Getting Grinder To Work with a Self-Signed Certificate

Recently, I’ve been working a bunch with Grinder to do some load testing.  I’ve had great success with it in the past, and wanted to punish an app.  My test needs to make HTTP and HTTPS requests which I never anticipated would be a problem.  Unfortunately, my server has a self-signed certificate which the Java


Life is like a sine curve

As some of you may know, it has been a tough time for my wife and I.  This anecdote from her graduate school adviser really cheered me up. My student Guoqing who is from China is always full of stories and proverbs and good advice. When he was young he dreamed of being a writer


Java Memory Management Improvement Proposal

For the umpteenth time, I had to deal with the dreaded Java OutOfMemoryError, this time when trying to run Fisheye Subversion browser.  My problem deals with a known issue in Fisheye where a background indexing task sometimes runs causes an OOM error.  Of course, an OOM does not just effect the indexing task, it can


Respect the Silent Evidence

I have been reading The Black Swan : The Impact of the Highly Improbable by Nassim Nicholas Taleb (a.k.a. NNT) and been thinking about its impact on some of the assumptions that I have made.  One of the main points is how often accept as proven fact theories which ignore silent evidence.  Software professionals fall


No Rock Stars Need Apply

Interesting article from fortune on why talent is overrated.  As a society, we tend to overvalue innate talent.  However, most success comes from focused hard work rather than pure talent.  Tiger Woods is great because of how focused he is on constantly improving his game. As i talked about in Effective Technology Teams, what someone