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I just read The Common Denominator of Success by Albert N. E. Grey. Please take the time to read it now as I will be referring to concepts in it. My boss, Ashley, had suggested it as an inspirational piece. As I read the piece I was struck by how relevant it is to so much more than just Life-Insurance salesmanship. As he discussed some of the things that insurance salesmen do not like to do I started to list off in my head the things that Programmers do not like to do but should do if they want to be successful.

The author of this article seems to think so. There is also this article that seems to be reporting the same thing. Rumors are flying around what Apple, who always keeps its announcements well under wraps, will be announcing at the keynote for its World Wide Developer Conference next week. I am looking forward to hearing what Jobs and Crew have in store for us next week.

The CompletionService interface defines a service that allows the caller to submit tasks to be completed in the future. A commonly used implementation is the ExecutorCompletionService, which uses an Executor to run the tasks that have been submitted.

Ran into a problem when I was maintaining a customer's site today. They wanted to upload 10 - 20 MB movies as attachments to their Drupal blog posts. The standard limit set in Drupal is 2MB. I changed the setting to no avail. There was a note at the bottom stating that my PHP settings limited the upload to 4MB. So I did a search and come up with this post. So I changed my upload_max_filesize setting to "20M" this still did not work. The problem is that PHP also limits the post size and my default config limited post size to 8MB.

In a world where AJAX is becoming the norm instead of the exception we need technology platforms that allow us to scale these applications. I have been working on an application for a major hotel chain that is used by their call center agents to book reservations at their hotels. The application uses AJAX techniques to run several queries simultaneously and presents the data in a very dynamic interface that closely resembles a traditional desktop application.

I have started fooling around with the iPhone SDK. I am planning to release a product soon but the plans are quite preliminary so mums the word on exactly what is coming. However, I ran into a little problem right off the bat.

For the most part, Mac OS X programs do not use environment variables or the PATH. They behave in a very different way from other Unix environments on this score. However, as Java developer I use several tools that require that other command line programs be available on the system PATH. In Windows and Unix there are well known places to put this kind of information but in Mac OS X the location for these changes is obscure.

It seems there is a bug in WAS that was introduced with 6.1.0.3. I found this forum post on the subject.

Apparently, WAS looks for a resource in the WAR that matches the URL before allowing the servlet filters a chance to process the URL. Despite the fact that the design of the Servlet Filter mechanism is to allow web applications more control over their URLs and how they are accessed.

Well I figured out what was causing my IE Rendering problems. I was using a "code" tag and that seemed to throw off the floating of the right hand navigation elements. Weird but it looked great in Firefox. This is not new but, damn I wish IE would just implement the standards. Perhaps a meta tag could be created that tells IE to use a standards compliant interpretation of CSS and HTML. That way, a standards compliant web site can just add a meta tag and IE will render it correctly without all the weirdnesses that are left in for "backwards compatibility".

I am always looking for ways to limit the amount of typing I have to do. Hibernate helps me alot because I don't have to write all the SQL and I can concentrate on the less tedious aspects of designing my persistence model. Spring helps me alot because I don't have to write all those factories and other "glue" code.