The “Break it Down” Blog

Is Java Becoming Irrelevant?

Update #1: To clear up any confusion, this article is focused on the business value of Java - it’s ability to control and generate revenue - not it’s value as a language or a technology. So the word “irrelevant” is applied to it’s business value, not if it’s a good technology or not. Sun Microsystems announced [...]

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Black Spots on Tomato Plants, Signs of Hornworms

My wife wanted to get into tomato growing after getting a couple of EarthBoxes (that we love, but find way overpriced… you can build something similar yourself from 1/10th the cost if you are interested) and noticed that after a few months of excellent tomato production, we started to see quite a bit of stalk [...]

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Handling Self Doubt and Battling Inactivity

About a month ago I wrote a piece about “Chronic Underachievement” and yesterday the CEO of OpenRain wrote an article about “Handling Self Doubt” that touched on 3 excellent points I skipped over completely and still struggle with today, more specifically: Criticism is a good thing (it means people care) Self-Doubt can cause you to freeze in [...]

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Sun to Begin Closing up MySQL Source Code

Uh-oh, Spaghettio’s! Looks like Sun is going to start closing up some of the open source portions of MySQL, namely the more advanced functionality and the backup solutions that are currently open sourced. Can you blame them? They paid a goddamn billion for MySQL, it’s not too surprising that they want to create some value-add [...]

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