Broadcasting from the Romanian trenches
Sven Nordqvist's Pettson and Findus series is beloved for its cozy portrayal of rural Swedish life. An eccentric old farmer, his talking cat in striped trousers, helpful (if gossipy) neighbors, and illustrations dense with hidden mucklas. Books like Pancakes for Findus and Findus at Christmas resolve warmly, with community support and simple pleasures winning the day. Findus and the Christmas…
Or: When applying for a job becomes a technical interview you didn't sign up for TL;DR: Microsoft's job portal had a bug that prevented me from submitting my application. After some browser console detective work, I discovered missing bearer tokens, set strategic JavaScript breakpoints, and manually set authentication headers to get my resume through. The irony of debugging Microsoft's code to…
Days ago someone reached out on LinkedIn claiming to represent Koinos Finance's hiring team. Christian Muaña said they were impressed with my background and wanted me to move forward for a Senior Software Engineer position. The technical interview email came from "Andrew Watson, Senior Engineering Engineer at Koinos" (hire @ koinos .finance) and seemed professional enough. Complete a 45-minute…
For years, the developer community has been locked in a quiet arms race over who has the most powerful laptop. I’ve stepped off that treadmill. My setup is a modern take on the thin client, and it has made my workflow more focused, secure, and flexible. At its heart, the principle is simple: use a lean local machine that runs only a browser, a terminal, and Visual Studio Code. The core of the work…
I'm excited to share dxform , a side project I've been working on while searching for my next role: a Dockerfile transpiler that can transform containers between different base systems and generate FreeBSD jail configurations. The concept started simple: what if Dockerfiles could serve as a universal format for defining not just Docker containers, but other containerization systems too?…
I've started working on a personal project to integrate Claude Code directly into the NetBeans IDE. It's still in the early stages, but there's enough progress to share a look at how it's taking shape. As someone who contributed to NetBeans in the past (starting with Sun Microsystem days, up to the early Apache Software Foundation years and with my old OpenBeans distribution), it's interesting to…
Working with multi-gigabyte LLM and diffusion model files presents a practical challenge: local storage is fast but limited, while network storage is capacious but slow. This is especially true for compact workstations like a Mac Mini or a laptop with a small SSD, where fitting several large models is impossible. What if you could get the best of both worlds—the speed of local storage for active…
I saw The Trouble with Harry (1955) a while back and it didn't have a big impression on me. But recently I rewatched it and was amazed at how odd time seems to flow, how somewhat confused people are, as if they have memory problems. This review goes into detail about the movie, but I wanted to focus on a single riddle in the movie. It's this exchange with the kid: Arnie: Why haven't you visited…
The JChoice Global Ecosystem Report 2020 is looking good: Apache NetBeans at 50% of the free Java tools, Eclipse at 45% and vi / Emacs and Notepad++ at 5%.
Discrimination based on social skills and social groups exists and geeks experience it a lot. One facet of it is the pseudo inclusive peer pressure. The desire to belong to a group is strong in anyone so people would accept many things just to fit in. At the same time, a few understand this game quite well, can get meta about it and specifically target geeks to mock them by appearing to be…
There was a lot of buzz a while back about Open Source sustainability. Small and large companies as well as individuals discovered it's near impossible to survive financially doing Open Source. It occurred to me that this might be an emergent property of Open Source and a reason why many foundations (like Apache) as well as users intuitively look at the "community" first. The community is like a…
It seems not a day goes by without another open source supply chain attack. The latest, uncovered by the security researcher "JK" is called "Instant Thought" and was noticed in the most popular Java IDE, combined the the very popular build system Gradle. One might assume that just opening a Gradle project to read the source code is a safe operation, but Instant Thought shows this is not the case.…
On June 15th 2017 the EU launched "Roam Like at Home", a set of rules that removed roaming charges. It was a great idea to harmonise telecom infrastructure and remove another invisible border separating people within the EU. Romania was hit particularly bad by these rules. They introduced new borders where before there were none. Previously, roaming was available to any telecom user either on a…
Source .
Internet Archive's Wayback Machine is a gift to the world. For quick checks you just enter the URL and you get the archived version going years back. A whole little cottage industry seems to have been formed around the Wayback Machine. They offer you whole-site download and conversions for the low price of $5 or $15 or $45 or however much they can convince you their service is worth. Among these…
There's been some uproar about the MongoDB Server Side Public License which tries to prevent cloud vendors like Amazon take all the money in the MongoDB market. Many are pointing out that this new license does not respect the Open Source Definition published by the Open Source Initiative . In truth many users and companies would find the license acceptable. A legal advisor will clear the license,…
As Apache NetBeans became a top level Apache project and finished the incubation process I was asked for an interview and my photo. Only a single quote was taken from the interview and used on a not too positive article about NetBeans. The quote was presented as coming from me as a member of the 'Project Management Committee' to give it even more weight. Bellow is my full interview for historical…
What shocked me most during my involvement with NetBeans, now an Apache Software Foundation project, is that The Apache Software Foundation is a record label not a rock band. Imagine you like a given band. You go to their concerts regardless of the location, enjoy their music, buy their records, maybe proudly wear a T-shirt. You deeply care about that band and the band cares about the music they…
I'm exploring NetBeans Web Toolkit with the articles here NetBeans Web Toolkit is the new name I'm trying to give to Jaroslav Tulach's HTML/Java API, a rather impressive library that deserves more use.
Haskell functions have this nice concept called 'guards' which allow you to define a condition and return a value when that condition is true. For example: abs n | n < 0 = -n | otherwise = n This makes the code rather readable, especially when you have more guards. Guards build one upon another since you know that if your guard condition is checked, all the other failed: something n | n < -2 = 10…
As part of the Apache NetBeans IP clearance we are combing through all the code and dependencies. One interesting thing we bumped into was that the jsch 0.1.54 binary JAR we are using has a different hash (and size) than the binary JAR from Maven Central. The old hash is 0D7D8ABA0D11E8CD2F775F47CD3A6CFBF2837DA4, the new one is DA3584329A263616E277E15462B387ADDD1B208D. The binaries are 278,612…
I had an interesting Haskell problem the other week: work on columns and rows of a Data.Array i e . You only have the Ix i, Ord e class constraints, which make sense because the index must be a Data.Ix . The elements also must be Ord to be able to process them. The thing about Data.Ix is that it's very opaque. It only extends Ord . There is nothing matrix-related in it. One could use Data.Array…
These past months I have done a NetBeans patch for the Apple Retina Display and also made a small Wiki-like site to help me and anyone else interested with finding matching font icons for the NetBeans icons: https://nextbeans.com/retina The nextbeans.com stack is Angular , Prime NG , nginx , Jetty , Servlets, Spring Framework JDBC , HSQLDB . SSL via Let's Encrypt . Hosted at Scaleway . It's a fun…
Samsung announced a while back that they used a "Neural Net based predictor" for their CPU branch prediction. Shortly after that an Intel person claimed it's no big deal because they have also been using a perceptron for some time. But to me this seemed a rather big discovery! Previously I would have assumed that branch prediction is a super complex algorithm. Learning that branch prediction is a…
Note : This article is a living document and will be updated as I learn new useful information (last update 31st December 2016). I will move the helper scripts to a dedicated repository and copy part of this article into the Apache NetBeans wiki. Introduction The NetBeans source code has been stored in a Mercurial repository for almost a decade now. But starting October 2016 NetBeans is preparing…