GDCR11

I attended the Dallas session of Global Day of Code Retreat on 12/03/2011.

The session was hosted by ThoughtWorks with breakfast provided by HP and lunch by Improving Enterprises.

I split the ~23 minute session into three parts in the play list.

iPhone4S day!

Waiting to get my first smart phone. I've had my Motorola V551 for so long it still says 'Cingular' when I turn it on. :)

Fixing up the AESEncryptor

A follow on to my previous posts about using the Java Cryptography stuff to perform simple encryption. It turns out I was using a proprietary class from Sun for the Base64 encoding/decoding.

I got rid of the imports for the proprietary classes:

import sun.misc.BASE64Decoder;
import sun.misc.BASE64Encoder;

And used the Base64 class from org.apache.commons.codec.

This only required a few minor changes to the decode/encode calls.

AES and Java: Part the Third

So, in review, I needed to be able to encrypt a string using AES.

• I started with a simple test to see if I could get the original string back after encrypting it.
• The next step was to actually try hooking up the Java Cryptography classes to do the heavy lifting.
• In this installment I'll clean up my current solution and extend it just a bit to be more generally useful.

JCE Exploration Part 2

As I explained in my prior post I'm trying to figure out how to use the Java Cryptography classes to encrypt a string using AES.

I have a little test that passes but doesn't actually do any encryption. How shall I proceed?

A little excursion into JCE

I had an occasion to explore a bit of Java that I've never dealt with before: the Java Cryptography Extensions (as of Java 1.4 these are part of the Java distribution). The problem at hand required being able to encrypt a string using the Rijndael algorithm (AES).

Geek Night 06/08/2011

We had eight open-sourcers tonight. The largest contingent was Greg Heartsfield and his friends from Bell--Nick and first-timer Mike. We had two other newcomers--Kevin and Engin.

Starting off on the write foot...

...and by that I mean writing tests....

It has been a few frustrating sessions at Dallas Geek Night.

I've looked at a couple of technologies for writing iOS apps (even though I don't yet have an iPhone or iPad).

• mobl is like a DSL where you can declaratively layout screens and controls and will run in a webkit based browser.
• MonoTouch is a commercial plugin for MonoDevelop that allows you to write iOS apps in C#

I've also looked at partychapp.

So what is my frustration? Tests or the lack thereof.
When I start to work on a project I want to be able to quickly start writing unit tests.

Geek Night 03/16/2011

We had 7 developers at the Addison ThoughtWorks office. Several worked on different aspects of StoryNavigator.

Stumbling around Google collections

I came across a situation in some code I need to modify where maps were being 'filtered' to create tailored data for different situations. I couldn't come up with the solution I wanted in the moment so I cobbled up an example to see what might work.

Geek Night 02/23/2011

My first Geek Night in four weeks. Two of those didn't occur due to icy roads in the DFW metroplex.
Tonight we had ten people show up to the ThoughtWorks office in Addison.

Geek Night 01/26/2011

More angular! More node.js! More auto-test.

Geek Night 01/19/2011

Eight people came to work on open source tonight at the ThoughtWorks Dallas office.

Geek Night 01/12/2011

We had 5 attendees on this cold (for Dallas) night. Including Dhawal Shah who rode his bicycle to/from the meetup tonight. (I think a few more of us could benefit from that kind of dedication).

Geek Night 01/05/2011

Note to self: After a two week hiatus, publicize the meetup!

I think this was the first Geek Night where the ThoughtWorkers present were outnumbered by the other attendees--well, at least by this margin- 2 to 1!

GeekNight 12/15/2010

Richard Jensen installed IntelliJ 10 Community Edition and puttered around a bit.
Paul Hammant gave a brief look at his stack trace reducer idea.
Paul Holser was working on his JUnit 'quick check' project.
Greg Heartsfield continued work on his 52-in-52 project--inducting newcomer Dhawal Shah.
Yujun Liang was present but left before disclosing his activities.
Cosmin Stejerean and Eric Smalling continued work on the Hudson build radiator.


This is our last Geek Night in Dallas for 2010. Happy Holidays everyone and a prosperous 2011!

Geek Night 12/08/2010

Our small band of intrepid open-sourcers met for another session.

• Bill Schofield was present for a short time but had to leave early.
• Greg Heartsfield spent most of the evening educating Richard Jensen on node.js and his book a week tracker (52-in-52).
• Eric Smalling and Cosmin Stejerean worked on a Hudson build monitor.
• Paul Hammant worked on an example of JBehave driving interaction with a website.

Are you in the north Texas area? We meet every Wednesday night at the ThoughtWorks office in Addison, TX.

Geek Night 12/01/2010

ThoughtWorkers barely outnumbered guests (5-4) due to a southern contingent arriving.

Bill Schofield and Eric Smalling worked in Objective-C (OpenGL) on shape drawing--think asteroids triangle.
Rodrigo Wolschick and Duda Dornelles (from TW Brazil) did some work in Groovy on groobe.
Richard Jensen shaved yaks. (Trying to figure out how to get a project perspective in eclipse for creating Firefox plugins).
Greg Heartsfield and Sebastien Blanc node.js application for book reading lists.
Paul Hammant and Chris Petersen were doing frequent git pulls from Greg's project--forcing him to make his project more accessible to newcomers.

Geek Night 11/17/2010

Another small group tonight but we had some added excitement!
The building (and some of surrounding Addison) lost power about an hour into our Geek Night activities.

Prior to the disruption:

• Paul Hammant and Cosmin Stejerean worked on some XStream issues--and were able to create a patch before we lost power.
• Greg Heartsfield was showing Sebastien Blanc his Fermata project. During the blackout Greg gave an impromptu lightning talk on the project to the group.
• First time attendee Christina Zhong basically arrived just in time to be caught by the power outage.
• Addison Lee actually arrived after the outage occurred.
• Jim from Midnight Coders dropped by for a bit while we were in the dark.

 After a suitable waiting period we retired to a nearby restaurant and had a lively discussion.

There will not be a Geek Night in Dallas next Wednesday.

Do You Gosu?

Early days yet but it looks interesting. It reminds me somewhat of C# circa .NET 3.5

• var
• closures (blocks, lambdas)
• enhancements (I think this is like extension methods)
• object initializers