At work I use a Windows PC. For some reason Microsoft Word windows were always staying on top of every other window. This was tolerable for a little bit, but very quickly became a real problem. I wasn't able to use a different application and view a Word document at the same time and the only way I could switch to another window was by minimizing the Word window. I finally figured out (serendipitously) how to get things to behave properly...

I have an AppleTV that is now playing movies from a variety of sources. This is how I am able to take some of the more popular movie containers and convert (transcode) them for use with the AppleTV using OSX.

I read a bunch of articles and talk to developers about software performance and the word performant comes up quite a bit. You'll hear it mentioned conversationally (in technical conversations) like I've heard that kind of sql query isn't very performant or To make this code more performant, you should do xxx. The problem is that performant is not a word. I know this is a bit silly, but it does seem to grate on me (more than it should).

I recently purchased a new A/V receiver, a Denon AVR-4310CI. My last receiver, an Onkyo TX-DS575, has really served us well (for 11 years) and still functions perfectly fine. I made the upgrade because I wanted to reduce cable clutter and to solve the we don't know how to turn on the teevee problem.

I've decided quite recently that I think I want to be a vegetarian. It has taken me a while to get to this point because I do not have one huge overarching reason to do it. However, I do have several small reasons that make me want to try it out...

I finally decided to upgrade the blogstamp client for drupal to the latest 6.x branch of Drupal. It really only took me a day to do and I'm not really sure why I didn't do it like a year ago... I guess I'm just lazy.

When working with an event driven asynchronous application, it is difficult to troubleshoot Exceptions. It is difficult to figure out exactly why an Exception occurred and sometimes it is difficult to even determine that an Exception has occurred at all. I ran into this last problem when writing a GWT application; the client was swallowing all sorts of Exceptions. Here's how I was able to shed some light on spurious and hidden exceptions...

Apple decided to change the well-known password of the default Java truststore in their latest updates. I'll file this one under a Let's change the thing and see who complains category.

I think I'm going to start doing my writing again. I've taken a break in part because I didn't have much to say but also because I think I was a little burnt out. I have been working with GWT for about 9 months now and have created a full-stack framework, that I really like. It uses GXT --> GWT --> Spring MVC --> Hibernate, and doesn't use any DTOs or require new XML configuration for development. I'm going to start writing that book soon. I also want to rev the blogstamp.org plugin for drupal, it's only been like a year since the last rev!

After reading a JavaSpecialists article about a Java Memory Puzzle (about whether nulling local variables was ever really necessary), I wanted to see if I could figure out the answer.