Fernando Zamora

If there is one phrase that I would like to not ever hear again is "all for less money than you spend on a cup of coffee".  I don't know who came up with this phrase but frankly I think it's way over used. I know that the people that say this believe the phrase and most of the time are not trying to be sinister, sneaky or anything like that.  In most cases the value that their services or products offer are well worth their value, if they are fully used. When you consider the amount of consumer investment that it takes for any type of mass produced/sold item such as music, movies, educational videos, tutorial websites, gym memberships, etc, the investment is well worth it.  The producer carries all the risk but if they are successful, they have the potential to reap huge profits. There's two points of view on this.  On one hand the the provider is betting that his profit will come from mass number of sales/subscriptions.  The consumer is betting that his exp...

Java has something called inner classes. Most of you know what an inner/nested implies in an object-oriented programming language. When we talk about nested we are referring to something (a element or block) of the same kind as the outer kind declared within the inner body of the outer element. Nested is simply a more specific term for an inner element. You can have an inner if statement within a loop for example, but since a loop and an if statement are two different constructs, that does not qualify the if statement as nested. A nested element must be inner in addition the inner element must be of the same kind as the outer element for it to qualify as nested. An example of this are nested if statements or nested loops. In the case of a nested if statement, a nested if statement is an inner if statement within another if statement. Same with a loop, a nested loop is an inner loop within another loop. This, I think is an acceptable description of a nested element in any language, w...

   I have been studying for the OCP Exam.  I passed the Programmer 1 exam and that one wasn't too difficult to prepare for.  Preparing for the Programmer 2 exam  has proven to be a much bigger challenge.  It covers 12 areas with one of them being Building Applications with JDBC .   In my work experience, I have been exposed to a small subset of JDBC. That's mostly because we don't use the raw implementations and instead use a combination of other persistence frameworks.  I tried studying JDBC straight from the book to prepare for the exam and it's proven ineffective.  Studying theory with no hands-on JDBC is difficult.  There is simply too many unanswered questions. It also proves to be difficult because it is vastly different than anything I've done with ADO.net.     So earlier this week I decided that in order to truly grasp JDBC, I was going to get some hands on practice. With this goal in mind, I figured the best option f...

Interesting Observations in my Java Certification Journey Posted on Feb 12th, 2013 by Fernando Zamora As of today I am an Oracle Certified Associate (OCA). That is because today I passed the OCA Java SE 7 Programmer 1 exam. Overall it’s been a journey that has taken me a little over a year. While I can’t speak on what the exam covers, I can talk about the things I learned about Java while preparing for it. There are many other things that you should know besides what I cover in this brief list, but these are the major interesting points that I learned along the way. They are interesting because they are different than what I am used to in my years of experience with C#. Read More

With the holidays fast approaching, many of us will want to purchase some cool tech toys such as tablets. Currently Microsoft is pushing their Surface 2 with Windows 8.1 tablets. Microsoft's current Windows strategy is misleading at the least and here's why. The Surface 2 cannot and will not completely replace your laptop. Why? Well that's because it cannot run regular Windows apps.  The surface runs Windows 8 RT whereas a laptop runs Windows 8 (no RT).  Each is targeted for a different hardware architecture.  Think of RT as a slimmed down version of Windows 8 that looks like Windows 8 but is only targeted for tablets. Sure it can run the new version of Microsoft Office, but that's about it (as far the legacy Windows apps are concerned). It can only run the apps from the Microsoft Store. Think of it more like an iPad with a keyboard that uses the Microsoft store, which by the way has fewer apps than the Apple App Store. This does not mean that you can't get a l...

I blogged today on the topic of what I envision for the future of technology in our society. Go check it out at Codematterings.com Flying Cars and Cyborgs

For the last couple of days I've been trying to setup a session in node. You know, so that I can access information as the user navigates from page to page. Typically this is so ridiculously easy to do with other stacks that you almost take it for granted.  The call backs to get and post requests have a req and res variable for request and response, respectively.  Typically you can access the session from the req in other stacks.  Not so in node.  At least not without the proper setup. Say you have a module like below exports.list = function(req, resp){ //do something interesting here and call your view } Well in that module you can access the session member of the req like below: exports.list = function(req, resp){ req.session.userName = "foo"; //do something interesting here and call your view } Then in some other function export you can use that session's property and use it for whatever.  If you are new to node this is...