Author Archives: tborthwick

The Internet can’t decide how old I am

Several articles came out a little while ago on Google’s ad preference settings and the fairly specific profile they keep on you, but I had already become intrigued by another online age measurement almost as explicit- match.com ads. Now I have … Continue reading

Posted in ruminations | Leave a comment

Setting up Puppet on Windows

Our system configuration strategy consists mainly of saved VMs, a hodgepodge of scripts and notes scattered about, a lot of manual effort, and good intentions. We have a mixed linux/windows environment so we’ve never been sure if the new DevOps … Continue reading

Posted in software | 9 Comments

Book Review: Programming Android

Programming Android provides a good, comprehensive view of Android application architecture, but for someone already familiar with java, it starts slowly…reeeeeeeeaallly slowly. There are sections on installation of the Android SDK, basic concepts of standard java (like its type system), a … Continue reading

Posted in software | Leave a comment

Looking for HTML5 Nirvana

This is a dumb question, but does HTML5 support true cross-browser compatibility? Or, I should say, is it browser-agnostic? I kinda thought the latest versions of the major browsers were all converging on the same standards anyway, so I tried … Continue reading

Posted in software | Tagged | 15 Comments

Configuring Spring Integration channels without XML

I’ve been looking at some messaging frameworks lately and trying to find something that’s not too obtrusive. Spring Integration seems straightforward, plays nicely with our other Spring stuff, and runs in your application, which is a plus for us, but … Continue reading

Posted in java, software | Tagged | 3 Comments

Adding more users to your EC2 instance with IAM

Amazon makes it easy to try out AWS with a free micro instance. As you start using it more, one of the first things you might want to do is let others have access to your instance. Using the IAM … Continue reading

Posted in cloud, software | Tagged | Leave a comment

In Praise of Pre-built Software Components That Keep Me From Having to Learn Things

We would all like to be spending our time learning Forth or competing on TopCoder or writing compilers, but sadly we are often forced instead to work on things that will satisfy the intellectually dreary business requirements of a paying … Continue reading

Posted in software | Tagged | Leave a comment

Book review: Programming Amazon EC2

Amazon Web Services is a vast ecosystem and Programming Amazon EC2 by Jurg van Vliet and Flavia Paganelli strikes a nice balance between explaining general concepts and providing practical coding examples. It’s a great way to get started with EC2. … Continue reading

Posted in cloud, software | Tagged | 1 Comment

Adding an https connector to embedded Tomcat 7

The api to add https support to an embedded tomcat server follows the corresponding server.xml elements pretty closely. For example: Connector httpsConnector = new Connector(); httpsConnector.setPort(443); httpsConnector.setSecure(true); httpsConnector.setScheme(“https”); httpsConnector.setAttribute(“keyAlias”, keyAlias); httpsConnector.setAttribute(“keystorePass”, password); httpsConnector.setAttribute(“keystoreFile”, keystorePath); httpsConnector.setAttribute(“clientAuth”, “false”); httpsConnector.setAttribute(“sslProtocol”, “TLS”); httpsConnector.setAttribute(“SSLEnabled”, true); … Continue reading

Posted in java, software | Tagged | 2 Comments

Upgrading Maven 2 to 3

Maven 3 doesn’t have a huge number of visible improvements over Maven 2, but upgrading is easy and doesn’t pose a large risk. We encountered only a minor number of problems in the upgrade, the biggest ones related to how … Continue reading

Posted in java, software | Tagged | 3 Comments