About Me
I live in San Francisco and am the Co-Founder of Two Bit Labs where we develop iPhone, iPad, and Android mobile apps for our clients. I love the mix of team leadership and working as a hands-on contributor. My technical passions include Swift, Kotlin, Ruby, Cloud Computing, and open-source software.
I also love to sail and my wife, daughter, and I sailed out the Golden Gate in 2007 on our 38 foot Hans Christian cutter (sailboat) on a 3 year cruise. Read about it at http://sailsugata.com.
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Recent Posts
- Backup your Gmail
- Naming your business or product, forget the domain
- Storing Git repositories in Amazon S3 for high availability
- Acceptance Testing non Ruby web applications with Cucumber
- Code readability through conciseness
- Mac OS X gem cleanup failing
- iPhone development the easy way
- Production MySQL performance tuning
- Selenium Continuous Integration Runner
- Standalone Migrations: Using Rails migrations in non Rails projects
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Category Archives: Java
Xalan XSL transformations in the 1.4 JDK can be VERY slow
At work as part of our XML data feed product we end up doing XSLT transformations on XML files starting a a few MB all the way up to several hundred MB. Using the 1.4.2 JDK it took over 4 … Continue reading
Posted in Java, Software Engineering, XML
1 Comment
Creating database test fixtures and the rails export fixtures plugin
Being able to quickly and easily create test fixtures for your database is important yet it’s not always easy. There are basically 3 approaches I’ve seen used: 1. Use a MySQL or PostgreSQL dump that gets imported before the tests … Continue reading
Posted in Database, Java, MySQL, Ruby, Software Engineering
3 Comments
Using log4j to monitor web application errors
When monitoring a production website (especially with a dozen or so application servers) you don’t want to rely on combining the logs and reviewing them manually for exceptions, you want the servers to notify you when there’s a problem. There … Continue reading
Posted in Java, Software Engineering, Systems Administration
3 Comments
Why nobody is web testing in Java
Go into any IDE and create a default Web project and you’ll often get JUnit, but I have yet to see one include some form of web testing support (e.g. Cactus, Cargo, and HttpUnit) and that’s just lame!
Posted in Java, Ruby, Software Engineering, Web
3 Comments
Java’s SEO blunder: jsessionid
Update: Bryce pointed out a servlet filter you can implement to disable JSESSIONID’s… very nice! When we started moving GreatSchools from Perl to Java + SpringMVC + Hibernate one of the first things we had to figure out was how … Continue reading
Posted in Java, Search Engine Optimization, Web
9 Comments
Will a language scale? Wrong question!
This tongue in cheek post by Dion about Ruby not scaling made me chuckle but also got me thinking! The whole question of whether a modern language scales or not is really the wrong question to ask. Almost any language … Continue reading
Posted in Java, Ruby, Software Engineering, Web
5 Comments
Differences between Digg and Reddit
I wrote a tongue in cheek humor piece on April fools day last year about ditching Java and switching to .BAT. Earlier this year it hit the front page of Reddit which was very exciting since my little server stood … Continue reading
Posted in Humor, Java, Software Engineering, Uncategorized
5 Comments
5 things Ruby on Rails has that Java doesn’t
After listening to this weeks Ruby on Rails podcast where Geoffrey Grosenbach interviewed Bruce Tate, it got me to thinking about why Ruby on Rails appeals to me. For me as a Java person, the real appeal of Ruby lies … Continue reading
Posted in Agile Development, AJAX, Java, Ruby, Software Engineering, Web
3 Comments
Load balancing across MySQL servers using JDBC
In our production environment at GreatSchools we have 3 production MySQL database servers: 1 read-write master and 2 read-only slaves. In moving our site from Perl to Java we need to load balance read-only connections across the read-only slave servers … Continue reading
Posted in Database, Java
9 Comments
Well formed validation of XHTML pages
Validating XHTML pages is an interesting subject because no high traffic site I’ve ever tried it on actually successfully validates XHTML against a W3C validator. Most folks I know take it for granted that it’s unrealistic to write large sites … Continue reading
Posted in Java, Software Engineering, Web
1 Comment