I changed every instance of this:

%CATALINA_HOME%\bin\tomcat5.exe

To this:

%CATALINA_HOME%\bin\x64\tomcat5.exe

Then, I ran:

service.bat install

It worked for me! Now I have a tomcat service that doesn’t fail when starting up. Hopefully this can help you out, too.

https://trello.com

For example, in my entire career (over 15 years), I have never, ever, ever once needed to find an ancestor node in a binary tree. Nor, in reality, have I needed to traverse a binary tree. So, presenting this as a problem to solve is completely ludicrous in an interview. It doesn’t tell the interviewer anything when I can’t solve the problem in five minutes except that I have zero experience with binary trees.

Here’s where the need for a major overhaul comes in. Instead of irrelevant problems, how about presenting a real situation that you, as the potential employer, are facing or have faced, and then see how the candidate approaches that problem. After all, are you trying to hire someone who memorized an algorithm? Or are you trying to hire someone that can come up with practical solutions to real world problems?

Fast forward 20 years to today. A few weeks ago, I re-took this test and was surprised to see my type as ISFJ. It was an online test, so I kind of blew it off, thinking there was some mistake in the programming of the site. Yesterday, I bought David Keirsey’s book Please Understand Me II, and re-took the test again. I was ISFJ. So, the test I took online a few weeks back wasn’t wrong after all.

If temperaments are a pre-disposition, how is it that I went from an INTP in my late teen years to an ISFJ today? These are very different temperaments. There are some characteristics that overlap. NTs are geared toward creativity and engineering. I am a software engineer, so that makes a ton of sense. SJs are geared toward accounting, inventory and materials handling, not complex systems. For me, accounting-type jobs are far away from my personal desires. I love programming. I live and breathe complex systems.

Is it possible, then, for a person to have their temperament shaped a lot by life experiences? For example, SJs are the Guardians of society. These folks support the tried and true. Well, that’s not necessarily me. They also are ultra-dependable, to a point of taking on more obligations than they can possibly handle. That’s definitely me. And this is why I’m driven to research this area of my life . . . the “sick sense of responsibility” as someone once described me. Why am I like that? Don’t know.

Is it possible that a person can have two different temperament types overlapping? I don’t mean schizophrenic here. However, I can’t see how a person can go from an NT to an SJ type if temperament is a pre-disposition. Here’s an example. Like I mentioned at the outset of this post, I used to write all the time. Much of my teen years were spent writing stories. I loved it. I still do, but over the years the whole creative side of me just shut down. I can’t think of a single story to write, and I haven’t been able to in a very long time. Not that I don’t want to, I simply can’t. No energy for it as my energies are sapped up in my job, family and other obligations. There hasn’t been a shred of creativity in me in years and years. Yet, I started out that way, and yet, I have the desire to go back to that state of mind. So, at my core, I believe the NT part of me is still there, just somehow repressed, and that life’s experiences have the SJ part of me out in the forefront. Is this even possible? Does this make any sense?

If you experience this, in the file named clsField.asp (actually, I may have renamed this long ago from its original name . . . I don’t remember) in this property: “Public Property Let FilePath(ByRef pstrPath)”, find this:

' Parse File Name
If Not InStrRev(pstrPath, "\") = 0 Then
    FileName = Mid(pstrPath, InStrRev(pstrPath, "\") + 1)
End If

And change it to this:

' Parse File Name
If Not InStrRev(pstrPath, "\") = 0 Then
    FileName = Mid(pstrPath, InStrRev(pstrPath, "\") + 1)
Else
    FileName = pstrPath        ' Vista doesn't sent full paths anymore
End If

That should clear up this error for you.

<table>
    <tr>
        <td valign="middle">Select:</td>
        <td valign="middle">
            <input type="radio" name="fruit" />Apple
            <input type="radio" name="fruit" />Orange
        </tr>
    </tr>
</table>

In this example, depending on your browser, you might see the text “Apple” and “Orange” sit lower than the “Select:” text. In Safari and Opera, this renders just fine. In IE, the text is 2 pixels lower and in Firefox, the text is 1 pixel lower. If we design for IE, then Firefox will be 1 pixel above, and Safari and Opera will be off. This is a case where browser-specific CSS is necessary, but you wouldn’t necessarily want to create a whole new stylesheet for it. Enter CSS Browser Selector by Rafael Lima. This nifty little piece of javascript lets you use browser-specific classes in your existing stylesheet. In this case, the solution was simple. First, we change the HTML a bit to put the text following the radio buttons in a label with a class named radio.

<input type="radio" name="fruit" /><label class="radio">Apple</label>
<input type="radio" name="fruit" /><label class="radio">Orange</label>

Then, we reference the small javascript file in our HTML header:

<script type="text/javascript" src="css_browser_selector.js"></script>

Finally, we add the browser-specific CSS to our stylesheet:

.ie label.radio {
    position: relative;
    font-weight: normal;
    top: -2px;
}

.gecko label.radio {
    position: relative;
    font-weight: normal;
    top: -1px;
}

label.radio {
    font-weight: normal;
}

Yep, it’s that easy. Now, IE and Firefox (gecko) render properly. Safari, Opera and other browsers just fall through to the last label.radio.

When customers import their data, imports go fairly slow. We give customers standard fields to import data into, but then they also have the option of importing custom fields. The table that holds custom fields allows one record per customer/user/field. Each record is tied to the user, and the user data is stored in another table. If a customer has 10 custom fields defined and they upload 50,000 users with all 10 field values, this is a total of 500,000 custom data records. The import process has to first see if the custom data exists. If so, it updates that record. If not, it inserts a new record. As you can imagine with this process, the more custom fields a customer has, the slower the import process becomes. Each custom field has to be tied to the user before it gets updated or inserted. The user may or may not exist, so we have to first insert or update the user, get the user id, and use that for each custom data record. That means no bulk loading because we first need the user id. Think of it as a master-detail relationship. The table that holds users is the master. The table that holds custom data is the detail.

I’m curious to know what you’ve done, or would try to do with a scenario like this to make it super fast.