heart?"

I just had an odd exchange, someone has a great piece of open source software that I totally depend upon, it's a complex beast of a thing, and I wanted to a.) express gratitude, b.) offer some help with the build. You see the build for this particular system is an Ant build script with a preamble of instructions, and the project itself is this megalith of code in one big src/ directory. Every time I want to use some new component that is in development, I have to download someone's tarball, uncompress the thing and then fish around for JAR artifacts to upload to central.

Very often someone shows up on the Maven User list with a question along the lines of: How can I get Maven to compile my project using dependencies? Your help is very much appreciated." I usually translate this into: "I'm a student who has just been asked to use Maven and I want you to do my homework." Or worse, "My boss wants me to learn Maven, will you learn it for me and after you are done send me detailed instructions. I am too lazy to read the free book." These emails are obvious, you can see them a mile away... very often they go ignored for days and days.