A couple weeks back I set out to upgrade the version of Hibernate Search that one of our applications was using. The boys at JBoss had recently released Hibernate Search 3.2.0 and it looked pretty sweet. The possibility of performance improvements around indexing was enough to make me upgrade. Unfortunately, like most software frameworks, Hibernate ...

The team and I have recently kicked off a rather ambitious project.  In an attempt to help accelerate the early development activities, we’ve made a decision to build a series of one-off implementations using the DeveloperForce.com platform (salesforce.com sans the sales CRM portions). The objective is to learn enough about the platform during these initial ...

I spent a few hours tonight trying to diagnose a problem we were running into tonight with some web application code. That was on top of the better part of a day that was spent by another developer digging into the code. Development ain’t easy, and frameworks for all their glory strive to make the ...

For the past couple of days I’ve been attending the caBIG Annual Meeting (it’s the 5th such meeting and by all accounts the most well attended). About caBIG caBIG™ stands for the cancer Biomedical Informatics Grid™. caBIG™ is an information network enabling all constituencies in the cancer community – researchers, physicians, and patients – to ...

Today was our first hack day of 2008. I’ve been helping coordinate these events for the past year and a half and they’ve proven to be a solid source of inspiration and motivation for all participants. Unfortunately for me, today was more or less a day of false starts. Like always, I had a number ...

So I’ve been working off and on over the past 6 months on a little side project, JDBCSpy. I’ve mentioned it previously so this post is just a little update. It’s far from my day job and really just serves as a bit of an outlet. You’re free to argue about whether it’s a creative ...

A Google of One It’s just another phase in the continued commoditization of infrastructure. It started a decade or two ago with the OS and has been followed in quick succession by the web and J2EE stacks. While not free, cloud computing offerings by the likes of Amazon.com have definitely opened the realm of possibility ...