devnulled: A stream for software developers and engineers

The MySQL Performance Blog is posting about where you can download/build recent binaries of MySQL as it looks like they are no longer offering recent downloads. I’d have to say there is definitely evidence of this being true– I’m running 5.0.30-1 on my server this site is hosted on, yet the newest version available for download at the MySQL site is 5.0.27.

I’ve always been weary of the MySQL licensing scheme and have used PostgreSQL instead when possible, and if true this would be yet another reason I will continue to choose PostgreSQL over MySQL.

Adam Bien covers how to reduce the size of JAR packages in Java 5 & 6 here. An example he shows starts at 44 MB and gets reduced down to 6 MB– impressive!

I’m in the process of transitioning this blog from content consisting of items about my personal life and interests to instead focus on software development. That said, I’ve started removing all links to external sites of friends (you’re now linked from my new personal blog) and also reorganizing categories. A few of my regular readers out there will probably notice that some feed URL’s are broken, and you’ll need to slightly update them. For instance I have quite a few people using the “Geekery” feed which has been renamed to “Culture”.

Given the new focus of this blog, I’d highly recommend adjusting your feed reader to start picking-up the full feed for this site rather than one of the topic categories such as “ColdFusion”. I don’t plan on writing non-topical content on this blog again anytime soon, and all of the non-geek related categories have been removed.

While I could setup yet another of layer of mod_rewrite rules in Apache to fix the various problems I’ve created with the feed URL’s, I’d like to try and start to work towards a relaunch of this site without being hampered with the various legacy support hacks that I’ve had to put in over the years. In theory the main category changes I’ve made should mostly be done and shouldn’t change again anytime soon, but don’t hold your breath. It will be nice to clear-out all of the existing hacks and start anew.

I appreciate your patience, and hopefully I’ll slowly but surely transition the design and ancillary content of this site into a more focused area.

I’ve been meaning to start turning the content of this site into a fairly focused software development blog for awhile, and finally got one of the first major steps done. As I mentioned earlier, I’ve finally moved all of my personal stuff to a new blog which is tentatively titled blog.bharper, and will start judiciously deleting old personal content from this site as it slowly morphs into a more generic software development site. My new blog is a fairly informal place for me to post stuff that I’m interested in outside of the general geekery posted about here, and also gives me a place to share trivial events with family and friends while also not intending to alienate people with LiveJournal type drivel. Anyhow, there isn’t much new content there that you haven’t already seen at the moment, but if you’re more interested in me rather than the geek stuff I write, you might want to start checking the new blog instead. I don’t plan on linking to it directly from this site again, so now is your chance to grab the url.

Surprisingly enough out of over almost 4 years of writing (600+ posts) on this site, about half of them were not software related. So of course that means I’ll have to spend hours going though this site as well to delete non-programming related posts. Good times. Look for some fairly dramatic changes coming to this site as well in the upcoming weeks.

Today is pretty much the wrong weather for my Datsun 280Z here in Colorado, but it made Autoblog’s Readers Ride of the Day! Judging by the comments, there are plenty of people who also still love the old Z’s too.

I haven’t much touched the car since I bought it other than typical old car maintenance items (for the most part, I like doing all of my own work), so I’ll be kind of interested to see the comments it generates on it’s current state. Sometimes I want to leave it alone, other times I’m ready to do a few minor things to it.

For a little more about Autoblog, as far as I know it’s one of the most popular blogs about cars out there (each entry seems to generate tons of comments) and most gearheads who are also interweb nerds seem to read it. As for me, I’ve loved cars as long as I can remember and have owned at least two at a time for the past 8 years or so.

Sorry for the spam on the ColdFusion feed, but I had to share.

I came across a blog entry which shows you how to create an IRC bot from scratch in only a few lines of Python, which honestly kind of amazed me even being somewhat fluent with Python. I’ve seen a number of other Python IRC bot packages but have yet to try them out (such as Supybot, Phenny, and Pynfo), but a quick example like that is pretty impressive to me.

Greg Stein announced on the Google Code Updates Blog that they’ve added downloads and a simple wiki. Examples of the new download functionality, and a wiki are also provided.

This makes me happy; it’s just in time for my “I’m not working the rest of the year” vacation so I can finally write up some documentation for CFAkismet, provide a zipped download of it, and finally give it the 1.0 stamp between the other 900 things I have planned during my time off.

Java 6 Standard Edition has been released and can be downloaded here. The long winded version of what’s new can be read here, while the summary of new features and changes can be found here.

Personally I don’t know if I’ll be working on anything in 1.6 anytime soon as 1.5 is still the current standard for non-J2EE Java, but I wouldn’t be surprised to be using it in production by next Summer or so. Although I still think “wtf” about them including Derby as part of the standard release.

Of the things that should be in there from Apache rather than Derby would be most everything which is currently in Apache Commons as it seems like pretty much every Java project needs a good 4-5 Apache Commons libraries.

Now I’m sure all of my Java RSS feeds will be populated with Sun employees talking about how cool NetBeans and Java 6 is, which of course only further motivates me to stick with Eclipse and Java 5.

I just moved away from running mod_php5 under Apache 2 to running PHP5 under FastCGI for a number of reasons, including that I will be deploying some Python apps on this same server before terribly long and didn’t want the overhead of mod_php5 and mod_python on each request.

This is my first FastCGI install and configuration, so if you run across any problems with the site, please let me know.

Have I mentioned that I’m a terrible candidate for shared hosting?

I must say I work with a really amazing team at work, and there is rarely a day we don’t get into complex technical discussions about anything from “what algorithm is the best to do x” to getting into deep geeky details about how certain platforms work such as the Hotspot compiler in Java. Granted we aren’t a typical CF development shop (I’ve actually been working exclusively in Java for the past couple of months for instance), so we have a wide variety of programmers and skill sets and so forth on the team. In general we’d rather hire smart people with solid backgrounds than someone who has 80 years of experience in Ajax.Net and RubyGroovyFlex 2.0 on their resume, and over time I think it’s proved to be a very valuable asset.

We’ve talked about how CF translates into Java many times over the past couple of years and some of the inherent performance problems with weak typing (at some point it still has to be converted back to static typing– this is a basic theoretical problem that any dynamically typed language has). I showed my co-worker (and primarily Java programmer) Rod the “what is wrong with the ColdFusion compiler” post, and he has a very well written response to how ColdFusion translates its own dynamically typed tag based syntax down to statically typed Java code. Of course the high level Computer Science answer would just be “it translates CFML to Java using a parser generator then recompiles it, duh”, but instead he goes into the details of the implementation of the parser generator as to how it types the dynamic variables at the Java level. He doesn’t really ever do any ColdFusion, so be easy on him in the comments if you have a bone to pick on the CF side.

A related thing to note that he doesn’t cover is how much faster it is to instantiate objects in cfscript rather than CFML on a percentage basis. Just some food for thought. I can do a follow-up post on this in particular topic if anyone is interested.

I cover a slightly similar topic to this in an upcoming CFDJ article, so stay tuned.