On my new role, I have found the need to do a lot of reading to get up-to-speed. As a result, I had a stack of reading projects loom before me quickly, and was struggling to efficiently have a process that ensured I was getting all the reading done. My GTD system didn’t help me much either for the reasons mentioned in this article. Namely, reading projects with broken down action items along with the rest of my daily to-dos in the GTD system creates a form of cognitive dissonance. Hence, as the article suggests, I’ve found the distinction of working out of a routine instead of list for my reading projects to be helpful. I would rather not see a to-do entry from a reading project (say, completing a book) in my daily list at all. Instead, I have allotted times in my calendar when I can drain out the stack of ebooks on my operational reading list.

Oracle 11g XE does not run natively on Mac OS X. However, you can have it setup running on a VM and have your natively-running JBoss servers connect to it via port-forwarding (along with additional steps below):

When it comes to learning something new, we often tend to take the approach of seeking solitude with a bunch of books and a laptop. Although this may appropriate for some kinds of learning, the collaborative approach of learning together with other people is often overlooked. HBR has an interesting article arguing that we learn more when we learn together. This would make sense considering that human beings are relational beings to the core and are not meant live in silo’ed worlds.

I decided to try out Red Hat’s PAAS solution OpenShift by deploying a simple application built on Ruby Sinatra. These were the basic steps required to get up and running:

How easy it is to be content where you are as a developer and coast through a Software job so long as it pays the bills! If you want to get out of the rut of becoming stale in your technical skills, here’s some excellent advice on what it takes to start heading in the direction of becoming a better programmer than you are now:

Great productivity tips from Harvard Business Review. Particularly appreciated these ones:

Here are a helpful and handy set of flash cards on integration patterns from Red Hat to be used during design and development.

A consultant is someone who offers professional advice and service based on his deep knowledge and expertise in a specific area, combined with a broad knowledge in the related field. What does it take to be a good IT Consultant? Here are some of my opinions, and tips that I have gathered:

Problem:

When using Hibernate API in an EJB application, the following exception occurs during runtime.

java.lang.NoSuchFieldError: org/apache/log4j/Level.TRACELorg/apache/log4j/Level;
    at org.jboss.logging.Log4jLogger.translate(Log4jLogger.java:64)
    at org.jboss.logging.Log4jLogger.isEnabled(Log4jLogger.java:39)
    at org.jboss.logging.Logger.logv(Logger.java:1953)
    at org.hibernate.internal.CoreMessageLogger_$logger.tracev(CoreMessageLogger_$logger.java:443)
    at org.hibernate.cfg.EJB3DTDEntityResolver.resolveEntity(EJB3DTDEntityResolver.java:58)
    at weblogic.xml.jaxp.ChainingEntityResolver.resolveEntity(ChainingEntityResolver.java:87)
    at weblogic.xml.jaxp.ChainingEntityResolver.resolveEntity(ChainingEntityResolver.java:87)

Solution:

Problem:

When trying to use maven jaxws plugin for generating wsdl from annotated Java classes, the below error occurs during build.

“Embedded error: com/sun/mirror/apt/AnnotationProcessorFactory”

Solution:

Change the plugin version of jaxws-maven-plugin from 1.10 to 1.11.