The Goldfish Chronicles

Once upon a time someone at Netscape made the terrible mistake of JavaScript.
Later we had the name change of Java 2.0 when 1.2 was just coming out. I think we can presume that said someone, a little marketing crud puppy in the depths of cubichell, moved from Netscape to Sun.

However, since then it has been quiet. Could they have moved elsewhere? Was Microsoft’s moves from 98 to XP to 2004 to whatever an example? (No that’s just Microsoft). However now, with the announcement of J2SE 5.0, we can rest our worried minds; the marketing crud puppy it still at Sun.

Or…

Maybe they contract

Blogging merely to hear myself speak and feel content that I am recording the reason why I am not announcing the superb new release of the blog. I’m uber-sodding busy. Agreed to two contracts outside of work that are sucking energy out of me like a vicious pair of vampires.

Still…a month or so more I think. If I’m still alive, I’ll get to wipe the dust off and continue.

Some interesting bits going on though. Colleague at work is using my web-scrape engine and found a nice performance bug in the latest release of gj-scrape. I call toLowerCase on an unknown-sized String rather too often. So I got to have fun rewriting the innards of gj-scrape and it now performs nicely.

It’s the kind of code that is just fun to do. Simple, building up an increasing unit-test coverage, using JIRA to manage things. The scraping-engine will need a new release too, so need to work on that. Pondering when to try out Maven RC3, as I hear it will let me create sites with the ‘old’ (ie one I use) look and feel, but at the same time give me a changes-report that can link into JIRA.

I did notice that the latest JIRA (or one I’m on anyway) has a cool RELEASE-NOTES creator. Would be nice if it could include comments about said notes as an option, and if it could spew out changes.xml format for Maven.

Saturday (apart from work on both contracts) is also my dedicated hours to Jakarta Commons day. Technically I’m working on getting Commons Lang 2.1 out the door, but this evening’s time was spent hacking out a script to deploy as many commons project.xml’s as possible into the Maven repo. Means people can reflect on them from tools, so happy to have got that done.

I’ve been spending a lot of time trying to watch/listen to Euro 2004. BBC Radio 5 wins out, though I’ll probably pay Pay Per View still for the England game(s) left.

Windows Remote Desktop is very cool. I’ve dropped my work resolution from 1600×1200 to 1024×768 just so my laptop doesn’t mess up the screen when I log in from home. That’s how much I like being able to do that. Am even using Eclipse and developing on Windows (a bit) again. I assume it’s nothing but a VNC solution, but it works nicely and easily. Never had much luck with them in the past.

Wife and I are moving slowly on with the new blog. Got a cute idea for the image-header, though Java’s PNG support seems a bit weak, so the first one may be rather poor in quality.

I used template-toolkit for the first time yesterday. It’s a perl templating solution that I remember being mentioned at the first/early london.pm meetings. It was very simple and I’m very impressed. Using it as a CMS style system to generate the developer-intranet at work from an XML file.
Might try to do the same thing in Velocity, see how it compares to TTK.

Re-reading the Hugh Cook, Chronicles of an Age of Darkness. Probably my favourite fantasy series (10 books), though Feist’s Riftware saga may beat it. It was never really released in the US and browsing at hughcook.com, I discovered he actually planned to release 60 volumes. Also finishing off McConnel’s Code Complete, and reading about OpenBSD and Linux Firewalls. At work I’ve got Tapestry in Action open and a book on Windows Scripting. At Safari, I’ve the usual 10 books on the bookshelf. Only one I’m really reading is OReilly’s Template Toolkit book.

Tomorrow is a visit to the zoo. Fun, but it’s only going to make the rest of the time that more overflowing with todo’s.

Nice little tidbit that I just read in Thinking in Java.

I’ve always missed the ‘inherit’ keyword from LPC. ‘extends’ always felt a bit crap as we spend most of our time talking about inheritence, not extension.

Eckel defines inheritence as being a direct child of the superclass, with no new methods and attributes, and extension as being a child of the superclass, but allowed to add new methods and attributes.

A minor point, but it helps me appreciate the ‘extends’ keyword more.

The near constant flow of spam into my user account is a pain, but what really gets annoying is the hijacking of servers.

When I first migrated the server that had sat under my desk in the UK to the US, I somehow configured it as an open-relay and had a month or so of being spam-raped. ie) until the bandwidth came in on the bill. I fixed that. 2+ years ago.

Recently, the same thing has been happening, though I’m no longer an open-relay. Somehow someone is pushing spam through my box and out to the rest of the world. Three possible options I can think of, open-relay, the mail-list (mailman) and hackers (that terrible mid-90s film).

So postfix is upgraded to the latest, the mail list is turned off for a short while, and I’m going to go buy the movie so I can burn it. Either its stopped, they’re not sending anymore today, or the new version doesn’t log the successful relaying.

Plus notes: Postfix upgrading is so well put together. I’m quite stunned. That’s not the way Linux is meant to work, I’m supposed to spend hours tearing my hair out and fighting the system. (I upgraded from source onto a version installed by the original SuSE rpm).

Negatives: Apart from dead mail lists for a bit, time wasted, the fact I’ve been blacklisted at some places, I’m not sure if it’s stopped anyway. Seeing quite a lot of connects from probably sources that don’t say much. Just connect then disconnect. I think that’s just the spam being delivered to my users.

Frustrating, and a waste of 5 hours of my Saturday.

Not Java, but something I’ve meant to look at for years now. Originally NetSaint and now called Nagios, I noticed the Apache admin team mentioning it and let my browser wander over to nagios.org.

Half an hour later I had a running system [compiling nagios and nagios-plugins from source]. The documentation warns that is not for the faint-hearted, but I found their warnings to be (rarely for a computer project) over the top. You do have to do a fair bit to get it going, but this is largely a question of following some pretty blatant instructions and then figuring out a dozen configuration files. This is easier than it sounds.

It’s now running at work to tell me if the printer’s webserver goes down (highly important, we might run out of toner!), and at home against my own machines. It has an oracle plugin, so I’ll give that a try at work too and start delving into custom checkers for our system at work.

In other, more Java related news, I’m starting to dedicate a little time towards Commons Lang 2.1, and continue to work with Roller at home for the new blog, which will hopefully beat the baby to a release date.

*cheer* Company is paying for three of us to head up to ‘Southern Ohio’, or as it is really called, ‘Northern Kentucky’, for the local NoFluffJustStuff conference at the start of August.

Tickets and hotel rooms are ordered, just waiting for the months to tick by.

Stu Halloway, Erik Hatcher, Venkat Subramaniam, Bruce Tate and Dave Thomas are all repeat speakers, though only two repeated sessions from last year. In addition we get David Bock, Ben Galbraith, David Geary (who is hopefully as good a speaker as an author), Ramnivas Ladad and Ted Neward, which feels like more speakers than last year. Then again, there were cancellations last year, so I suspect the original numbers are the same.

Highlight of Friday promises to be Dave Thomas’ State Machines talk and Sunday I’ll be looking forward to a double-length talk from Eric Hatcher on Tapestry. An earlier version burnt us at work (too restrictive), so I’m hoping to be converted to the wonders of Tapestry.