My first batch of home-brewed sake

Posted under Personal by Anthony Chaves on January 17th, 2009. Comments Off

Last night I had a couple glasses of the sake, specifically doburoku, I brewed over the last two weeks.  The taste is pretty good for my first try.  It is a bit sweet and very smooth.  Each glass went down real easy and didn’t leave me reeling due to the taste or alcohol content.  I suspect it contains about 12-15% alocohol by volume which makes one glass of sake comparable to a glass of wine.  The recipe I used says the final product would be about 15-18% alcohol by volume but I think I used a bit too much water while brewing.  You can read more about the technical aspects of brewing sake on Wikipedia or take a look at the recipe I followed.  Read on for more about my brewing process. (more…)

Scalability round-table/forum on January 28

Posted under Java, Rails, Ruby, architecture, database, scalability, spring, sql by Anthony Chaves on January 13th, 2009. Comments Off

The Boston Scalability User Group is hosting a technology round-table meeting on Wednesday January 28th at 6 p.m.  The meeting is at the IBM Innovation Center in Waltham, MA.

This is the first time we’ve done the round-table style meeting and I’m excited to see how it goes.  Guests are encouraged to come prepared with questions, answers and opinions on application scalability tools, strategies and designs.  Hot topics will include platform and software stack, cloud computing and resources, vendor tools and support and CDNs. Those are my guesses about hot topics doesn’t mean the meeting is limited to those topics.

Guests, be the regular or first-timers, will drive the direction of the discussion.  We’ll talk about solving technical problems based on past experience or serve as an advisory panel on where and when to use a particular tool.

Full meeting details are at the BostonSUG web site.  We ask that you sign up for the meeting at the meeting registration page so we have an idea of how much food to buy.  There will be snacks and bottled water at this meeting.

Hope to see everyone on the 28th at 6 p.m.!

GridGain grid computing meeting on October 22

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Posted under Java, scalability by Anthony Chaves on October 6th, 2008. Comments Off

If anyone is in the Boston/Waltham, MA area on October 22nd the Boston Scalability User Group is having a meeting with Nikita Ivanov from GridGain.  Free pizza and a free talk about Java-centric grid computing sounds like a good deal to me (disclaimer: I’m the meeting organizer).  Check out the meeting details at the BostonSUG web site.

Rails and Restful Authentication

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Posted under Rails, Ruby by Anthony Chaves on July 11th, 2008. 3 Comments »

It’s been quite a while since my last Ruby on Rails post so let’s go over a little “gotcha” that you might encounter when using the restful_authentication plugin.

Getting started with restful_authentication is fairly easy.  After installing the plugin it’s just a matter of running the following generate command:

script/generate authenticated user sessions

This will create a migration for a users table, a model and controller for users and a sessions controller.  It will also add some named routes to config/routes.rb.

So far so good, right?  Well, a common mistake when generating the model and controllers is to user the singular form of both user and session.  The command will run successfully and do exactly what you told it to do.  You won’t become aware of a problem until you try to log in for the first time and see this:

NameError        in SessionsController#create


uninitialized constant SessionsController


RAILS_ROOT: C:/rails/bookmarks


Application Trace |             Framework Trace |             Full Trace






Request


Parameters:


{"commit"=>"Log in",
"authenticity_token"=>"0c0f07222da8ed58d8c6ebcafb9bf32f0bc84143",
"login"=>"anthony",
"password"=>"mysupersecretpassword"}


Uh oh! what went wrong?  It looks like Rails is looking for a controller called SessionsController.  But we generated one named SessionController.  Why is this happening?  Take a look in the views/session/new.html.erb file.


<% form_tag session_path do -%>


<p><label for="login">Login</label><br/>


<%= text_field_tag 'login' %></p>


<p><label for="password">Password</label><br/>


<%= password_field_tag 'password' %></p>


<!-- Uncomment this if you want this functionality


<p><label for="remember_me">Remember me:</label>


<%= check_box_tag 'remember_me' %></p>


-->


<p><%= submit_tag 'Log in' %></p>


<% end -%>


The form_tag target is session_path.  session_path is created for us by magic because of its mapping in routes.rb.


map.resource :session


When mapping a resource like this Rails looks for the controller with the pluralized name of the resource name by default, which means session_path is getting SessionsController.  We can change the behavior by explicitly setting the controller for the resource.


map.resource :session, :controller => :session


Try to log in again and you will be authenticated!  Of course it may just be easier to remember to use the pluralized name of whatever controller you want to use for managing sessions.

Terracotta Tech Talk

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Posted under Java, hibernate, spring by Anthony Chaves on May 20th, 2008. Comments Off

I’m developing a Java/Spring web application deployed on JBoss 4.2.2 that makes heavy use of memcached in order to reduce the latency experienced by the user. The user interacts with data that is (unbeknownst to them) in the cache. In order to make changes permanent a message is placed on a queue that is picked up by an MDB. The message is just the key used to access the data in the cache. The MDB takes the data out of the cache and then saves it to the database. This greatly improves the user experience because they do not have to wait for the next page to load while costly database writes occur. So far, so good.

In this case I am unfortunately duplicating data by separating the reads from the writes. The data lives in the Hibernate session used by the read-only app server in order to load the data in the first place. It also has to be loaded in the write-only app server in order for that Hibernate session to work with it, which brings me to the point of this post: Is there any way that I can use Terracotta to pool my Hibernate-managed objects into one pool used by both the read-only and write-only app servers? I think I would like to pool my Hibernate second-level cache. It seems like Terracotta can get the job done.

That said, I’m anxious to explore this topic more when Orion Letizi from Terracotta Tech comes to speak at the Boston Scalability User Group next Wednesday on May 28th. The meeting starts at 6 p.m. at the IBM Innovation Center in Waltham, MA. Of course there will be pizza and soda (sponsored by Terracotta – thank you!) so come to the meeting to have some food and explore what Terracotta can do for your project. All the details, including directions, are on the Boston Scalability User Group web site. Remember, there will be pizza!

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