mike.mainguy

I thought I'd do a quick comparison of web frameworks to see how popularity is trending nowadays per google trends. I realized this is has some serious drawbacks, but as a person who has been in the j2ee space for years, I find the trend very interesting. The trend is clear, if you're an ace J2EE super guru, you are about in the same position as a yii developer. While you're experience might be transferrable, the days of java containers ruling the universe appear to be numbered. To do some other interesting comparisions, let's look at java specifically. This roughly supports my observation that Struts is dying off, spring is holding stead, and gwt...while making a big splash a few years ago seems to be tapering off. These numbers are a little deceptive because back in 2005 a lot of the "up and coming" frameworks, languages, and tools didn't even exist. So let's take a look at just the upstarts. I've included rails because it's...

The hazards of the unknown unknowns or how to avoid Running off the jetway This scene illustrates an all too common problem in any field, and is one that I've encountered over and over again. We often entrust major decisions to folks who don't have enough information or are working with major assumptions about the situation that are incorrect. In this example, Jim Carrey's character is running furiously to get a briefcase back to it's owner, and when stopped (because the airplane has left), he assumes that his status as a Limo driver entitles him to board the plane even when no one else is allowed. The critical piece of information he was missing was that it wasn't simply his lack of status that was the reason he couldn't board the plane, but the fact that the plane had already left. This is a lot like many computer 'experts' who claim that because of their status, they can ignore warnings or requests from others because 'They know better...

I have a long love/hate relationship with running and I think that it's a great metaphor to help explain the subtle differences between agile practices and traditional development. My kids have been bitten by the running bug and they devote a lot of time to cross country and track. More importantly, they have trained for running longer distances and therefor better understand the importance of preparation, pace, and form. As a person who spends a lot of time playing soccer, the idea of NOT running as fast as possible still requires a LOT of mental energy. On the rare occasion that I still get out running longer distances with my kids, they routinely tell me to slow down for the first mile... then they scratch their heads because I burned myself out blazing through the first mile in 7-8 minutes. In software development, agile practices are the equivalent of the type of running done in soccer... you are actively changing direction, reacting to things on the field and using s...

So I thought I'd investigate SAAS online chat components and I consulted the almighty google and selected my first contender. boldchat seemed like a good option until I discovered it seemed to need an exe to function. As I'm a max/linux snob, this immediately removed it from the running. My next contender was selected from a post on Stack Overflow was olark . I'll have to say that from the get-go, this seems like a very fully featured and easy to use tool. I was up and running within 5 minutes. After toying with this for a bit, I'm really quite impressed. If you need a quick and easy online chat on your web property, olark is a great way to get moving quickly. Questions? Feedback? powered by Olark live chat software

What character encoding are you using? Most folks nowadays settle on UTF-8 for web centric type applications, but things can get squirrelly if you use this encoding and start working with non-unicode systems. Recently, we had a situation where we took the string representation that started out with an array of 17 0xff values. In a unicode aware system, using UTF-8, this will translate into a character sequence of 17 0xfffd values. What happened? How did an array of 8 bit values get magically translated into an array of 16 bit values? It requires a bit of digging, but the short version is that if your source system is using 8 bit characters (something like iso 8859-n) and you translate to unicode, you will fail on certain byte values because they are invalid in UTF-8 and other character encodings. The only thing that can then happen is to change the character to the "invalid character" which is 0xfffd. For reference, in UTF-8 the values 192, 193, and everything ove...

Reading up a big about MQTT I decided to set up a test bed to see how it works and if it lives up to it's potential. The use case was simple, I wanted to build a multi-user chat system that would use MQTT over websockets connected directly to an apache activemq server. First off, I fired up an ec2 instance with ubuntu-13.04 and tried to apt-get activemq. It turns out, however, to use mqtt over websockets, you need version 5.9 of activemq. So I pulled a snapshot version of activemq. Enabling mqtt over websockets is a snap, you simply add the following configuration to your activemq.xml <transportConnector name="mqtt+ws" uri="ws://0.0.0.0:1884maximumConnections=1000&wireFormat.maxFrameSize=104857600"/> Next, download the eclipse paho mqtt client . And create a web page to send traffic back and forth. One last thing I did was install apache on the same server as the activemq instance. I did this to avoid any potential problems with same ...

I recently needed a new server instance for some testing. Normally I would go back to AWS as I've had problems with Rackspace in the past . Being open minded and assuming things have changed in the last couple years I thought I'd go back and try out Rackspace cloud for my testing (for reasons I will not name here). My first and most shocking revelation is that they have NOT fixed a key security problem. I'm going to outline this right now and hopefully somebody can fix it Problem #1: Login as root via ssh Guys...guys...guys(or gals)... It is baffling to me that you still allow this. Yes I get that you have a wonderful "Blacklist the my server ip when something goes wrong" and "then disable access to my console to fix" routine going on to protect your network if MY machine gets compromised due to your silly lackadaisical security. Wait, that's actually a negative thing too :) please stop, I'm not going to use you as a provider un...