Well, that was fun. Google Recaptcha is known to not work hazy. I knew that, but it was free, which I liked, and it worked reasonably until last week.
Since last week the site's been flooded with comments related with sexual prowess and not software prowess at a rate of about 10 a day.
In response, I've closed the site to comments for the moment. Since my audience is small and not very post-minded, I don't think this will be a big loss for the short term.
Sigh. Go spammers.

In "The Devil's Advocate" Al Pacino's character at one point tells Keanu Reeves character "Some people, you squeeze them, they focus, others fold."
I wouldn't call ODFToolkit the devil, but the statement became my mantra to keep at it with this toolkit.

I've been seeing a lot of articles about the role of a software architect lately. Not surprising considering the ongoing financial crisis. There's a lot of job-changing going on, and people have to defend their worth to their employers. Naturally, me officially being one, I have an opinion on the subject.

I'm working on some middleware Java EE software and ran into an interesting problem last week. I had a background job that retrieved a list of records from a datasource and processed them. If an error occurred, a status field in the records was set to 'ERROR'. Unfortunately, the Java EE timer service runs in a transaction, creating a very nasty problem.

I've been using Java Swing for over decade now - ever since it was first released in fact. Working with Swing has always been somewhat of an acquired taste. You can do very cool things with it, but you can more easily do very uncool things. When I was neck deep in SwingUtilities.invokeLater synchronization bugs, I'd wish for a better UI library for Java.
Over the years I tried alternatives, such as QT-Jambi and SWT, but they never really convinced me. Recently, I decided giving JavaFX 2 a whirl. I wasn't convinced about JavaFX, especially after Kirill Grouchnikov called it a trainwreck and left the Java UI scene behind. On the other hand, Amy Fowler was on board, and she was one of the core Swing team back in the day.

This article won't be a comparison of the two -maybe I'll do that at some later date- but a code example.

I thought I'd do some mythbusting, for a change.
I found this article on Slashdot the other day. The premise is that 'Splashscreens are sloth'. That people should create better software that comes up instantly.
An interesting rant, but does it measure up?