Cure of the Mediocre

There is a new mix for download in the Music section. This time, I started out to be very minimal. The first couple of tracks I really love, mainly because of their fresh and unconventional underground feel. The pace increases after about 1/3 of the way and becomes a little more progressive and even a bit big room, taking a few turns into the melodic and then in the last third of the mix it goes down until ending up in my obligatory chill-out zone. It is roughly 1 hour and 45 minutes long, so take your time to enjoy the beast in its whole without interruptions. There are a lot of different styles covered within. It is again a mix of all the tracks I liked listening to the most in the past couple of months. I must admit, it was not easy to get them all working together this time and you might notice the fades are a little bumpy in the last half, but I just wanted to get all of them into one mix because they are just awesome. Hope you enjoy!

Direct download: here.

More mixes: here.

Are you a java web application developer and you are working with JBoss Seam? Ok, then you might be interested in the following performance problems (and their solutions). If not you should seriously consider leaving this post! It is rather long and dry and might make you never consider programing with Seam EVER (which can also be a good thing, but I will leave this discussion for another post). In any case: You have been warned.

Soo… I have recently gained some experience developing a medium/large web application with Seam and I also discovered a couple of pitfalls you run into when using this framework, especially in terms of performance optimization. At some point, I had pages of just average complexity, loading in more than 17 seconds! In this post, I will go over each of the steps that i did to speed up those pages to 3 – 6 seconds. During my code analysis, I searched through a couple of Seam performance tuning pages out there, but for some reason they did not really provide me the tweaks or straight solutions I was hoping to find. Many of the tips I found sounded very reasonable, but when I applied them to my project, there was barely any change in Seam’s performance! That’s why I publish my own list of performance optimizations, which definitely had a visible impact at least on my code and hope I can help those among you, who find themselves in a similar position like me. And even if my performance tuning tips are not able to help in your particular case, at least you will learn how to identify performance problems in your Seam project with this post.

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Over the years of internet usage, most of us grew accustomed to the fact, that we should choose passwords, that are not plain text. No, they should be as cryptic to our eyes as possible: containing numbers in random positions, special characters like ‘@’ instead of ‘a’ and some of the letters have to be capitalized. What sounds so plausible is only based on the fact, that we are not good at remembering them, so we *think* those passwords are secure. But are they really?

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Neil deGrasse Tyson makes astrophysics accessible to the average people by his enthusiastic and entertaining way of telling stuff and Stephen Colbert’s fun way of leading the interview is a quality bonus to this video. If you are only slightly interested in the questions why we should raise our scientific literacy and what makes astrophysics valuable to everyone, you should really watch this entertaining talk:

Browsing around my old mixes recently, I found two quite old ones from the years 2006 and 2007 that I just have to publish! One is called E-Lounge and the other one Springbreak. I have been listening to them while working today and although it is now nearly 6 years ago when i made them, I was surprised how fresh and full of energy they went… and I made myself a rule that all mixes that I am still listening to today, I will keep on my blog – so here you go…

Check out my music section, scroll down to the very bottom and download them right away! Feel free to get the other ones while you are at it as well (if you haven’t done so already) and don’t forget to leave some feedback!

I was playing around with some caching options on my blog, because the response time has been reportedly slow lately. I found a relatively decent configuration especially thanks to the W3 Turbo Cache plugin, but now my beloved shoutbox ‘Schreikasten’ (formerly displayed on the right side as a widget) did not work properly anymore. Although I will look into what exactly the problem was again, until I find a solution, I will have to disable the shoutbox for now. I am not sure what to do with all the stuff that I would have posted there. Usually that stuff was not worth to open a whole entry for. And visitors where able to drop a line without the context of a blog post in it. However, I prefer a faster website. Maybe I will collect my findings in a regular post once enough has been accumulated, like stromkopf does. Any other ideas besides going twitter?

If you have a wordpress blog (or any other kind of website), you might come across this problem some day: you want to fetch multiple RSS feeds and merge their entries in chronological order into one feed. Don’t panic, I might have found the solution for you. On my WordPress blog you can see I have RSS feeds for the blog posts, the user comments and now also the shoutbox entries. Most visitors were not aware of the different RSS feeds on my page (and who could blame them?), so I decided to combine them all into one big feed. Here is what you need to do…

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I have a new ‘mixtape‘ for you guys! This time it contains my favorite tracks of the past few months. I had them in a kind of heavy rotation while working, and now i put them together in a sequence.

I like to imagine it is going up like a rocket into the orbit in the beginning where suddenly (at around half of the mix) you stop moving and just kind of float around in zero gravity until you drop back down to earth (in the last 12mins). So it is kind of chillout with some energy boost here and there.

Hope you enjoy!! Don’t forget to provide some feedback in the comment section…

Listen now…

(Bild-Quelle: Uni Frankfurt)

Fukushima ist alles andere als ein erledigtes Thema, auch wenn es in den Medien ein wenig untergeht. Es ist immernoch nicht klar, in welchem Umfang das Innere der Kraftwerke und insbesondere die Brennstaebe in den vier Abklingbecken zerstoert wurden. Unglaublich! Eine wahre Hilfslosigkeit macht sich breit: Derzeit ist das Japanische Militaer dazu gezwungen Schulhoefe umzugraben, damit der nukleare Dreck unter der obersten Erdschicht verschwindet. Erinnert ein wenig an “unter den Teppich kehren”. Was aber wenn eins der Kids anfaengt eine Burg zu bauen? Continue reading

I never buy bottled water. Except the occasional beer, wine or whisky that comes in recyclable glass, I am barely buying any plastic bottles at all (and I am practically never buying cans of any kind neither). I might have a slight advantage though: I don’t like Cola, Fanta, Sprite very much, but… I probably can NOT live without sparkling water. The bubbles are soo refreshing and soothing for my stomach, its almost a relieve to drink it.

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