The Goldfish Chronicles

The latest copy of Dr Dobbs has an interesting article in the Embedded Space series. Normally I don’t read this series, but Ed Nisley’s topic this month was about space travel, an area I have the usual sci-fi fans interest in [and belief that space colonisation is our raison d’etre].

Ed makes a good point that only having 5 space shuttles is bad, as it has stopped new spacecraft being developed, and new concepts being considered. It seems that his topic [which was primarily on fault tree’s and bug-risk analysis it seems] also applies to reusable library development.

Having reusable code means that new code to do the same thing is not tried. StringUtils.capitalise(..) becoming popular would mean that no one else would try to solve that problem, possibly from a radically different direction, or using a JDK 1.9 feature.

Reusable Library development seems to be a hard topic. There are many debates around Commons Lang [and other Commons APIs] about whether they should all live in one jar, or all live in one project, or in many tiny projects. How do you decide that the single method in MathUtils in Commons Lang is worthy of Jakarta Commons Maths. How many methods do you need for it to have its own sub-package, its own package, its own jar etc.

Along with that, the above issue of stopping technology becoming stagnant gets interesting. Java itself had this problem, not enough new features being added to Java allowing C# to get the leap ahead on the language features.

Safari has gotten be attached to bookmarks in a web browser at long last. Mozilla supports the same necessary features [menu’s in my ‘bookmark bar’] and is cross-platform.

However, as I use around 6 machines regularly, I’m getting sick and tired of having to set up the bookmarks on each one and try and keep them synched. So I went to Best Buy, picked up a USB keychain [64Meg, but a 32Meg one would have been fine if they’d had one I trusted would work on a Mac] and tried to setup a Mozilla profile on it on my Windows laptop.

That part worked fine, great. Next step: Try to select that profile from another install of Mozilla. I used an OS X install, but another Windows one would have been fine too.

Problem. There is no way to select an existing profile in Mozilla and I could not even find a nice .js file to hack to get it to use my pre-existing profile.

Ouch

Oi, Mr Jobs:

I want to be able to select a url and drag it to the Dock, where I will drop it onto the Safari icon. This would then open a new Safari window to that Url.

Equally, this method would also be used for passing any parameter to a program by drag and drop, but Safari seem the best one.

I’d also like a feature removed. Could Safari stop using Finder to handle its file system browsing. It makes it impossible to make your home page a local directory full of documentation. It’s enough to make me turn on the local web server.

Okay, maybe the humour is a little macabre, but am I the only one who saw the headline on BBC News and had a part of my head say:

“Finally, the ASF are clamping down on Jon Scott Stevens“

Well, I say installing, closer to not installing.

I’m tyring to install SuSE 8.2 on my replacement machine for umbongo.flamefew.net. That machine is a 4U and I’m looking forward to lowering the rent with this new 1U. I waited for SuSE 8.2 so I could edge myself onto the next round of releases and last a bit longer in the automatic update world.
[Incidentally, http://www.micropro.com have knocked 100 dollars off their cheapest servers]

Anyway. Not much luck with 8.2. The machine had 8.0 on it happily, but 8.2 refuses to get past the install screen, no matter what I try. Various boot options etc. Personally I blame GRUB. SuSE switched to this with 8.2 [or 8.1, I think 8.2 though] and it’s the only new thing to the equation from my point of view.

I’ve removed the old version, googled, searched, and am still basically clueless. I’ve tried CD2, with the same results, re-installed the 8.0 and that continues to work, and am now in a wait state, hoping SuSE support or some genius can tell me what is wrong. Of course, I might be wrong in even thinking that grub is used in the install

That was weird. I was about to start writing a document, and rather than going to my Dock [Apple equivalent of the Start Menu] I went to the bookmarks in Safari [Apple web browser].

Maybe there is something to this ASP/Browser-is-the-OS thing after all.

I’m a big O’Reilly book fan and I’ve lusted after the CJKV [asian language i18n] ever since I got into the concept in Jeffrey Friedl’s first edition of Mastering Regular Expressions. A few weeks ago, I saw that Amazon had 1 copy left in stock and had it up for sale for 30 dollars. Usually it retails at 60 dollars, and as it was over 25 dollars I got free shipping. I leapt on it.

After a while of waiting, I received an email telling me they were unable to ship the book to me. Well, I wasn’t too bothered. I figured the 1 copy turned out to be a ghost and was just a glitch, which I can accept happens.

For a week I forgot about it, until I happened to be on Amazon today and wondered if they’d adjusted the stock level down to 0. I searched for CJKV, and lo and behold, Amazon have it on sale again at 65 dollars, with a full stock [I assume].

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/1565922247/qid=1050729813/sr=1-1/ref=sr_1_1/102-6853393-9144945?v=glance&s=books

It’s obvious that what has happened is that Amazon’s bulk-cheap distributor have come up empty on the book, so they’ve switched back to their normal price distributor for the book, but as that is so far removed from me that it feels ruder.

I came across the following by Jason Hunter while hunting for a JSP site:
http://www.servlets.com/soapbox/problems-jsp.html

It, and the subsequent article, are both pretty interesting to read with the benefit of hindsight. JSP 2.0 and JSTL obviously both owe a lot to Jason’s complaints [or someone with the same thinking hat on].

SuSE 8.2 turned up this afternoon. I’m replacing my 4U SuSE 7.1 with a 1U SuSE 8.2 machine, so getting it all installed, migrated and replaced is important now that SuSE have stopped support 7.1 [as reported on the suse-security mailing list].

But first, a couple of impressions on the new version.

Before I had even opened the CD case I glanced at the books. I got the professional update and was surprised to still get 2 books. Both of which seem to be of good quality, especially the Administration one, it covered a lot of ground. Skimming through, it even showed me how to setup the machine as a Netware server.

Onto the CD’s. Bit weird this. 7.1 came on 7 CDs and 1 DVD. 8.2 comes on 5 CDs and 2 DVDs. Very odd maths.

Installing. I began by installing SuSE 8.2 onto my Dell laptop [as I was watching TV]. I realised I had forgotten the passwords to the SuSE 8.0 install on there [lent the machine to a friend with weak passwords so he could play around, utterly forgot to change them back] so I can’t try an 8.0 to 8.2 update. Instead I did a clean install.

The installer was very easy. It correctly noted my previous SuSE install and set things up to replace that. The only hiccough I really had was discovering that my DVD-CD/RW combo drive didn’t seem to want to autoboot the DVD. Getting further in I hit a few snags.

The first was that it correctly noticed the USB mouse I had attached, but didn’t bother to see the laptop’s internal PS/2 trackpad. So I restarted without the USB mouse. I had issues with the display, it wouldn’t do anything over 800×600. I’m unsure if I had it doing more than this before, I swear I did. 800×600 is piddly.

Lastly, the wireless PCMCIA card. I battled hard with SuSE 8.0 to get this to work, and I can declare that 8.2 is a lot easier to install. Using Yast2 I happily got the card installed and working, though pcmcia doesn’t seem to be started automatically and I found I could click on the buttons on the task bar and tell it to start pcmcia.

However, problems still hover. I cannot get the machine to talk to my name-server. The setup in Yast2 seems to work, but I can’t seem to ping to anything. Also, when I mess with Yast2 after turning on PCMCIA it appears to kill the PCMCIA and I haven’t figured out how to restart it.

One last thing. SuSE have added a nice bit to the install process [at least from 8.0 I think, bear in mind I’ve not bitten 8.1 at all] which allows you to test your network card by visiting the suse update site and doing your first update. I didn’t have PCMCIA up and going at this stage though and I didn’t want to stop watching the X-Men cartoon. So so wrong. Cartoon I mean.

Anyways, for a first install without much attention being spent, SuSE 8.2 did pretty admirably. It has a new look which should stop Windows users complaining about all the scrolling text. The blue look and feel did have me worrying that I’d been sent the personal version. Multiple mouse configuration still seems to be painful, though at least I’ve found a place in Yast where I can try to do it now, and wireless networking seems to almost be there. The nameserver glitch aside, the only problem I really have with wireless on SuSE is the pain of pcmcia. It’s just not natural on SuSE yet.

[My other day to day home OSes are OS X and Windows XP. At work I use various SuSE versions and Windows 2000]

Thought I’d try and use DW to do some JSP at work today. It’s relatively nice, but I’ve slammed into two problems. One is just a pain, while the other is a major blocker.

i) First off, after loading in my taglib via the TLD file, DW does not seem to record the taglib directive for that taglib. I’m assuming this because I cannot see it anywhere afterwards, and more importantly, when I start to use a custom JSP tag, I’m not getting the directive which imports the tag.

ii) This is the major blocker though. DW doesn’t seem to accept that my imported JSP [JSTL in this case] is case sensitive. It loads ‘forEach’ in properly but then wants me to output this as either FOREACH or foreach, neither of which will work.

If anyone has a clue about these, I’d love to get it fixed.