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Books I have read this year (2014)

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Well after thinking a little about it I decided to do a post about the books I read this year (2014), I didn't committed to any particular number of books but in the previous year I resumed my reading hobby, and this year started buying books like crazy. So I wanted to write a little about each book: Atlas Shrugged (Ayn Rand) To be fair, I started reading this book in 2013 but finished it this year (it's a big book!) and also wanted to write about it. This is a awesome book, full of details and ideas; Ayn Rand magnum opus is a must read. In it she develops her Objectivism philosophy, each character embodying an archetype around it. It's a lengthy book, even some parts are very boring (for example, the John Galt's monologue is too much, could be shorten very much), but for the most chapters the writing is great and it gets you thinking about some of your values, principles and thoughts about life it self and life in society. I liked that the book is written i

Processing Augmented Reality Tutorial - Part 1

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Introduction For a presentation with a Studio that I'm currently working we decided to do feature an augmented reality show. Something simple for people that had little or none experience with AR. So after doing a little research about what technologies supported AR I decided to use Processing, which I'd never used, but after learning that was a Java environment I supposed that would fit in my confort zone. Searching I found the following tutorial:  Augmented reality tutorial with #Processing To tell you the truth I struggled a lot with the libraries and the code from that tutorial, I don't understand why there is no indentation (seems like the work of a junior programmer, not trying to offende the author), the interaction with the libraries is buggy, and some of the code is incomplete. But none the less serves as generally good introduction, so let's start from there... First, I won't be using Processing in the environment provided, but using direct

Array/Item problem on JAX-WS - Axis 1.x interation

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A few days ago I encountered a little problem with a Webservice that I was asked to interact with. The client in question was on other country, and the permissions on the VPN were not granted already. My normal workflow dealing with WS is first asking for the WSDL for mocking and building the artifacts. So I launched SoapUI and started working on the integration. All worked just well with the mocks, and for a little moment I thought that all will be joy and bliss. The artifacts the JAX Import that I used gave me the following model: Having worked with JAX-WS as a client and server, and only as client with the server being Axis2 for example, I thought that because of the signature of the Webservice Interface I was dealing with a JAX server on the other end. But when the real connection was made (without Mocks) the attribute on CustomerSubscriptionInfo was comming  null  from the server . I tried a few more times with different input data but was the same. The person responsa

Java ESC/POS Image Printing

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Hi! I've been wanting to do this post for a while. For many years I've been working from time to time with various printing issues, mainly in the context of Kiosk/Receipt printing. The most common printer that I've used was an Epson Thermal Printer, such as the TM-T88III or more recently TM-T88V (which my article will treat). One of the various requirements from my clients had been putting their logo on their receipts, and although you can upload the logo to the printer with a tool and tell the printer to print logo #1; this way can be very rigid and hard to maintain (changing the logo would require for me to go printer by printer uploading the new logo). A better way is to raster the image pixel by pixel using ESC/POS, the native command language of the printer. Being a thermal printer, there is no concept of color, nor gray scale; either the pixel is burned or not burned, black or white. This is a very important concept to have in mind. ESC/POS is Epson's