Fortunately, they didn’t do any harm other than posting or adding links. I suspect that the attacks were purely automated attacks exploiting known vulnerabilities. Things could have been a lot more unpleasant.

Anyway, as a result, I decided it was about time that I updated the blog to the latest version for the security fixes it now has in place to guard against these attacks. Hopefully this will keep the blog safe for a little longer.

All I need to do now is convert my old theme…the default WordPress theme looks so… default.

On the first day of Christmas,
my cool colleague sent to me
A tip to expand my business globally

On the second day of Christmas,
my cool colleague sent to me
Two social networks,
And a tip to expand my business globally!

On the third day of Christmas,
my cool colleague sent to me
Three Del.icio.us bookmarks,
Two social networks,
And a tip to expand my business globally!

On the fourth day of Christmas,
my cool colleague sent to me
Four YouTube videos,
Three Del.icio.us bookmarks,
Two social networks,
And a tip to expand my business globally!

On the fifth day of Christmas,
my cool colleague sent to me
Five Second Lives,
Four YouTube videos,
Three Del.icio.us bookmarks,
Two social networks,
And a tip to expand my business globally!

On the sixth day of Christmas,
my cool colleague sent to me
Six Twitter nudges,
Five Second Lives,
Four YouTube videos,
Three Del.icio.us bookmarks,
Two social networks,
And a tip to expand my business globally!

On the seventh day of Christmas,
my cool colleague sent to me
Seven Facebook pokes,
Six Twitter nudges,
Five Second Lives,
Four YouTube videos,
Three Del.icio.us bookmarks,
Two social networks,
And a tip to expand my business globally!

On the eighth day of Christmas,
my cool colleague sent to me
Eight Wiki entries,
Seven Facebook pokes,
Six Twitter nudges,
Five Second Lives,
Four YouTube videos,
Three Del.icio.us bookmarks,
Two social networks,
And a tip to expand my business globally!

On the ninth day of Christmas,
my cool colleague sent to me
Nine ladies blogging,
Eight Wiki entries,
Seven Facebook pokes,
Six Twitter nudges,
Five Second Lives,
Four YouTube videos,
Three Del.icio.us bookmarks,
Two social networks,
And a tip to expand my business globally!

On the tenth day of Christmas,
my cool colleague sent to me
Ten lords IM’ng,
Nine ladies blogging,
Eight Wiki entries,
Seven Facebook pokes,
Six Twitter nudges,
Five Second Lives,
Four YouTube videos,
Three Del.icio.us bookmarks,
Two social networks,
And a tip to expand my business globally!

On the eleventh day of Christmas,
my cool colleague sent to me
Eleven podcasters podcasting,
Ten lords IM’ng,
Nine ladies blogging,
Eight Wiki entries,
Seven Facebook pokes,
Six Twitter nudges,
Five Second Lives,
Four YouTube videos,
Three Del.icio.us bookmarks,
Two social networks,
And a tip to expand my business globally!

On the twelfth day of Christmas,
my cool colleague sent to me
Twelve Stumblers stumbling,
Eleven podcasters podcasting,
Ten lords IM’ng,
Nine ladies blogging,
Eight Wiki entries,
Seven Facebook pokes,
Six Twitter nudges,
Five Second Lives,
Four YouTube videos,
Three Del.icio.us bookmarks,
Two social networks,
And a tip to expand my business globally!

Sarcophagus Pattern

Intent

Provide a unified interface to a preserved, unspeakable horror that cannot be purged for sentimental or compatibility reasons. Sarcophagus is similar to Facade, but carries the implication that the box should only be opened in the presence of police, necromancers, or others familiar with the dealing with dead things.

Sarcophagus defines a higher-level interface that prevents the contents of the tomb from eating the brains of living. This can be used to simplify a number of despicable interactions and nightmarish dependencies into a single interface.

See also
Facade Pattern, Mediator Pattern, Adapter Pattern

Origins
Inspired by Tom during discussions of [removed to protect the authors]. Defined by Bill.

From the “Online Etymology Dictionary”: sarcophagus
“stone coffin,” 1601, from L. sarcophagus, from Gk. sarkophagos “limestone used for coffins,” lit. “flesh-eating,” in reference to the supposed action of this type of limestone (quarried near Assos in Troas) in quickly decomposing the body, from sarx (gen. sarkos) “flesh” (see sarcasm) + phagein “to eat” (see -phagous). The stone sense was the earliest in Eng,; meaning “stone coffin, often with inscriptions or decorative carvings” is recorded from 1705. The L. word, shortened in V.L. to *sarcus, is the source of Fr. cercueil, Ger. Sarg “coffin,” Du. zerk “tombstone.”

So, I’m just in the process of converting the site, which has been made significantly easier using the post I found on vrypan.net.

Now all I’ve got to figure out is how to rebuild my previous style with the minimum of effort, and work out what to do with posts that contain Textile-like mark-up.

One thing I have immediately noticed is how much more responsive the site now appears to be.

“I’ve selected the best 50 life hacks of the year, based on their popularity and contents in different categories. Invest your time - read them. Bookmark this page and mark reading them as one of your new year resolutions.”

read more

It is a short, succinct explanation of Domain-Driven Design, and takes us back to the basics of application design using a domain based approach.

Far too often, Java designers and developers spend too much time worrying about “how” to build an application, with far too much focus being placed on the technical aspects. Floyd’s book re-introduces the domain driven approach, focusing on “what” to build.

Java’s complexity (ironic for a language that was striving for simplicity) is the reason why so many Java developers have such poor focus. Using a simpler language (Ruby anyone?) allows the developer to focus on the “what” without having to worry about the “how”.

Unfortunately, Java’s complexity is here to stay. Which is why I think it is so important to stress to developers that they shouldn’t lose focus on the “what”.

Slavery is wrong, there is no doubt about that.

However, it should not be forgotten that the majority of African slaves were “bought” from African kings and merchants in exchange for a variety of products. Especially guns.

The Africans were enslaved by their own rulers. The European nations took advantage of their greed.

There were some exceptions, and history does record a number of military campaigns to capture slaves, but these account for a very small minority of the 10 million slaves that were traded between 1650 & 1900.

Blair’s apology is nothing more than a farcical attempt to win favor for Labour with British African voters.

Perhaps we should ask for apologies from the Danes for their Viking raiding parties?

If you haven’t heard of it, Second Life is a virtual world. It is *not* a game. If anything, it is closer to being a cross between 3 dimension chat and 3 dimensional web. It is a place where you can build a virtual home, invite your virtual friends round, and have a virtual party with them.

The great thing is, Second Life is a blank canvas. You can build want you want in it, and program those objects using the Second Life scripting language to give them behavior. This makes it the perfect virtual environment, allowing me to express my creativity in my down time.

It is also fascinating how some real life companies have begun to leverage Second Life, and you are now beginning to see a cross over between Second Life and Real Life businesses.

If you visit, send an IM (instant message) to my avatar, “Electro Spark”.

It looks like the peeps over on Java Lobby have run into this common problem too.

There are a couple of ways around this problem that dont involve restarting all of your Java network based applications.

There is a property that can be set via java.security.Security, “networkaddress.cache.ttl”, that sets the poll interval (in seconds) that Java will use before refreshing a cached DNS name.

To set this value, you just need to include the following snippet somewhere in your code:

bq. java.security.Security.setProperty(”networkaddress.cache.ttl” , “60″)

There is a second property, “networkaddress.cache.negative.ttl” which is pertinent too. This property sets the poll interval used for unsucessful DNS lookups.

You can set both of these properties to zero, which will disable DNS caching all together.

In addition to these settings, there are two internal system properties that can also be used, but depending on your VM, these may or may not work.

“sun.net.inetaddr.ttl” & “sun.net.inetaddr.negative.ttl” correspond directly to the two previously mentioned properties, but are System properties rather than Security properties, so they have the advantage of being configurable via the command line, or centralised with other application properties.

There is a useful page over on the Sun Java site that discusses all of the available Networking Properties. It is well worth bookmarking.

Once I learned the very hard lessons of how to be a leader instead of a manager, I fully embraced the idea that a successful team was one where people of varying skills had the opportunity to fully demonstrate their talents. At the same time they could count on the different skills of others to help them be more successful than they could have been by themselves. That’s a mouthful, but it served me well.