http://michaelzanussi.com Yes, Java is pass-by-value. Mon, 05 Jan 2009 07:47:12 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en The ThinkPad received an OS upgrade this weekend. Not to Windows Vista, but to a brand new installation of Ubuntu instead. XP, while quite nice and serviceable, was simply running too slow, even after a fresh install back in October, and I really didn't feel like re-installing again or worse, ... http://michaelzanussi.com/2009/01/05/whither-microsoft/ Because it hasn't crashed since I upgraded to Parallels 4.0 in November. Very nice. However, I now have a green, 1-pixel wide, vertical line running up the right side of the LCD that appeared out of nowhere one day. That I can actually live with; the random reboots, I cannot. Still, I ... http://michaelzanussi.com/2008/12/29/why-is-mac-kinda-happy/ Coming back to work from the Thanksgiving holiday, we were greeted with some IVR strangeness. Seemingly random error events were being thrown in our IVRs every fourth or fifth call, causing callers to be transferred to an agent rather than allowing them to continue in a possibly unstable IVR. After ruling ... http://michaelzanussi.com/2008/11/29/odd-gvp-behavior/ World of Warcraft Patch 3.0.2 a.k.a. "Echoes of Doom" was released this week. It's a massive patch, 1.2GB to be exact, containing a lot of code for the forthcoming release of Wrath of the Lich King this November. Unfortunately, patches are not perfect and problems are sometimes introduced. For those of ... http://michaelzanussi.com/2008/10/18/mac-client-issues-with-echoes-of-doom/ It's Parallels again. I had just launched Visual C# when Mac froze for a moment, Parallels crashed, and the screen wiped gray with this lovely dialog box in the center: Upon restart, Mac mocked me further: As if I needed to be reminded. Parallels is useful, but it sure blows sometimes. http://michaelzanussi.com/2008/10/16/mac-crash/ Today, I was updating one of our EJBs to support some existing functionality of an Oracle stored procedure of ours. It's a very straightforward function that adds a contact note to a customer's account record and returns a boolean indicating whether the insertion was successful or not. I thought it ... http://michaelzanussi.com/2008/10/08/oracle-jdbc-and-boolean-return-values/ In my last post, I wrote about OAS caching causing a problem after a server move. Since it affected production, it was a big deal. Caching causes us other problems, though, typically in our development environment, where it may not be a huge deal but is annoying nonetheless. <rant> Take for example deploying ... http://michaelzanussi.com/2008/10/08/more-caching-issues/ I came into the office this morning to find a bunch of errors in our Oracle application server logs. It appeared that our post-call survey app was timing out on a section of code that retrieves application options from the CME, in particular the openConnection() method in CfgInfoDesktopConfiguration couldn't make ... http://michaelzanussi.com/2008/09/11/container-blues/ I just finished reading Stephen Kochan's Programming In Objective-C. Since I've been wanting to do some Mac and iPhone development, I figured this was a good place to start. Overall, I thought it was a good effort, but certainly not the best. On the negative side, I found a surprisingly large ... http://michaelzanussi.com/2008/09/10/programming-in-objective-c/ Mac has been running great since I had the hard drive replaced a few months ago. No more lengthy pinwheel spinning and not a single flashing question mark folder in all those days. However, Mac did perform a random reboot tonight, which when it happens is a bit startling. Thinking back, ... http://michaelzanussi.com/2008/08/22/random-mac/