Personal Blog

My Fat Tire Obsession: Finding Fat Tire Beer in LA

Reading Time: < 1 minute I’ve never been too much of a beer fan, but I definitely do like darker beers, or beer with more flavor than your typical Bud. I experienced Fat Tire for the first time 2 years ago while visiting Denver, Colorado, and since that time I’ve been mildly obsessed with finding this beer in Los Angeles.…
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New blog URL

Reading Time: < 1 minute I’ve decided to setup Movable Type and have now moved my blog to my personal website. Going forward, this blog will be hosted at http://eric-blue.com/blog/.

WWFSMD Motivational Poster

Reading Time: < 1 minute This afternoon a friend of mine brought a nifty Motivational Poster Generator to my attention. Being that I’m a huge fan of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, I decided to put this poster generator to good use. For those of you who would like to become more familiar with FSM, I’d recommend visiting http://www.venganza.org/ (FSM image…
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Removing the login prompt from the Eclipse Koders plugin

Reading Time: 2 minutes Koders.com is a search engine for open source code. I’ve been aware of this service for sometime and find it very useful on occasion to locate different code snippets. I know that they started offering plugins for various IDEs and figured that I’d give the Eclipse plugin a shot. My first impression of the plugin…
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Essential Eclipse Plugins

Reading Time: 2 minutes I’ve been using Eclipse now for a few years (Since version 2.1), and one of its best features is the great selection of plugins. The de-facto sight for getting the latest and greatest plugins is at http://eclipse-plugins.2y.net/. This site has really helped me find a great selection. The following list is only a *fraction* of…
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Getting XMLSpy to support EXSLT dynamic functions

Reading Time: < 1 minute Recently I have been using XSLT to transform XML from one format to the other. I use Xalan (for Java) in the application itself, but often develop and debug with XMLSpy. I needed a way for XSLT to dynamically evaluate and select a given string, and found no easy way to do this other than…
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Real Rhapsody uses SQLite for its database

Reading Time: < 1 minute By shear coincidence this evening, I discovered that Real Rhapsody is using SQLite for it’s local cache. After some brief inspection, it looks like this db is used to store playlists, user credentials, radio stations, and info about music that was imported from local disk. I thought this was pretty cool since I’m a big…
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Persistence Strategies: DAO (Data Access Objects) and ORM (Object-Relational Mapping) – Part 2

Reading Time: 3 minutes Article 2: DAO – Data Access Objects Some time has passed since my first posting. My investigation on persistence originally focused on DAOs. I was looking for a relatively simple way to persist data, without a full-blown persistence solution (like Hibernate, OJB, or iBatis). Before I get too far ahead, a definition of DAOs are…
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Persistence Strategies: DAO (Data Access Objects) and ORM (Object-Relational Mapping) – Part 1

Reading Time: 2 minutes Article 1: Overview I’ve been working on some recent projects, both personal and professional, where the topic of object persistence has come up. As I’ve learned over the last few months, while this is certainaly a common problem and there are no shortage of solutions out there, this can be a challenging area. While researching…
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Software for tracking your book collection

Reading Time: 2 minutes Last year I started looking for a better way to keep track of all my books. Over the last 10 years, I’ve accumulated dozens and dozens of books. Most of them are currently at home, however I have a number of books at my office, my home where I grew up, and have lent many…
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