The requirement is simple: download Apache Axis sources, and compile them. According to web page that gives you the link to source files, all you have to do is to setup Maven, and use it to compile Axis from sources.

In case you want to open the source with Eclipse, you need to use Maven again, and that’s also a single line comment in a web page. Looking at this, you first feel happy about it: this should be quite easy, right? Not if you are an idiot, which is what I am appearently!

I do “exactly” what the web pages and readme.txt says, and I fail. The project can not compile due to tests failing, and when I open the project in Eclipse, I get a lot of errors, related to directory structure.  I’ve spent countless hours because of missing little details, but this time I guess I have the right to demand a little bit better documentation. I’ll admit that I’m an idiot, so providing an idiot proof documentation for compiling Axis would be good at least for me.

Yes I do. I am about to go crazy because of all the books and documents I have to carry around, and I can not read from the screen. I have to read from paper, otherwise I feel very uncomfortable with what I’m trying to read. I have to carry around a couple of books, a large number of papers etc, for I can not know when I’ll have that spare time to work on something. As I work on my main PhD subject, the amount of books and papers I keep getting back to, increases exponentially. The laptop is not a solution because of the battery life, screen display and more important than that, the ergonomics.

Iliad is the ultimate device that I’ve been drooling over for quite some time now, and Its features are far beyond kindle in my humble opinion. The problem is, the price tag is around 600-700 dollars, and that’s simply too high for me know.  I’ve probably contributed to destruction of Amazon forests more than anyone else around, since my best friend is an HP Laserjet printer these days.

In case you feel the urge to buy a very nice present to some guy you do not know,  just let me know.

Ok, this is really an interesting one. In medical informatics, one challenge that never seems to be conquered is providing a user interface that will not make a doctor grumble.
No matter how hard you try, you almost always here the comment: “this is not so easy to use…”. Medical professionals seem to be very picky when it comes to user interfaces and interaction with information systems. This link here mentions the same thing again. I’ve previously written about Microsoft CUI, and for all of our sakes, it would better be successful. This is a field that is sucking up a huge amount of effort and it is a large setback to adoption of many systems. Being terrible about user interfaces, I am not the one to take things further in this domain, but this is one field which should benefit enourmously from some form of standardization.

This is about Ruby on Rails. Not meant to start a flamewar, and not written to bash it. It is just that some of my concerns are not only mine apparently. When I wrote about Rails framework before, I was fond of the productivity it brought. Especially with the support for Ruby in Netbeans, ROR becomes a nice framework. However, scalability and other stability, enterprise features in general are required in our age. You can go ahead and read about the scalibility features of ROR all around the web, I did so.

What you have to be ready is to be able to quickly provide solutions. You have to have an idea about how to scale from 200 requests  a day to 200k in a week. With Java and .NET, I have that. Especially with Java. I can be running on Tomcat, and I can switch to JBoss to have clustering, load balancing, whatever I need. I can use NLB with Windows servers, switch to COM+ etc..

The point is these are very well tested solutions to scaleability problems. They have been proved for a lot of cases. The news is that ROR is having a hard time these days, for a very well known  site, Twitter might be abandoning ROR. When you search for scaling Ruby on Rails, you’ll probably come across something that contains references to Twitter.

I’ve switched from ROR to J2EE for my project, and I’m happy I’ve done so. Yes, my backend code is not as efficient to write as Ruby, but I’ve been successful at responding to requests  quite quickly, and most important of all, I am facing possibility of scaling to a much larger level, but I have no question marks about how to do that. I guess feeling confident that I have well proven methods to scale matters more some times. I guess JRuby becomes very important in this context since it can run ROR and it can scale using J2EE infrastructure. Let’s see what’ll happen in this front.

This is about Ruby on Rails. Not meant to start a flamewar, and not written to bash it. It is just that some of my concerns are not only mine apparently. When I wrote about Rails framework before, I was fond of the productivity it brought. Especially with the support for Ruby in Netbeans, ROR becomes a nice framework. However, scalability and other stability, enterprise features in general are required in our age. You can go ahead and read about the scalibility features of ROR all around the web, I did so.

What you have to be ready is to be able to quickly provide solutions. You have to have an idea about how to scale from 200 requests  a day to 200k in a week. With Java and .NET, I have that. Especially with Java. I can be running on Tomcat, and I can switch to JBoss to have clustering, load balancing, whatever I need. I can use NLB with Windows servers, switch to COM+ etc..

The point is these are very well tested solutions to scaleability problems. They have been proved for a lot of cases. The news is that ROR is having a hard time these days, for a very well known  site, Twitter might be abandoning ROR. When you search for scaling Ruby on Rails, you’ll probably come across something that contains references to Twitter.

I’ve switched from ROR to J2EE for my project, and I’m happy I’ve done so. Yes, my backend code is not as efficient to write as Ruby, but I’ve been successful at responding to requests  quite quickly, and most important of all, I am facing possibility of scaling to a much larger level, but I have no question marks about how to do that. I guess feeling confident that I have well proven methods to scale matters more some times. I guess JRuby becomes very important in this context since it can run ROR and it can scale using J2EE infrastructure. Let’s see what’ll happen in this front.