So far I’ve found a few things Eclipse does that I really like, it has some good highlighting features that make it easy to see where classes, variables, parameters etc are being used. Some IDEA does better – I miss the key bindings for generating code, a lot and it’s about the only thing I’ve carried over and added myself.

One thing that really bothers me about Eclipse and that I’m going to see if I can spend some time sorting out tomorrow is the order of maven imports. They’re in classpath order, which I suppose in some circumstances is good, but for browsing or trying to look at the imports it’s frustrating. 9 times out of 10 I’m looking to see if something is there or looking into the dependencies themselves for something and trying to dig through that mess takes longer than it should.

In fact I have to say the whole ‘project explorer’ in Eclipse is a bit lacklustre. IDEA’s is simpler without losing any of the functionality. I’m probably missing something and just need to find some options to make it work more like I’d like (or use a completely different view). Eclipse has a lot of preferences I’ve never looked at.

Aside from that it’s all good. I’d have to say some bits of IDEA are more polished, but in other ways I prefer Eclipse. The choice to drop IDEA completely though because I need to use Eclipse at work was a good one – I don’t think I’d be making the same progress if I was switching between the two yearning for IDEA all day at work.

More info: https://blogs.apache.org/infra/entry/apache_org_04_09_2010

If you’ve signed up for a public JIRA server (or run one) and it wasn’t a password you only used for that, you should probably think about proactively changing it anywhere else you use it.

The passwords are hashed, but JIRA uses a random site wide salt, so it’ll take time but eventually they could figure them all out.

It’s actually could have been a pretty clever exploit, go after developers who are more likely to have accounts with one of the cloud providers. Use the accounts to launch instances and use the instances to generate password tables, compromise more accounts, launch more instances….

I’m lazy and the password I used on the Apache JIRA was one I used a few other places. I knew it was a bad idea, but I did it anyway. I’ve learned my lesson and spent the whole night changing my passwords and getting them all in 1password on my mac on iphone.

There’s no reason to believe that my password has been compromised yet, but it’s better to be safe than sorry. Now my passwords are all randomly generated, really long with letters, numbers and symbols.

I Released Announce.ly last night, it’s a side project I put together with some of the code that I built for Sproozi.

What’s it good for?

Announce.ly makes it easy to make announcements through twitter.

People have lots of questions about how to use twitter for their business. Should you create an account in the name of the business and use that to communicate, use some of the tools out there to share access to the account. Or you could create an account as a personality to represent the business, many company CEOs do this.

Either way works and there are lots of companies out there following both models successfully but there is another way.

I want to be myself on twitter, I want to make announcements for the projects I’m involved in and I want the project accounts to retweet me when I use hashtags associated with the projects. I don’t want to have to manage accounts for every project.

For example if I tweet an announcement about Announce.ly – “Announce.ly is live! #announcely” then I want the Announce.ly twitter account to retweet it automatically

And that’s what announce.ly does, check it out now to start your free trial then head on over to the Announce.ly blog where we’ll highlight use cases and feature some of our most interesting users.

Read more about Geek Ups in general at Geek Up. Questions, comments etc direct them at me here, on twitter @andrewmccall or email.

Tomorrow night we’re hosting the second Hebden Bridge Geekup, we skipped December because it fell on the 30th.

The first was a success we had a good turn out. As with the last one, we’re still finding our feet so there is no formal agenda or presentations planned. Of course if anyone has anything they want to present or a project they want to talk about drop me a line if you do and we’ll sort something out.

Read more about Geek Ups in general at Geek Up. Questions, comments etc direct them at me here, on twitter @andrewmccall or email.

It’s less than £50 and what’s best, it exports the logs as NEMA and GPX.

I’ve been focusing mostly on Sproozi and looking for some seed funding to try to get another developer on board and really get it off the ground. If you know someone who may be interested in investing in a local search and exploration application – let me know. If you know a Java/Hadoop/HBase developer that wants to work on an exciting new project (at least I think it is) – let me know.

Anyway, I hope you like the new look, it’s basically one gigantic set of dynamic sidebars with widgets. The code is in github if you’re interested: http://github.com/andrewmccall/hemingway.

I do rely heavily on tests when it comes to regression testing – making sure I haven’t broken anything. I’ve spent time having to go through every page on a fair sized web app after every release and inevitably finding something broken that I then had to quickly patch. Once it’s patched you start the testing over again and probably find a few more things. With no way back  it ends up an all nighter. It’s not a lot of fun and testing helps prevent it.

The other reason I write tesst is that they help a huge amount when I refactor code. Like over the last few days. I’ve spent them undertaking a major retooling of large swaths of code. I’ve been pulling out all the RDBMS stuff from some user management code and replacing it with a Hbase implementation. It’s also shown me that the code was pretty tied to the RDBMS implementations, much more than I’d originally thought.

It’s not anymore, and I’m not sure I could have pulled it apart without a coherent set of unit tests. I’ll post a little on the strategy for writing tests I’ve implemented to prevent it in the future a bit later.

JSR 303 builds on it by codifying the annotated validation framework into a standard you should be able to use from front to back and everywhere in between maintaining your rules for what is and is not valid. Of course that’s the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, it’s far messier living on the bleeding edge before the standards have been officially released.

I’ve released a small very early project that builds on some of the stuff I’ve done using the Hibernate annotaions with Springframework in the past. Basically, wrap a Spring validator around the Hibernate one – or in this case around a generic javax.annotations validator.

I’ve also added a few new constraints that I need. NotEmpty validates that a field must not be null and must not have a size of 0. Email validates email addresses and URL validates Urls. It’s an early release, but check it out here on GitHub if you’re interested. If you want to use it feel free if you want to make additions I’d love to accept them.