Robert Nieto's blog

Finally an update!

Robert — Thu, 24 Jun 2010 05:27:23 +0000

It’s been over a year since I last wrote on this blog. I’ve updated to the latest version of wordpress and changed themes.
I’m hoping to have enough time to take an active interest in my blog, but life has been so busy as my wife just moved here.

I’ve been programming often in Java and Ruby lately, so that is good. Hopefully I’ll have some code to put up in a repository in the near future.

I’ve been working on a framework in Java for testing trading ideas. I’ve been testing it with a simple grid system.

The grid functions based on the current Net-asset Value, and will close all trades after a specified profit level is reached. As I develop a better framework I’ll write more about it.

Success and Windows 7

Robert — Thu, 07 May 2009 00:15:00 +0000

Well I passed the 220-602 exam with a 96%, so now I’m a Comptia A+ certified IT Technician. The next Comptia exam I take will depend on what Microsoft certifications I plan to go after, since if I take the Security+ exam I can use it as one of the elective exams required for MCSE. I still haven’t decided yet.

I have my rc1 cdkey and now I’m going to install it. As it is good for 13 months, I plan to keep it as my desktop os. I’ve been running windows only in a virtual machine for the last few years, so it should be interesting to have it as a host os for awhile. I plan to put linux in a virtual machine. As I have already converted my lvm setup to ntfs I should be able to install it tonight and play around.

A+ IT (220-602) Exam

Robert — Tue, 05 May 2009 00:19:02 +0000

After taking the first exam, I figured I should take the next one soon. I’m scheduled to take the exam this Wednesday at 10:30am.
I believe I’ll do fine, but again to play it safe I’m studying for it.

CompTIA A+ Essentials (2007) Results — 95%

Robert — Fri, 01 May 2009 19:44:17 +0000

I was confident that I would pass, but I didn’t quite know what I’d score. I received a 95% on the exam, which isn’t bad at all. I have to decide now which secondary exam to take, though it’ll most … Continue reading →

Comptia A+ Certification

Robert — Wed, 22 Apr 2009 23:27:59 +0000

I just registered today to take the test on May 1st.
I figure with a week of review I should be able to pass the test.

Hopefully all goes well.

Google App Engine

Robert — Thu, 09 Apr 2009 19:55:32 +0000

It was great news to hear how google has adopted java servlets as the second platform for app engine. My account has it enable now and I look forward to tesing it out.

The few restrictions that exist do not really seem to matter. I haven’t seen a situation where it’d be ideal for a servlet to spawn a thread, though I’m sure someone could point out such a situation.

Later I’ll write more about my experiences with it.

jQuery and IE

Robert — Mon, 30 Mar 2009 22:07:16 +0000

I’ve had an interest in testing out jQuery for some time now and this weekend I finally dived right in with a simple ajax example quiz service. The backend was quickly designed as a servlet outputing JSON, leaving me with the frontend to do in jQuery.

As I did the initial design in firefox everything went smoothly, until I tested in IE. The kanji (word) to quiz wouldn’t update on the page. A quick google later I learned IE often will cache the get request. The simple fix was to include the current time as the data in the get, and after that IE stopped caching the requests.

For now the site is very simple as I do not plan to update it, but I will use spring mvc to build the next version.

Java Spring

Robert — Sun, 29 Mar 2009 16:32:12 +0000

I’ve started working with Spring, and to me the Inversion of Control via Dependency Injection really stands out as a nice design methodology. Of course this is a concept one can use in any software when required, even without Spring.

After reading about the foundation of Spring, I cannot wait to use it. I plan to discuss it more sufficiently as I gain more experience with it. I’d like to test out its web MVC module as soon as possible.

WordPress

Robert — Wed, 25 Mar 2009 02:43:28 +0000

For now I’ve decided to use wordpress for this site. With WP Super Cache plugin enabled, the site’s performance is very nice.

Server change!

Robert — Mon, 23 Feb 2009 17:05:23 +0000

I’ve been using this tiny 64MB vps for quite some time now, and with much tweaking was able to run the basic LAMP stack (apache, mysql, php) with mail on many domains, but there was no room for future growth. With all these services it was difficult to serve many concurrent users. So I decided to change VPS providers to increase the resources on this system. The transition went smooth. All services transferred without interruptions.

The good thing is this VPS has 384MB of ram. After being restricted by such a small amount of ram for so long it is nice to have plenty of extra resources. Now that the transition is complete, I can continue working on some custom services.