ColorSchemeDesigner.com

If you're developing a website and need to pick out a color scheme, take a look at ColorSchemeDesigner.com. Great webapp for picking color scheme. Liked it so much I donated some money to the developer. Highly recommended.

Video conversion with HandBrake

I have a JVC Everio HDD camcorder that I haven't used very much until just recently. Looking for some software to convert the MOD formatted video files on the Everio to a different format, I happened upon HandBrake. HandBrake did a nice job of converting the video to something I can use in QuickTime. Very impressed with this piece of open source software.

Is Spring Framework becoming a configuration nightmare?

I had a crappy day dealing with Spring Framework 3.0 M4. I've been using Spring since 2004 and I've been a big fan of its use. Lately however, I've become concerned that Spring Framework is turning into another EJB, a configuration monster. I've been using Spring 3.0 M1 for a while now and recently upgraded to M4 to get access to some new Spring MVC annotations, @RequestBody and @ResponseBody. These annotations allow you to bind directly to the request body and response body, respectively. They're very helpful if you are using Spring MVC for ReSTful web services. They seemed relatively innocuous, but after some time with them, they are much more complicated to configure than one might expect from Spring. Still don't have a working solution with these new annotations. Part of it is the documentation isn't where it needs to be, but that will hopefully be remedied by the time 3.0 is GA. In the meantime, I'm stuck on the damn configuration of view resolvers, mapping adapters, and what not. Configuration kills! I've had the chance to work on Grails and I must say, I am very much longing for another opportunity to work on that platform. I realize that Grails uses Spring, but Grails also keeps Spring away from, behind the covers for the most part, so I can build solutions for my client instead of muddling through configuration acrobatics.

Keeping traceroute/tracepath by my side these days

Ugh! All sorts of networking issues lately at work. Each environment is set up differently from a networking standpoint. Makes promoting code a pain in the butt. I've been giving traceroute and tracepath both a workout these past couple of days. Who says learning Unix utilities is a waste of time in this day and age of graphical desktops and networking utilities. One tip from today: Make sure you specify the port that you want to route to in the traceroute/tracepath invocation. In our case it did make a difference ;-)

Snow Leopard ships with Subversion 1.6.5 support

Just upgraded to Versions 1.0.5 and noticed that Snow Leopard ships with Subversion 1.6.5 libraries and command line tools. Very cool. I'm assuming Xcode 3.2 also uses Subversion 1.6.5.

Snow Leopard installation frees up a ton of disk space

Approximately 17 GB in my case. Not too shabby. Now I have to get Xcode 3.2 and the iPhone SDK add-on installed. BTW, the iPhone SDK installation now expects Xcode 3.2 to be previously installed, so make sure you've installed it off the Snow Leopard distribution. The 404 MB file size of the iPhone 3.0 SDK for Snow Leopard should be tip off if you've installed previous iPhone SDKs.

.NET thread local storage implementation kicks my butt

I got skooled today in .NET. I wrote a thread-local storage abstraction using named data slots some time ago. Avoid named data slots at all costs! Use the ThreadStaticAttribute instead. Not only is the ThreadStaticAttribute much easier to implement, but it performs better also. I had to wait till my code was in a near-prod environment before enough load could be generated to cause the race condition to occur. It took me about 2 days of debugging to find the issue. Most importantly, read the damn documentation before you attempt to write some threading code. There are some subtle issues in the .NET Base Class Library that I would have avoided if I had read the MSDN site. Very embarrassing.

From Microsoft:

The .NET Framework provides two mechanisms for using thread local storage (TLS): thread-relative static fields (that is, fields that are marked with the ThreadStaticAttribute attribute) and data slots. Thread-relative static fields provide much better performance than data slots, and enable compile-time type checking. For more information about using TLS, see Thread Local Storage: Thread-Relative Static Fields and Data Slots. (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.threading.thread.allocatenameddataslot.aspx)