My day job ran into a situation where we were acquiring an SSL certificate (using the openssl(1) tools), which would be used by a third party in a Glassfish installation. Until recently, that required various hacks to convert the PKCS#10 key/cert files into something keytool(1) could manage, but no more: as of Java 6, keytool(1) can handle PKCS#12 files, which makes it much easier to deal with this.
Read more »
In my day job, I’m the gatekeeper for changes to the company’s production databases. We recently ran into an interesting and difficult problem: how do we change a large, heavily-used table without violating our “avoid downtime if possible” mantra?
The following is a slightly expurgated version of the postmortem I sent the team. Table names have been changed to protect the guilty.
Read more »
I did some work on a contract recently that involved creating an OpenLDAP replica of an OpenDirectory database. Here’s what I learned:
Read more »
Everyone who’s worked in a C-derived language has seen a switch statement or two in their lives. There are a few well-known reasons not to use them, but somehow they crop up now and then anyways because they’re just so convenient — initially.
Switch is a holdover from lower-level languages (mostly, various assembly languages) where the destination of a jmp instruction could be computed or looked up in a table. In modern languages, there are usually more appropriate structures for determining which piece of code to jump to: that’s what virtual dispatch does, for example.
Unfortunately, it’s not always obvious how to “fix” code that makes heavy use of switch.
Read more »
Last time, I wrote about why Singletons get a bad rap, and I wrote some high-level advice for moving away from them sanely. I want to cover a practical (if somewhat idealistic) example using Java and Spring to move a Singleton creation dependency out of a class.
Read more »
Examples | Owen | 
January 17, 2012 9:28 pm | 
Comments (2) 
Subscribe