About four weeks ago I ran my very first marathon. It was a great experience but what struck me is that the day itself is not really the hardest part of the entire preparation. As they say, the hardest part ins’t getting over the finish line but rather getting to the start. I can only confirm this.

I ran into a slightly puzzling problem while upgrading from Maven2 to Maven3 this week. In hindsight the solution wasn’t all that complicated but it threw me a little because Maven is usually quite good at pulling all its required dependencies.

Recently I’ve experienced strange Apache crashes on my VPS and the support ticket I opened wasn’t being answered, so I decided to check out Amazon’s offerings in this field. I turns out it is really simple to spin up a free (for a year) micro instance.

LaTex is a great typesetting system. It (or at least its predecessor) was written by probably the most famous programmer still living. Once you grokked the syntax it is simple to create really complex documents with cross references and to split up the input into multiple files like you would do with a large program. If you like document creation which uses plain text input rather than some fancy-shmancy WISYWIG tool, LaTex is for you.

Today I found out about a little CSS quirk/feature (haven’t quite decided yet): Image tags are being assigned a seemingly undeserved 5px of padding-bottom.