The Goldfish Chronicles

So MS will possibly have to deploy Java to Windows machines through the update mechanism or some such.

Watch the MS deployed version of Sun’s JVM screw up the hand-installed version of Sun’s JVM

I learnt a few useful things today.

1) http://www.theopencd.org is a pretty cool site. You can burn a nice CD that even your barely computer-literate relatives could find useful. Open source Windows applications on one CD with a nice installer. You can download the ISO, no need to fork out cash.

2) SFTP [secure ftp] is easy to setup. In OpenSSH on a Linux box, merely uncomment the last line of the /etc/ssh/sshd_config which has Subsystem sftp. Restart and you’re there. Use FtpZilla from the OpenCD collection and you’re secure.

3) Hex and Ascii WEP keys are easy to convert. If your hex key is 4142434445, then your ascii key is ABCDE. Something like http://www.asciitable.comis of use here.
It does mean that 21 or so of the characters that can be in your hex key, are not typable into your ascii key. So the key is weakened somewhat.

Someone was asking for a commons-logging taglib on the Apache mailing lists, so I ported the Log Taglib over to using commons-logging. Nothing fancy and pretty easy work. A download version can be found at:

http://www.flamefew.net/~hen/logging/

which should be replacable for the existing Log taglib [ie uses same tags etc].

First off, Merry Christmas to those who celebrate it.

A long day of in-laws without a computer is forgotten with a perfect gift. My wife got me the first three volumes of Knuth [Oh, and Star Wars lego]. I’ve been eyeing them up on the local shop’s bookshop for years now.

[From a post of mine to the Seattle JUG, because we all have an opinion and because I believe in doing work once and selling it twice.. or three times.. or ]

I’m glad that the call is for a current JVM to be installed and not
Microsoft’s ancient old JVM to be reinstated. JView [MS JRE] was an
amazingly useful thing for MS to have, I still can’t believe they made the
mistake of removing it and playing into Sun’s hands.

It will be interesting to see how ‘current’ is defined. Will it be Sun’s
JVM, or some latest version hack-together from MS? Will it be updated
through the Windows Update program? How will MS be enforced to assist in
bugfixing?

It ought to be a bit of a kick for Linux. Do the latest Linux CDs come
with an up to date Java? I know that SuSE 7.x came with 1.1 as the default
JDK and 1.2 only available in the commercial section, which led me to
believe there were Linux/Java licensing issues. With Solaris, Apple and
Windows all coming with Java, Linux would be the next major OS in
publicity terms to not come with a built in Java.

Lastly, this is immensely unfair to Microsoft. I don’t know the details,
so I don’t know if MS signed a contract to keep Java on Windows for a
decade or something, but to be forced to include another company’s
software seems immoral. With the exception of the open source crowd,
Microsoft have one of the more open environments. Both Solaris and Apple
use their monopoly [possibly they have to to compete] far more than MS
gets to [iChat coming with OS X.. Sun charging so much for anything they
can].

I will cheer the death of JView, but this move makes little difference.
Windows 95->Me will not be affected by this. Windows 2K might be, NT
probably won’t be, and maybe even XP won’t be [I guess it might be an
automatic update, or just in the next version].
The majority of people who are on XP or the next version over the next few
years are probably on broadband and would not have noticed the kick of a
JRE download.

In the end I’ll feel a slightly odd taste in my mouth that MS are forced
into this, and a feeling that Sun are wasting time in court to be the
“people’s hero against MS” and in marketing to battle the constant two-way
lies and statistics that is the .Net/J2EE fracas.

Over time there has been a bit of discussion on having some additional maths utilities in Commons Lang. My first thought is of a Complex number class, at work I use the VNI Complex number class which does the job.

I did a bit of googling around and found an interesting paper on the Sun employee page for Joe Darcy. Joe created Borneo, a floating point enhanced version I remember reading about ages ago in Doctor Dobbs and has since worked his way into the Core Java team at Sun. He’s in charge of floating points it seems.

I finally took the plunge and bought a Dell 4150 laptop to be my mobile games machine and ‘get more used to Windows’ platform. It complements the Powerbook nicely.

So I am in a position to make a pretty compelling comparison between the two machines. The powerbook is 18 months old or so, but cost a bit more than the Dell. The Dell in fact has a slight edge spec wise.

My immediate thoughts on the Dell:

1) Oooo. I like the pluggable bays [bear in mind this is my 2nd laptop] especially with the 2nd battery I bought.
2) Hmm. Lots of mousepad/buttons on the laptop, but all seem poor compared to the Powerbook’s. Oh, and I hate being able to tap the pad to do a click.
3) Music on the install screen. Whatever next.
4) Ah, XP again. Nice [once Norton shuts up]. I used a Beta version a while back and found it fun.
5) AArrrghgh. Wireless card no work. It seems my router [Netgear MR314] and Win XP with Service Pack 1 do not play. The netgear does its 128bit WEP in hex, and the new XP won’t let you enter this. I try with WEP turned off [confuses the Apple a bit] and still no luck from the Dell TrueMobile card.

Time to see if the whole thing about “If you pay, you get good support” runs true. I’ve phoned Apple a few times in the past and while the support felt skimpy, it always did the job. Dell’s turn next.

Ever noticed the word ‘Commons’ leaking into lots of open source things? Apache Commons, the new Creative Commons license…

Being English, it makes me think of English history a lot. The agricultural revolution, the House of Commons, the local commons and lots of other pre-socialist ideas. I wonder if there are links?

From what little I remember of history, land used to be shared between the people in a village. They could go and keep chickens on it, run their children, plant herbs and vegetables. Common land. As the government grew more economically domineering, they reclaimed this land, or maybe it was just rich people buying it. Anyway, it was involved in the reactions to the increased agricultural efficiency that had arrived through improved ploughs and things. There were lots of revolts in which people from the south east of england marched on London [Wat Tyler being the one that always sticks in memory].
Common land still exists, with the usual humour of age-old law.

Now we have such bombastic terms as ‘Revolution’ being applied to open source coding. Less loudly, the word Commons is cropping up. I wonder if there are analogies that can be applied and if ‘Commons’ is the word they really ought to fear. MS tried to link open source to communism, which is just a McCarthy-ism bit of politics, but I think it definitely shares roots in the original beliefs of the Commons.

[Incidentally, I found a nice site with lots of old documents on: Avalon project. Avalon… Commons… Now we just need Henry II signing a peace accord in Jakarta over the Turbine war.]

I have two boxes at work. Linux one and a Windows one. I keep trying to make myself use the Windows box for development, and then slipping back into Vim on Linux [I want to force myself to be development platform agnostic].

So my latest push is to get the environment how I want it. This means three things:

cygwin for command line.
a pager/virtual desktop
performance

I like to open and leave open a lot of applications. This usually makes my machine crawl. So a part of that solution has been to flip back to Mozilla. I love the tabs in it, makes it just like Opera

Cygwin was already on there. Works nicely.

My big find [from a colleague] is the pager. It’s called AltDesk and is available from Astonshell. Also available is a replacement window manager for Windows. It looks nice, but don’t expect it to play nice. It made my usual Windows system act a bit funny and hang sometimes. Still, it replaces it nicely, so maybe I won’t need to use it. Both are commercial, but very cheap [26 usd for both].

I like the OS X skin

Well, the 2 flamefew servers were relocated to a new room today. Nice and bigger and with lots more in the way of value add services for me to buy at Iglou, the colocation facility they live at.

Do other techies maintain their own machines? It’s quite an effort sometimes, but the freedom is wonderful. Thankfully my wife is as addicted to them as I am, so no problems

Only matter of real note, the machine the blogs are on lost its networkability and had to be power-shunted [one of the value adds is an APC thingy which will let me telnet in [I hope ssh] and reboot a machine at the mains]. Hopefully it won’t reoccur.