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Open source bargain

This blog started as a Twitter conversation between me and @realjenius about Ehcache but I needed a little more room to make my point. Ehcache is the most widely used open source Java caching library. Terracotta (my former employer) bought Ehcache last year and I was intimately involved in tending it while I worked at Terracotta … just to make my relationship to this clear. Periodically someone... [Read more]

Strange Loop 2010!

I have released the full schedule for Strange Loop 2010 and it is (in my humble opinion) a truly mind-blowing set of talks and speakers. Check out these keynotes: Guy Steele (Oracle) – “How to Think about Parallel Programming: Not!” Douglas Crockford (Yahoo) – “Heresy and Heretical Open Source: A Heretic’s Perspective” Billy Newport (IBM) – “Enterprise... [Read more]

Mapping relational data to the semantic web

I thought it would be interesting to share some of what we’re working on at Revelytix and also ask for comment on an initial piece of it. I’ll start with a little background first. Much of this is also covered in my recent slides from SemTech and that might be a useful set of complementary pictures. Revelytix is currently working on a project for the US Department of Defense. The aim... [Read more]

?assoc and ->>

I had a need today to take an existing map and put (assoc) a bunch of new key-value pairs into it. Additionally, many of these key-value pairs might have a nil value, in which case I’d prefer to skip the assoc. In particular, I didn’t want to overlay existing keys in the map with a nil, so it was not ok to just drop them and remove/ignore the nils later. So I wrote this null-aware assoc... [Read more]

Redirecting a Google Apps domain to a blog

I fought with this for a few hours tonight so thought I would post it here for the hive mind. I (perhaps foolishly) signed up for Google Apps and registered a domain name in the process. Google registers the domain with GoDaddy.com and properly sets up all the DNS records appropriately (I was happy to avoid that part). Registering for Google Apps standard is free, registering for the domain is $10/year.... [Read more]

St. Louis game dev competition

I’m just passing along an interesting new event that is coming soon – a video game developer competition from a company based here in St. Louis. Here is the info: Hello! My name is Sam Coster. I’m a junior at WashU and am currently employed by WorldKi, a software startup here in St. Louis. On July 13th, 2010, I will announce the theme of our first ever St. Louis Digital Man Competition;... [Read more]

Using records from a different namespace in Clojure

This is something that took me a bit of exploration to figure out so maybe this will help someone. Records are a new feature of Clojure 1.2 that allow you to dynamically generate a compiled Java class with a specific set of fields that can be used as a map with :keyword keys for the fields. It’s still in a bit of flux but it has a lot of nice improvements over the older struct support. The... [Read more]

NetBeans crash recovery

Twice now, I’ve had NetBeans 6.8 with Enclojure fail to start, probably due to an unclean shutdown. On the Mac, you have an option to report the failure and that allow me to at least see all of the offending stack trace and other system information. [On other OS'es I'm not sure how easy it is to get access to this information.] The tell-tale signs look something like this: Current thread (1033cb000):... [Read more]