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Sometimes, just sometimes - once every 5 years - I need to reverse engineer my own binary because I've either FUbar'd the code or the code is lost to me. Don't care to explain why the latter is true this particular time, but it is true. I need a built version of an application so I can run it through a trust Java Decompiler like the trustworthy JAD tool. JAD tool hasn't correctly reverse current Java code since Java 1.5, but it does come close and it's far easier to simply clean that up (you can see the structure of the code, even if it isn't immediately obvious what to do to get it to compile again).

A friend of mine pinged for some good bootstrap content on various technologies, namely Perl, MySQL, PHP, Python, Linux, C and C++. I learned (or, tried to... I'm convinced I'll never understand C++ and Perl) all of these different things over the years and so my knowledge is either outdated or incomplete. Nevertheless, I figured some of it might help others, too, so I'm reprinting a cleaned up version of my response email here. This information, of course, reflects my biases and experience and, except Perl, reflects professional experience in some form or another.

The world of enterprise Java looks very different than it did 10 years ago. 10 years ago, I started following the news, the open-source projects, etc. In essence, I joined the "cult" of Java and haven't looked back. Even as I write Groovy and Scala code, I still feel a part of that cult today.

Well, it's that time of year again! My dad's birthday, my birthday, and my favorite little 3 year old's (My buddy's little girl Makani - she's a whopping three years old already) birthday! I'm taking a trip to Portland, Oregon with the misses this Friday to visit dad and see the family. I'm really looking forward to that. Nothing quite so wonderful as perpetually, if only slightly, damp trees and coffee. :-)

And we're off! The new year has been moving exceedingly quickly (I can't beleive we're already almost done with the first month! "Stop the world, I want off!") I don't know if you guys noticed, but SpringSource has been putting out new educational content (and a corresponding amount of code that quickly overwhelms any attempt at providing educational content..) on the SpringSource.org web site. I have been trying to publish two weekly-ish (we may miss a day or two or a column or two) "columns." One is called "This Week in Spring," which details all the new stuff in the community related to Spring and/ or SpringSource. If you've written a cool Spring tutorial or read a blog post that had what you needed to get going with Spring, let me know! Here's an example of last week's "This Week in Spring." The other "series" I've been working on (with occasional guest-scribes) is our series of educational, back-to-basics posts called "Green Beans."

I can't believe how quickly things have come and gone. I thought 2009 was great, but 2010 year no doubt takes the cake! Now that we're all on the other side of the new year, I thought I'd take a quick look at my year (and my decade) and talk about the Spring framework.

I've been making heavy use of the H2 database of late. H2 represents the next big idea from the mind of the gentleman who created HSQL, so, of course, it's a rock-solid alternative to that.

I've just returned from Devoxx 2010 where I manned the SpringSource booth and talked to members from the community and gave a talk on the latest and greatest in the wide world of Spring. It was a lot of fun, but I'm glad to be home! There's a bit of downtown for those of us in the states as we celebrate Thanksgiving. Looking forward to catching up on some work!

What a whirlwind month! First, Java2Days, then SpringOne, and then Adobe MAX.

I'll be speaking at SpringOne2GX this week along with a raft of supremely awesome speakers from the Spring and Grails communities. I'll be delivering a talk about building custom components (mostly, custom adapters) for Spring Integration. There are other talks happening concurrently that, if I weren't giving a talk, I'd want to attend. :-) This year is poised to continue last year's agressive growth in attendance. Besides my talk, I'll be there taking in the talks and chatting with people in the hallways. I hope to see you there!

I have long used rEFIt to install Ubuntu on a MacBook Pro. Simply install rEFIt as instructed on the site and then install Ubuntu on the newly created partition. No weirdness. Depending on your hardware, you may need to make sure that the Ubuntu installer program uses nomemset. This wasn't the case for me.