The Goldfish Chronicles

Before my editor at builder.com moved on in jobs, I owed him an article on setting up JNDI in Tomcat so you can see a DataSource and thus a database Connection. I was looking into this a bit tonight while watching Duckman, but sadly for me I discovered the following how-to while looking to see if Tomcat still shipped with an LE option [missing useful JNDI jars].

However this is pretty good news for everyone else [and saves people from being ambushed by my futile attempts at the English language]. I especially like how it offers details on various database options, and I am sure the Tomcat people would be very interested in any submissions and lesson’s learnt on different databases.

I’m venturing out into the ‘real’ world after having used pine for the last decade for my personal email. At work I’ve used MS Outlook and Lotus Notes, and occasionally in the old days in the UK I had Outlook Express setup at home.

For the last 5 years or so, I’ve run my own email box and just used pine on the server. Along with putty, it gives me a very easy way to check email from any machine I happen to sit at. Extreme mobility, which is useful when you’ve not got a stable-home or a laptop. But now I have a stable-home and a laptop, so I’ve setup IMAP/SSL with which to check my email.

Pine sadly, is not very hot with IMAP and especially not hot with Maildir formatted mail boxes [which courier-imap demands, and I demand virtual-IMAP for customers, so courier-imap wins out]. Mutt is alleged to be better, and can read Maildir, so I expect to try and use that on the server side, however I want something graphical to handle the mail lists I’m on.

Mozilla’s MailNews application isn’t bad, but has one big problem. Only one From: address per account, so unless I play silly buggers, I’ll have to stop using the 7 or so email addresses I currently use.

OS X’s Mail.app isn’t bad. It feels a bit clunky though, might stop erroring when I actually give it a legal SMTP address.

Outlook, OE and Entourage are obviously damaged goods. I’d be worried about becoming virus fodder.

Evolution sounds good, though is Linux only. Indeed, Mozilla seems to be the only common option. That said, common options are de-skilling, but time-saving. By using a different agent on each platform, I can learn more.

At the moment it’s looking like:

Server: Mutt
Windows: Mozilla MailNews
Linux: Evolution [Failing that, KMail]
Mac: Mail.app

If anyone has any better suggestions, I’d be very interested in hearing them.

This is an interesting page for JUGs over at Sun’s site, although it’s really of use for any Java developer.

A copy of Java Pro arrived at work today. Ordered about 6 months ago I think, we were surprised to say the least. The only thing that sticks out from my reading of a small part of it was a claim that JUnit was an Apache Software Foundation project. QA on Java Pro can get quite shoddy sometimes.

But this isn’t about JP. This is about my trip home, where-in I went into Barnes and Noble, picked up a cheap copy of Nancy Walsh’s Perl/TK book [10 dollars sale] and got the latest Linux Magazine [my favourite mag at the moment, and yet the only one I don’t subscribe to pretty much [well, CPU too]].

It’s great. They need to rename it “Open Source Magazine”, or even just “Open Magazine”. It’s far and away the most enjoyable Java read [despite claiming that with 2 million downloads, JBoss is the de facto standard for deploying Java Web Applications. Obviously not quite got the whole Enterprise marketing scam.] out there. Java-wise, there’s an interview with the JBoss group, an article on Commons Validator and an article on Eclipse. Away from Java, we get articles on Parrot, Perl 6, Optimising PHP and Web-scraping in Perl. All of great interest to me, and I think to any open-source Java-phile. Then they throw in separate reviews of Lindows, and the 200 dollar Walmart PC, a few commentaries and some heavier articles, [Knoppix, Cfengine, Spread Toolkit (which has a Java implementation among others), MPI and linux scripting] and finally the Zonker’s Product Picks, a great section with a quick brain-dump of projects.

Java Developers Journal is definitely improved nowadays, Doctor Dobbs is getting too stuffy for me to bother with, MSDN magazine has yet to interest me at all, CPU is really just a bit of a chat and LJ is a bit too Linux focused. Linux Magazine is all about its byline: “Open Source. Open Standards.”

I love it. [This month anyway. Fickle fickle :)]

News just in:

American TV News channels claim to have discovered lost sense of humour 70km south of Baghdad. The afore-mentioned sense of humour is said to have been mislaid at some point in the early 20th century. Spokesperson Dennis Miller said, “In fact, we’re really not sure when it was lost. It’s been so long since it was actively used. “.

A spokesperson for the European Humour Export board refused to comment on what this would do to the lucrative export business to the United States, however a spokesperson for the Canadian Humour Union declared the find to be a catastrophe.

News Update:

As with most of the news reporting over the last week, this report has turned out to be an unfounded pile of bollocks.

Nasty web UI with Avalon’s documentation. The “visited-link” colour is bold blue, ie the same as the default for an unvisited link. I quickly got lost as to where I’d been.

Just thought I’d mention, the latest version of Rebol now supports OS X.2 [Jaguar].

A first just happened, after deciding I liked a book [Building Wireless Networks] at a local book shop, my attempt to buy that and some others [Jython for Java Programmers, JDBC Pocket Reference, Google Hacks] failed when just before hitting commit I decided to see if they were available on Safari yet.

Wireless and Jython were, as was Java Enterprise Practices, so three books ‘bought’ at Safari, and no money for bookpool.

So apparantly whatever that .com boom thing was is gone now. All the share stuff is not doing as well and there aren’t many jobs out there. We see lots of things that say this, and lots of articles that explain how IT people are not ’special’ anymore and will have to become ‘normal’ employees, because employers no longer _need_ IT staff and can replace them.

Now, this is partly bullshit. When programmer P or admin A leave the average company, there’s still likely to be a big iceberg of their previous work, and just like an iceberg, only a small part is visible to the other people. Some places however will have things organised and documented well enough [and slowed down enough] that the employee can leave and be replaced, so there is some truth.

Basically the powers that be have decided that the ‘alternative’ IT character is now ‘un-fashionable’. I’m happy with that, I needed a shave anyway.

..

But [you knew there was a but didn’t you], what gives? I’m a believer in equality [my generation had it built into us] and if the new era means that computer people at work [much nicer than ‘IT’] have to start being less geeky and salaries are dropping [the best link google found for me], what is the balance?

I’d like to see articles about how our jobs are changing to affect the fact that we’re now more expendable. Do our employers want us to document more so they can bring in the replacements when needed. Do they hire more employees so there is less of a load on the department as a whole? Or is everyone accepting that the work people were doing previously was not balanced by the renumeration they were getting and in fact a % of their renumeration was merely a retainer to stop them vanishing?

If so, what is the % retainer? Is the amount of work an employee puts into their job related to their renumeration? It ought to be a function of it anyway. Although desperation for a job/need for type of renumeration and enjoyment gained are also linked in.

In case anyone has been meaning to use hsqldb someday but not hunted down a tutorial yet, I originally used the JSTL in Action’s Appendix, written by Shawn Bayern, and am using it again to remind me how to deal with things. It’s a PDF available from Manning.