A little bit of history

My name is Dmitry Amelchenko and I'm a Software Engineer. For a list of my accomplishments take a look at my resume. I created and am maintaining this site - http://custommode.com . Initially this site was done in JetSpeed (wich is an open source implementation of a portal framework - Jakarta based project). Over time I realised it's not getting anywere and JetSpeed entered a lengthy redesign phace. So I replaced it with SnipSnap intending to have a place on the web were I can always post my ideas and involve friends in coloborative discussions. I'm a java guy (try to keep it in mind). Actually as of recent i'm leaning more towards ruby.

I'm promissing to post a picture of me as soon as I have it.

Some things I like:

• coding
• WiKiing ;)
• reading
• hanging out with friends and family
• windsurfing
• kitesurfing
• hiking
• biking
• fishing
• smiplicity - simple things tend to last longer
• driving on a highway
• commuting to work on a train
• singing (not only in the shower)
• solfege - http://tinyurl.com/4x7zf http://tinyurl.com/4ytzo
• drinking tea
• going to gym
• jogging in the morning
• walking at lunch
• climbing stairs
• basketball
• volleyball
• pingpong
• chess - i'm not good at it, I just like it
• skating
• I don't like skiing, sorry
• snowboarding

The list came out short - forgive me if I forgot something.

Things I regret about:

• There is only one thing I regret about. I regret that I didn't start wikiing earlier - there are so many things I've done that are forgotten forever now and were never documented.

Links to the sites I host

• http://preallowed.com
• http://cleantogether.com
• http://castavote.heroku.com
• http://gtd.custommode.com
• http://rootlocusinc.com
• http://custommode.com

Dmitry A>

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favorite firefox plugins

The firefox 2.0 is nicely complemented with following plugins:

• tab mix plus
• web developer
• download status bar

free music

A friend of mine sent me this link http://freebieboom.com/component/option,com_docman which has some independent musicians - some stuff are really good.

Choosing a cell phone with a service plan

These days it's not an easy task to choose a cell phone (as well as a service) - there are a way too many options. People are turning this challenging task into a business, here are the example web sites: http://www.myrateplan.com and http://www.letstalk.com/

Vonage vs. Verison

It's just amasing, after switching to Vonage I realized that my monthly bill went down from approximately $200+ a month to less then $50.

.net in presentation layer

Crawling the web for using .net on presentation:

• While ASP.NET does promote an MVC architecture, you don't get the features available in a framework "out of the box". The struts configuration file, for example, enables loose coupling of views and controllers, something that you don't get in ASP.NET without doing some coding. In reality, with code-behind in ASP.NET you get a Front Controller pattern instead of an MVC pattern.
• .net suggests to use Page Inheritance for creating common look and feel, in struts it's done by using tiles templating engine. If the main reason .net is proposed to be used on the presentation side is because it's presentation layer support, the lack of a true templating ruins the argument completely. If we are trying to encourage role separation of presentation designers and middle tier services developers dot net is not the answer. With the Page Inheritance aproach the presentation developers will have to be failrly advanced not only on the presentation skills but also on the programming concepts like enheritance. On the other hand tiles supports true presentation components abstraction. Every visual component is developed independently and then assembled into a page view via layout definition.
• Seems like the .net on presentation will require a lot of mixing of presentation markup (HTML like) language with some precessing logic in a framework native languate like c#. We can fall into the same trap with JSPs, alltohuhg it's totally possible to use JSTL tag libraries for processing instructions logic (like if/else and loop contracts). Even more, witn the latest JavaServlets spec we can disable javascriplets completely to make sure our JSPs will not have any java code mixed with markup.
• I'm curently in a process of learning more about .net and if for some reason as the result of this learnig I'm convinced that some of the earlier statements are false, I will review those and will correct this page.

Sun certified architect for J2EE

Beginning a preparation for the Sun certified architect for J2EE. Seems to be so out of date with how the system are archetected these days. Well, it's like taking a driving test - you just have to know how to take the test, but this is not how every one is driving in the real life.

Hibernating project

Finished hibernating my forum project. Initially it was implemented with castor. I'm very pleased with this move, hibernate seems to be much better quality product then castor. The documentation is very good, there is decent size hibernate community posting solutions to the web so it's always easy to find answer to mostly any question.

Modified wiki.css to make different levels of headers more explicit.

sp2 for XP problem solved

Just figured out the SP2 for XP. After installing it on my laptop, it was really slow (unusable). After searching the web seems like a lot of people reported this problem, finally one guy came up with the solution. Some dell machines for some reason have a problem with the SP2 CPU driver. To fix it go to device manager and revert the CPU driver.

Started working at a new place today.

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notes

todo