Program all the things!

I'm going to walk you through a scenario that's played out over the past couple months after I setup a Tomcat environment for a developer at our company. It's gonna be condensed and go fast, so

Dot on Dot off

We can all agree that the folks over at Google are web programming wizards, right? If you've ever even heard of google docs and what it does with javascript, you won't argue with me (not that you could anyways, this is a blog, not a conversation).

Now that we're all on the same page, let's poke fun at

Read the whole stacktrace/Be careful when using spring

As a disclaimer, I am critical of a lot of Spring frameworks. Don't get me wrong, they're often useful and can save a lot of time when they're used right. But it's really easy to shoot yourself in the foot (or the head) when using a lot of them. For this post, exhibit A will be Spring DI. I recently had a developer forward me the following exception:

Programming by Word Association

Security Theater: Believing Screenshots

I heard a statement today that interested me greatly. I'll quote it directly for accuracy:

"Our auditors accept screenshots for proof of our licensing use, but not spreadsheets because spreadsheets can be manipulated."

Overflowing

Do you ever have trouble learning outside of work? I certainly do. In college, during the summers, I felt like I had tons of time and concentration to dedicate to personal projects and ideas. Now, when I try to pick up a technical book outside of work, my brain stalls. Have the time, when I try to pick up a technical book at work my brain stalls. Here's my theory. Your brain is like this:

And the water is all of the topics you're expected to keep

Platonic Computer Science

Recently I encountered a file permissions issue. Long story short, I had a service that needed to run a .bat file, but because of a Windows quirk, it needed list access to the root of the drive the file was on. I called up my friends at our Information Security department and after getting transferred around a bit, I was informed that their policy was to not grant special access to the root of any