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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.

Most J2EE developers have at least heard of the Spring framework and know that it is an excellent framework for creating enterprise applications. I have recently needed to create an application that runs from the command line and is short lived. It has no GUI but I wanted it to be configurable and extendable in various ways. To that end, I defined a bunch of interfaces for the objects in the system to use when interfacing with other objects. Then I started thinking about the implementations of these interfaces and the factory classes I would need to create. I said to myself "Self, doesn't Spring already do this?" and I answered myself, "Why, yes". So I decided to try it.

Lately I have been reading the hype surrounding the concept of Business Process Modeling (BPM) systems. I always take this stuff with a grain of salt because I have not seen an idea that lived up the hype since the Object Oriented hype of the early nineties. I know some would debate that point and of course I don't mean to say that OO lived up to some of the more absurd hype. I remember some marketing fools actually were saying that OO would allow us to get rid of programmers. However, in this case, I think BPM and Graph Oriented Design/Programming has the potential to rival OO in its impact on our industry and jBPM is an excellent entry into this market.

Memoirs of a Gentoo Junkie - Part I

I first heard the word Gentoo from a colleague of mine I met while I was doing a gig at Cingular, Chris Bravo. Chris is a very savvy developer and I learned quickly to trust his judgment during our time working together. When he told me to give Gentoo a try I took the plunge. I have not regretted my trust. The Gentoo system is by far the best distribution I have used. Keep in mind, my requirements may not be the same as yours. Through the course of this article I will point out where Gentoo meets my requirements.

I just read the article linked above and I have to tell you I am never surprised at how often I hear old ideas repackaged as new ones and then marketed aggressively like they were some kind of handed down wisdom. The truth is, SOA adds very little but a buzz word. Grady Booch was talking about loose coupling being imperative for programming in the large, as he put it, back in 1994. Back in 2000 the buzz was "Component" architectures and further back it was "Object-Oriented". The problem is not with the technologies, it is with the people.

This price is dirt cheap when compared to the sacrafices our forefathers gave so that we can be free. We, as free people, must think. I am not talking about daydreaming about winning the lottery or analyzing the latest stats on your favorite baseball player. I think about those things just like the rest of us. I am talking about thinking critically about the words we hear everyday. Think about what the news reporter says. Is he reporting facts or interjecting his own opinion? Think about what you read on the OpEd page. Obviously what you have just read is Opinion but is it soundly argued?