Halogen Labs Weblog

I’ve been reading lots of comparisons about Hibernate/Spring/Whatever vs. Ruby/Rails. I can’t believe people are trying to compare them! Even more wasteful is probably this rant, but I digress

I’m a fan of Spring/Hibernate/Whatever for Java. I also think Ruby is a neat elegant language. It’s a stupid and shortsighted to think that Ruby/Rails is going to replace Java tech overnight.

Instead of arguing “oh Java is better because X,” or “Rails is cooler because I write YYY less lines of code,” how about trying the “other side” out for yourself and see how it works?

Discussions Arguments like these are old as the hills. Emacs vs. vi, Sega vs. Nintendo, Pepsi vs. Coke, and are a waste of time. Get back to work ;)

In the words of Digital Underground, doowutchyalike.

I was reading about someone’s idea for a mod_jsp to run under Apache as a module. Not only does it smell like a Bad Idea, there are better things to use than JSP, or even Struts for that matter.

I normally don’t post stuff about blogging, but this is too cool to pass up: the U of MN is offering a free MovableType blog to faculty, staff and students at no cost.

UThink is available to the faculty, staff, and students of the University of Minnesota Twin Cities, and is intended to support teaching and learning, scholarly communication, and individual expression for the U of M community.

Awesome!

Todo: Hibernate w/Tomcat Quickstart (via dsuspense).

Oh yeah, and my desk and monitor are shaking because there are train tracks no more than 300 meters from my apartment. It’s nothing bad, just very subtle. Now I know what an earthquake feels like.

I turn 25 today, and as a present my girlfriend and my parents chipped in and bought me a nice shiny new iPod. It’s smaller than I thought it would be. I’m afraid of dropping it. And it’s shiny. It can also hold more than twice the amount of mp3s I currently store on my desktop system.

I found a cool piece of software for the iPod called EphPod which allows you to manage all the music in your ‘Pod, calendar synching, and even more. By “even more” I mean, “can download RSS feeds and plop them into your iPod for offline viewing”. Here’s an example of an openWeather feed on the iPod:

Sweet, huh?

I’ve just released an alternative implementation of LOAF in XML under the Apache License. This release includes namespace support. You may find the file here.

I’m sorry, I can’t stand the tone that the material on the Prevayer website was written in. I am doing a big report on object persistence, and while researching Prevayler, I was left with a really bad taste in my mouth. Sure, it sounds cool, but when the author is cocky and egotistical, I am less interested in the product, and I want to flee and vomit in terror.

I hereby nominate Herr Wuestefeld for membership in The Annoying Open-Source Personality Club alongside with such famous people as RMS and JWZ.

Comment spammers will have their subnet banned with extreme prejudice :)

Hey, I’ve been proposed as a Cocoon committer, along with Antonio Gallardo. Thus begins a new era in my Cocoon carreer.

Here’s a list of useful weather references that I’ve found:

Key to decoding an ASOS (METAR) report (pdf)

A really big list of METAR stations.

I thought I had more but I can’t find them right now.