Quartz is an open source job scheduling system written in Java. Executing a job in quartz is based on the definition of triggers. But what if you are in a development environment where you don’t want to schedule jobs and want to be able to run them on demand? The API of version 1.6.0 tells us that the triggerJob method in the Scheduler class can be used for that. Great! But the triggerJob method also seems to throw away your job from the scheduler. So the second time you run the job it’s bingo!
A possible workaround we figured out for this is to reschedule the job with a simple trigger which will run immediatly:
scheduler.deleteJob(jobName, groupName);scheduler.scheduleJob( jobDetail, new SimpleTrigger(jobName, groupName));
You could of course also use the rescheduleJob method but then you have to be sure the job is already scheduled. In our situation this was not the case.
Yesterday I had a chat with Henri on Google Talk where he asked me for a screenshot of the project I was working on. For those of you who don’t know I am currently working on a webservice that will keep track of the technorati rankings of your blog. More details of the project will follow on this blog. Just for the record here is the sneak preview:
Sparklines are described in Edward Tufte’s book Beautiful Evidence (2006) as “small, high resolution graphics embedded in a context of words, numbers, images”. In one of our projects we needed sparklines and one option was to use this open source package by Larry Ogrodnek. Just out of curiousity I was wondering how far we would come if we would use the Google Chart API. My final result looked promising …
… but there was no way I could get rid of the gray x- and y-axis.
That was until I ran into this article where I saw sparklines created with the Google Charts API and without the x- and y-axis. How the hell did he do it?
Well … it seems to be an undocumented feature also used by Google on their financial site. Instead of using cht=lc (chartype is line chart) you can use cht=lfi (charttype is financial line chart). And yes here is the final result:
I want to share a nice little gadget from the Nike+ website. The runs are updated each time I sync my Nike+/Apple sensor. Time to get my lazy but out of the chair … you can almost watch me when I am running!
Today I was figuring out how to integrate the Hibernate search API in one of my projects. At a certain point the docs referred to the Lucene documentation. My old pal Google provided me the link to the Lucene homepage and when I opened it up I saw something very weird in the upper right corner: “Search the site with Google”
Yep, Lucene seems to be using Google as a search engine! At first I was a bit astonished about it. But why bother about it, the Google service is out there and it just works. After all Lucene is a great tool and I hope to tell you more about it in the near future.
A few weeks ago I visited my doctor for my knee problems and he told me I wouldn’t have to worry about running again. He also said that one of the reasons why I was feeling down about me not sporting where my endorphins. Or better the lack of endorphins. Endorphins are released during long, continuous workouts and are also known as “runner’s high“. I have never been high during my workouts but it sure feels good running again and I am proud to share a znap* of my nike+ logbook:
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* znap: slang for a snap / snapshot and … znapz is also the kewl name of my company
I believe in the Open Source Development model for building reliable software. End nineties I started to join (mostly by lurking on the mailing lists) the open source world using the Cocoon 1.x framework for one of our projects. Since then I learned a lot about the open world, it’s meritocratic organization, communication, infrastructure, collaboration etc. Today I start with sharing my own experiences at www.znapz.org.
The primary focus of znapz dot org is on building data driven web applications with Java, Wicket, Hibernate and MySQL. In the near future you can expect more posts related to the platform and it’s insides .
This morning I finished my first training since the GP Gaston Roelants. Problems with my knee kept me from training and I was a happy man this morning when I finished my training without any knee problems. The training track (see map below) was very slippery and wet, especially the part at the Platwijers.
The statistics below show what one month without training does with the condition. We got work to do if we want to run 10 miles of Antwerp in April and the 20 km of Brussels in May! I plan to pick up my 20km training schedule next week.
I have been training a while now with the Garmin Forerunner 305 (a wireless heart rate monitor with a GPS receiver) and I was very excited to run my first official running contest the GP Gaston Roelants in Brussels. It was a difficult track with a lot of nasty hills and I ran the 10km in 1 hour and 3 minutes. Syncronizing my Forerunner GPS with Google Maps resulted in the picture below. In the upper left corner you can see the Koning Boudewijnstadion and the Atomium and in the lower left corner you can see the Koninklijke Paleis.
Just ran into a tool called iText which is focused on creating PDF documents. Read more about ithere. A step-by-step guide to iText is available here at IBM or at O’Reilly
iText is used by BIRT an eclipse based reporting tool
