My GoDaddy domain is down

My domain registrar (GoDaddy) is currently down (9/10/2012 11:20AM AZ) in what seems to be an attack from the group Anonymous. Not only their services are down, even their main webpage is down right now! Wow, that was ugly!

I am not hosting any of my projects with them. Everything is hosted on Google infrastructure (AppEngine, Apps for Business, Blogger etc). Unfortunately they are all down too because I still rely on GoDaddy's DNS servers! Grrrrr! :(

The only positive thing I can take from this issue is that my web monitor app Pingr worked as designed and quickly notified me about the problem. In this case there isn't much I can do to fix it though, have to wait for GoDaddy figure it out on their side. At least Pingr will tell me once their system is back up. Until then Pingr's main URL (http://pingr.eventfy.com/) will be unavailable.

P.S. If anyone else wants to receive a notification from Pingr when your system is backup you can use it from its Google AppEngine's URL: http://pingr-eventfy-com.appspot.com/.

Update: at 3:18PM AZ (about 4 hours since I found out about this issue!) my domain eventfy.com finally got back up.

It seems some sites are still affected but GoDaddy is slowly getting there. You can find a discussion about this issue here (Reddit).

Update: yesterday night (9/13) GoDaddy sent me an email taking the blame, stating that it wasn't caused by an external hacker but by themselves. Not sure if (i) I buy it and (ii) it makes me feel any safer if this is true. Anyways they gave me a 30% off new product or renewal valid for 7 days. Man, I am just happy I don't depend on this for my livelihood! :)

Kindle media converter Windows script

Check this post out for a Windows batch script to convert images into PDFs optimized for the Amazon Kindle e-reader.

NFJS 2010 - Northern Virginia Software Symposium II

This is my last post about the No Fluff Just Stuff Software Symposium here in Reston, VA. Sad to say I didn't get any of the 3 iPads! I did see my name scrolling down for the last iPad (the most expensive model!) but the system had to pick someone else's name just 2 or 3 positions from mine! Oh well... guess I am not destined to get one, since I am not gonna buy one and my luck isn't gonna get me a free one either. This is something else I might consider buying, if it ever sees the light of day Notion Ink Adam.

Anyways, the symposium was amazing - Jay Zimmerman put together a great set of speakers and enough varied content for everybody. Thanks Jay! These are the sessions I attended, along with my comments:

Click on the "Read more" link below to check out my notes on Friday's presentations.

NFJS 2010 - Northern Virginia Software Symposium

I am attending the No Fluff Just Stuff Software Symposium here in Reston, VA. The schedule this year is really good, with names like Neil Ford, Jeff Brown, Matthew McCullough and so many other experienced speakers and book authors discussing things like REST, polyglot development with languages like Ruby, Clojure etc, cloud computing, testing, Agile development etc. Many of these guys are either book authors, code committers or both for really cutting edge technologies that are shaping up what most of us will be doing and working with years from now. Sometimes it is hard to decide which session you want to attend - at any given time during the event they have 6 parallel sessions going on!

I attended today 2 sessions with Neal Ford, "Implementing Evolutionary Architecture" and "Testing the Entire Stack". He is not just a gifted speaker but also makes it obvious he knows well what he is talking about from hands on experience. If you ever have the chance to attend one of his sessions at NFJS or some other symposium make try not to miss it, I am sure you will learn something you can use. His keynote "Smithing in the 21st Century", where he presented his views of how (and to what extent) we can predict the future and to where we are headed in the near future was great, and it was interesting not just for developers / architects but to pretty much anyone interested in technology.

Unfortunately I just found out about the symposium less than 2 weeks back so I couldn't convince my company to fund my tickets (who knows if they change their mind in the next weeks? that would be a good surprise :D). Despite of that, a good thing is that I got to do volunteer work helping the event organizers on some basic tasks (things like attendee registration, organizing the presentation printouts etc), got to meet some nice people and should even get some credit back. Also, NFJS will be giving away 2 iPads, books and other prizes at random for the attendees - who knows, if my name gets picked for one of the iPads that wouldn't be bad at all, especially because this is likely the only way I would ever get one! :D

I will let you know on Sunday if I got one of the iPads hehehe... along with my personal feedback of the sessions I attended. I know these things are subjective, but who knows, if you get the NFJS guys in your town this could help you pick your sessions.

Black friday madness

November, sweet november... month of the most important of holidays on Earth - the Black Friday! When all geeks can join in a mad rat race for the best deals, from clothing to electronic gadgets. For about 3 days people get in lines throughout the night, take enough red bull and 5 hour energetic drinks to glow green in the dark just to save some dough for the holidays. This kind of sacrifice may sound stupid for those who never experienced it, but since I came here to the US I can say this is the funniest holidays ever. Which other holiday can we find 47' HDTVs for less than half the regular price? Or get into a Walmart of Target store and see people fighting over cheap doorbuster deals? And hordes of geeks fighting online and killing web servers with DOS attacks trying to purchase half-price electronics? It is not for the faint of hearth, that is for sure!

This has been my approach during the past Black Fridays:
1. Monitor "official" BF sites for leaked ads weeks before the Black Friday - the ones I usually look into are:

• http://bfads.net/
• http://www.blackfriday.info/
• http://www.black-friday.net/

2. Based on the leaked ads, make a list of your targets - when the time comes there is no room for you to decide what to buy, if you hesitate you lose the deal!

2. Create a webmail account just for deals and other junk - apply for email lists on every store you can think of. Stores sometimes send good deals in its email lists and this is sometimes the fast way to score it! Just make sure you create a "junk" email account to use only for that purpose or set rules in your existing email client (webmails like hotmail and gmail are good at that too) to move all emails from these companies to a separate folder. Some stores I get deals via email:

• Newegg - http://www.newegg.com/
• Amazon - http://www.amazon.com/
• BestBuy - http://www.bestbuy.com/
• Target - http://www.target.com/
• CostCo - http://www.costco.com/
• TigerDirect - http://www.tigerdirect.com/
• CompUSA - http://www.compusa.com/

And so much more... some stores also give you discount coupons when you signup, so make sure you do not overlook it.

3. Monitor deal sites and forums for the best deals - the ones I use the most are:

• DealDump - http://www.dealdump.com/
• SlickDeals HotDeals forum - http://slickdeals.net/forums/forumdisplay.php?f=9
• FatWallet - http://www.fatwallet.com/

* - make sure you also follow the BF forum at SlickDeals - you need all the information as fast as possible!

4. And lastly, refrain from sleeping. This is key - if you sleep during the Black Friday week you WILL lose good deals. If you sleep during Thanks Giving / Black Friday / Saturday you will lose the BEST deals! In times like these you can't rely on a cup of coffer, you need something "military grade" - in times like these 5 Hours Extra is your best friend! :D

5. Some brick-and-mortar deals are inviting - but think wisely before stepping into the streets. Many times the online stores match or even top the deal. Also, shopping online you can easily cover dozens of stores - while other people are in line for one single store!

I hope you already figured I made a few jokes so far, I am not that crazy to spend 8 hours in line during a freezing night like some people to score a TV or laptop for peanuts. But for those who still think I am a materialistic person, I guess that may be true... but I have to say that most of the Black Friday fun is actually in digging and "fighting" (by fighting I mean trying to get your order thru, not actually fighting a dude over a TV!) for deals than actually spending tons of cash on stuff. And if you are picky with what you buy you do not need to spend a lot on stuff, spend good time with friends - I have had lots of good times with the wife and a friend on Black Fridays - and get out of it with good stuff you can use.

I just wish I had the idea to write this post BEFORE this years' BF... oh well, perhaps no one will notice if I copy / paste it for next year's BF hehehe :D

Greetings and my own "get rich" scheme plan

Greetings to you all. Yeah, I know by ALL I meant my still-zero followers, but before I start with my ramblings on Java development and technology I think I should first introduce myself and describe why I think the Internet needs another tech blog.

First, as my personal description states (and where you can find more info about me - though I don't know why you would bother), I am a technology enthusiast who has been working with Java development for more than 10 years. I still remember vividly when Java Server Pages were "the next new thing", and we even had to name extensions of the pages based on the JSPs 1.0 spec like "*.jsp10" because all other JSPs were based on the 0.9 spec. Good times, good times...

But despite that, and my wish to be heard in this channel, I do not want to sound like I am an expert on anything. I just love what I do and I think this blog could be a good tool to keep in touch with like-minded people for a good exchange of ideas. And, if in the process this blog makes me filthy rich with its google ads, then it will be just a mere coincidence - though I think I am overly optimistic on that. Well, I promise if I ever get filthy rich I will write a book (or better yet, pay someone to do it while I spend life in the Caribe) describing how I got rich, and then I will be even richer. Ah if it were that simple... coming back to reality, I guess if your clicks get me one burguer meal per year it will be a burguer more than I expect. Who knows, if I keep writing here years from I could publish this as a book like Joel Spolsky - yeah yeah, I know I am just starting this thing and I am just another developer with a blog, but we gotta dream high, right? :D

My plan for the next posts is to focus on tools and techniques I have been learning or experimenting with, like how to setup an efficient development environment on the cheap (i.e. free-as-in-beer), and more specific techniques related with Oracle databases and Java Server Faces. From there I will keep posting whatever I will be learning / experimenting with in the future.

I will also include here all the sites I read almost everyday, and reviews of the best books I read. Hope you enjoy the ride and help this blog (and its author) with your feedback so I don't feel I'm talking all alone here.

Lastly, I hope you have patience to forgive my obvious lack of English skills - it has been only 3 years, more or less, since I moved to the US. I did not attend school here but went directly to employment, which surely didn't help make me the next Shakespeare. So, bear with me with a little patience and I promise I will try to improve as fast as I can. But if any error passes through the cracks (and I'm sure they will) I will blame MS Word or Google language translator. :D

Yours truly,
Pedro Burglin