The Goldfish Chronicles

A link that Ceki posted a while back to the Apache lists, but I only bothered to check when James blogged on it. Two of the rules are:

1. Don’t whine unless you are going to implement it yourself.
15. If you like it, let the author know. If you hate it, let the author
know why.

This is one of my prime irritations with the open-source zealot’s mantra. They’re utterly wrong. I’ve seen people say the equivalent of ‘well volunteered’, or ‘where’s the patch’. Sure it would be nice if the person with the complaint supplied a fix, and it’s wonderful when it happens, but complaining about a product is in itself a service to that product and the developers of the product.

One of the things I like about Apache, rather than the Jakarta brand, is that they get the Open in Open Source Software. It’s the most important word and it doesn’t only link to the Source word. Be open in all things, be it receiving complaints, posting mail lists or decision making. While I’ll accept that sometimes you have to deal behind closed doors, they ought to be very much a rarity.

It’s why the JCP and Java are flawed. Not because they are not ‘Open-Source’, and who really gives a shit about open-sourcing Java, but that Java and the JCP are not Open. Let me see the discussions on each JSR, let me hear what the ideas for the future of Java are, stop treating Java like a business plan and treat it more like a community.

Having almost got to the point of ending my Safari membership, I decided to instead let the company pay for it and just polished off Mac OS X for Java Geeks.

It starts very well, and I found my interest caught for the first time in a while. Indeed, I ended up reading the entire book in 5 days or so, which in today’s world of car-commuting is pretty fast for me. Back in the old days when I commuted on a train, I’d expect that to be average.

There were many interesting discoveries, there’s a whole plethora of properties which may be passed into Java on OS X. A favourite for me was the property to change the position of Swing menus from the window to the global menu bar. I’ve wanted to do that for ages. I printed the chapter on properties. It also discusses the concepts behind the Mac Java implementation and variants on how to build applications for the Mac.

The book ends poorly though. It goes from showing cool things like the Apple speech, spelling and quicktime frameworks; to describing databases, tomcat, j2ee and web services on a Mac. All pretty much stuff that a Java Geek will know. The only part that interested me was the database chapter. It discussed mysql and postgres, gave some good links and reminded me how to start/end them. I’ve grown used to /etc/init.d/mysql start.

I also had trouble getting the permissions right on the fink version of mysql, so should be fun.

All in all, this is a perfect book for Safari. Light, quick, worth reading but not worth owning. If I was being paid to do some heavy OS X Java work, I would be tempted to acquire a copy, but it wouldn’t be that long before I was beyond the book.

An article on Jakarta Commons that I wish I’d written over at OnJava. Seeing quite a few by Vikram Goyal, came across his log4j one the other day.

Url is: http://www.onjava.com/pub/a/onjava/2003/06/25/commons.html.

The major bit I would add about the Lang section is my usual anecdote about StringUtils.capitalise [congrats on O’Reilly for managing the UK spelling without confusion, I’ve heard of another publisher who have had more trouble]. The capitalise method is normally implemented by calling toUppercase on the first character of a String. More correctly, they should call toTitlecase [and a few languages out there would thank you, yugoslavian style languages being one] and by sharing even something as simple as a capitalise method, these little details can be dealt with for you.

An odd week. The plus point of westward jet lag is that my usual 12pm->4am timeclock has been forceably kicked onto real time and I wake up at 7am now and feel tired at midnight. Bad side here is that the powers that be want me at work at 7am for 25% of the month. That’ll destroy it.

I’m dabbling with the Atkins diet. Last night we had a lovely orange chicken. Marinade the chicken in orange and mongolian fire oil, then cook with orange peel and crushed red hot peppers. Tonight we had bread-sauce’d pork [without the bread]. Take a half pint of double cream (heavy whipping cream to the yanks). Pour this in a saucepan. Remove the outer 2 layers from an onion, cut in half, stick 7 cloves in each, stick face down in the cream. Add 8 peppercorns and a bay leaf. Bring to boil. Let sit off the heat for 2 hours.
Then cook some pork in a pan, rub some sage, salt and pepper in. slowly move bits from the saucepan over. Very delicate, very delicious.

Homewise, I’ve got the old 4U server going as our new home server. New network diagram available at http://www.flamefew.net/~hen/HomeNetwork.jpg. I rearranged the basement a fair bit, and have stayed away from the grass because we were meant to have hired a bloke to do it while we were away. He failed to do a good job and I get to start tackling it tomorrow.

Codewise, it’s slow getting back into it. I want to push up the 2.0 of XmlWriter, but it’s a pain dealing with sourceforge. I’ve been working a bit on Scabies, my web scraping engine, and while it does a nice job there are still many issues that I want to resolve before a release.
Commons Lang 2.0 was meant to release before I went on hols, but it got held up. So now I’m back this is my main Jakarta target. We’re again dotting the t’s and crossing the i’s and close to a release. I’ve learnt to use JavaDiff (sourceforge project) and have output some nice change docs. These’ll either be in the distribution or just on the site, undecided yet.

Handling my email while away was a pain, so moving to IMAP on the server is high on the todos. I’ve already tested one box on courier and sqwebmail, so need to move the main box to those. A bit unsure how to handle the users, migrating other people is an immense pain as I’ve no idea what client they’ll use. Do I convert their folders or just their inbox.

Mailman has been giving me gip. I need to reinstall that as it’s basically dying all the time for the local JUG. Half tempted to move them out to a yahoo list.

Lastly, I’ve got to keep myself sane. Locking the barn door after the horse has bolted some might say, but I’ve been reading some nice scifi (the latest Ender book and a Michael Swanwick book) and playing Championship Manager 4 and Risk II. Risk II is oddly addictive. Championship Manager is fun to play as Australian and American managers, trying to understand their weird league setups.

Doctor Dobbs have a downloadable e-zine on Java. Some interesting additional articles to this months issue on Java. Bit of a pain to print because of the stupid adverts, which are all colour of one kind or another, knackers the printer.

Pages 2, 4, 11, 22, 29, 34, 37 and 40 are all big ignorable colour prints.

11 is definitely worth ignoring, it’s a full black page advert. Thankyou Zero G Installers. 22 (O’Reilly) is also pretty heavy on the colour.

You have to register at www.ddj.com.

Just got back from a 3 week vacation in the UK. Visiting friends and family, relaxing, playing with my old Amiga.

Everyone was on dial-up, so although I got a connectfree.co.uk account, I could rarely put up with the pain of trying to do things through dial-up.

It was fun to be back in the UK. I think the standard of living is better there [than Kentucky], but the cost of living is a lot lot higher, so in the end I’m able to have a bit more fun with increased liquidity over here.