[RANDOM] Cleaning old java updates from your system

Chances are that if you browse the internet regularly, you have the Java Runtime Edition (JRE) installed on your machine. Your browser launches it when you run into things like java applets, usually in the form of a game, or maybe a telnet client. My school's command line web login uses Java, for example.

Chances are also good that you've updated your JRE a few times since it bugs you with annoying prompts if you don't. The updates are good to have (they usually fix security flaws) but unfortunately Sun doesn't clean up after itself. Your computer probably looks something like this:


See those extra updates? I already have "Java 6 update 17", but there's a "Java update 4", a 5, and a 7. You only need the highest number update. Cleaning up the others can save you on average of a 100mb per update. If you have all 17 updates, that's 16 useless updates, or 1.6 gigabytes of wasted hard drive space.

How do I get rid of them?
You can try manually removing them using the Add/Remove programs tool, but that can sometimes break the installation or not clean them up fully. I just discovered a tool called JavaRa that seems to work pretty well. Try it out here (search for JavaRa, Windows will need the "binary" file).

For a corroborating source on what I just told you, try this link.

[PROF] Google your own name before job searches

This is something that your professional contacts will always tell you to do. However, I feel it's still overlooked considering how often people get fired or disciplined for having questionable content on the internet with their name attached to it.

In Google, just search for your full name with double quotes around it. The double quotes force the search to only include content that has both words together, which is helpful if you have two common names (for example, a search for a name like Bob Smith would return all pages that have Bob or Smith in them).

You should look at the search results and decide whether you want to take anything down, or try to at least.

As an example, here's a search for myself. I used to have only about 20 results total, but now I have over 350. There's also another "me" out there apparently. He's a youth soccer goalie in San Diego.

[PROF] Resumes: Welcome to the "real" world

As part of my job search preparation I have needed to revisit my resume and update it with my latest job's details.

We were given a list of basic items to change on our resume (list the college graduation date instead of period of enrollment, remove your high school, etc.) and some broader concepts to tackle as well (talk about non-technical skills such as leadership and communication).

To keep my resume to one page, I've needed to slash things over the years. One thing that I find especially interesting is how I will actually need to leave off some software or technologies that I have picked up but aren't really relevant anymore. I have a "pack rat" mentality and would like to put everything I've ever learned or used on my resume, despite how cluttered that would look.

Photo taken from the National Park service website.

One example of something I irrationally want to keep is my work with Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator. I took a graphic design class back in high school, about six years ago.

There is no reason to keep that on my resume. I'm not planning on ever looking for a graphic design job, and I sucked at graphic design anyway!

Some actually relevant stuff is also getting removed. For example, the programming languages C and MIPS are being removed. I've spent at most five hours working with either of those languages, and would probably crumple like a wet paper bag if asked questions about them in an interview.

To appease my childish side, I'm keeping a text file with a list of the stuff I'm slashing in case I ever need to browse the list for some improbable situation.

[TECHNICAL] Weblogic multicasting breaking your network

To all offices out there that have clustered weblogic servers and are experienced network problems: they're related.

My office has been experiencing serious network issues for a few months now. Problems like network connections resetting or extended outages were happening with increasing frequency, eventually reaching the point where there were practically hourly outages. This is especially bad since we use VoIP phones, so our client services people could be on a critical call and suddenly get dropped. We got to the point where we tore out all of our network infrastructure and replaced it with new hardware, but with no results.

After a ton of work by the CTO, our head of IT, the phone company's consultants and a Weblogic representative, we believe we have found the problem: clustered Weblogic servers using multicast. Basically, they constantly broadcast themselves over the network and clutter the system. The reason why it was getting worse over time was because the development teams all have been building their own clustered environments recently to act as production replicas.

A link to the problem described is here. FYI, we were using Weblogic 8 as well.