One of my current projects has been building a framework for automatically
provisioning and deploying servers into the
Amazon EC2 cloud.
So, I have scripts that ask Amazon to start an EC2 instance, wait for
Amazon to tell me that they are ‘running’, and then try to SSH into
the instances to do things to them.
One vexing issue I [...]
Along with SQLsheet, I’m open sourcing another library that I’ve written: lodi (Local Dispatch).
A lot of my work lately has relied on generating XML using templates (I’m using Velocity). The XML is mostly used to either drive an ETL process,
specify some XHTML to get rendered, or to configure some internal subsystem.
It gets complicated, though:
[...]
There are a number of JDBC-Excel drivers out there, but most seem to be nearly abandoned. Moreover, they all either use native pieces, are read-only, or do disconcerting things with in-memory databases, none of which work for me.
So, what is a self-respecting hacker to do besides write their own? Here’s the nutshell:
SQLSheet [...]
While I can’t think of anything much more boring than blogging about blogging, I will do it just briefly because here there might be a few useful bits of information here that are useful…
I just switched from MovableType 4 to WordPress and am overall very pleased. It’s faster, cleaner, simpler, and seems to have [...]
I have long had this irritating problem with .properties. It goes something like this:
I like to use .properties files for configuration unless there is a compelling reason to use something more complicated.
I’m pretty uptight about using constants in my code. This includes using constants to refer to the names of properties in [...]
In developing data integration applications for Windows users, it’s really important to provide
them with the most
Windows-like experience as possible when it comes to installation, starting, and
stopping the server. This has long been a painful topic
for Java developers. (Don’t even get me started about Java WebStart… 
)
Fyodor Kupolov has released a 1.0 beta of his
Scriptella ETL framework.
I downloaded it and integrated it into my applications - so far so good.
I blogged about Scriptella a while ago. It’s a simple and elegant framework for declaratively manipulating result-set style data (typically but not necessarily from a database). Fyodor also seems to [...]