Rocket Surgery

This past week I burned up dozens of hours trying to make JBoss AOP work in my .WAR file.  Then I realized that I didn’t have to.

I have this application that is a WAR file full of web services.  What I wanted to do was create an aspect that I could weave in to gather usage statistics on every web service called — the user, the amount of time spent, whether it was successful or not, that sort of thing — and write it to a table for analysis and reporting.  Since we use JBoss as our application and web server (and a paid support contract), I decided to try JBoss AOP which is bundled with the Enterprise Application Platform.

So, I wrote my aspect, and started trying to hook it in.  Man, what an ordeal. Read the rest of this entry »

Well, these two movies were so different that this really oughta be two posts, but I felt lazy.

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind was awesome.  I really liked the surrealism of it.  I liked the neat visuals they used to indicate the erasure of Joel’s memories, particularly the books turning all white (very subtle).  I also was amazed at Jim Carrey’s performance.  Normally I can’t stand him, and that was why I never got around to seeing this, to my loss.  It was fun watching Carrey be the reserved straight-man to Kate Winslet’s impulsive and loopy Clementine.  The side story was cool too because it turned out not to be such a side story.  I also enjoy non-linear timelines, so that was a plus too.  Four stars.

3:10 to Yuma was not quite as good, but good.  I’ve been on a bit of a westerns kick lately and have been watching some of the more critically acclaimed ones, and this was one of them.  I liked the character interaction between Wade (Russell Crowe) and Evans (Christian Bale).  I also liked the moral ambiguity of the two characters, where neither of the main characters was totally evil or totally good — reminded me a bit of Unforgiven, which was a far superior western.  Having said that, I liked that I couldn’t guess everything that was going to happen in advance, and I liked the acting.  The ending, however, seemed a bit preposterous to me.  I can think of a couple of better ways it could have turned out, but I won’t spoil it.  Two and a half stars.

Will Gorman has a post here about adopting Hudson at his place of work…

As a contrast to my previous post regarding securing Subversion, I thought I would go through how to secure a Hudson installation using Active Directory for authentication and authorization.

Steps:

Read the rest of this entry »

Requirements:

1. Secure a Subversion 1.4.6 installation running on a Windows 2003 server
2. Authentication must be against existing Active Directory accounts
3. The Active Directory server does not allow anonymous binding
4. Users in group foo should be able to get to the source code
5. Users not in group foo should get no access at all
6. Nobody should be able to see anyone else’s password.

Solution:

I finally got it working by using the suggested method of using Apache HTTPD server as a front-end to Subversion, and rather than applying security to Subversion, securing Apache to access Active Directory as an LDAP server.

Steps:
Read the rest of this entry »

I have designed two new bumper stickers in a shameless attempt to make a buck.

These can actually be ordered at http://www.cafepress.com/mattharrah.  Such a deal!!

Skeptical about the claims from all the hyperventilating environmentalist whack-jobs?  Don’t believe that all the heat waves, cold waves, tornadoes, earthquakes, locust swarms, and toenail fungus infections across the planet are due to global warming?  Think that the fact that the polar ice caps melting on Mars might just suggest that solar activity and not humans are the cause of the one (gasp!) degree increase in temperatures over the past 100 years?

Then join me in celebrating Carbon Belch Day on June 12.  A day for lighting cigars, idling your car engine, leaving all the lights on, and turning the A/C down to 60 degrees.  A day for throwing your aluminum cans in the trash, taking a long shower, and leaving the water running while you brush your teeth.  A glorious day for cutting the grass using a gas-powered mower; for doing a half-load of laundry (both the washer and the dryer!); and for feeding the poor starving plants of the world by pumping tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.

C’mon!! Thumb your nose at the religion science of global warming and express your support for capitalism and western civilization!

I never read the book, but I certainly hope it was better.  It had to be, to be the classic that it is.

While this was definitely better than Speed Racer, it was not nearly as good as the first Narnia movie, The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe.  At least that movie had some semblance of plot, some indication that there was a real reason why the Pensevie kids were in Narnia, and things actually developed.  This movie was a high-budget 2-1/2 hour episode of Itchy and Scratchy (”they fight, they fight, they fight fight fight fight fight!”).

Bad guy wants Prince dead so he can take the throne.  Pensevie kids are inexplicably brought back to Narnia to help him fight.  Deus ex machina in the form of Aslan saves the day.  The end.

Perhaps I am expecting too much from a kids’ movie, but it is truly a sophomore slump after the first one.  But really, it was just long and tiresome.

I just watched High Noon for the first time.  I decided to watch it after seeing Gary Cooper play Howard Roark in The Fountainhead and being very impressed with his screen presence.

The ballad that is sung by Tex Ritter at the beginning and played in snatches throughout was odd, but haunting.  It was also clearly what Mel Brooks was parodying in The Ballad of Rock Ridge in Blazing Saddles - but I never knew that before.

And here’s a small confession - I missed a simple, central detail to the plot that had me confused the whole movie (I HATE doing that).  I missed the fact that the three guys hanging out at the train depot were waiting for Frank Miller to arrive.  I couldn’t figure out for most of the movie what the three guys were waiting for!  I mean, if they were going to trash the town and kill Marshall Kane, why did they need to wait for the train?  Why not just ride into town and get started?  Boy did I feel like an idiot.

But it didn’t stop me from enjoying it.  It wasn’t the best movie I ever saw — or even as good as Blazing Saddles in my opinion — but it was good.  I liked Gary Cooper in this too, so I think I’ll rent a few other movies he was in, to see if I like them.  It was also a hoot seeing a young Harry Morgan and a young Lloyd Bridges.

I just got made a committer to the Hudson project.  Of course, it’s not like I’m a bigshot or anything, but still, you don’t get to do this every day, so I gotta take my bragging rights when they come…