The Goldfish Chronicles

The last half of the film is everything that Star Wars fans have been waiting for.

It’s like watching Empire Strikes Back for the first time again, but with so many years of waiting in between.

Stunning.

Short note that Payload 0.5 is out. The major theme for this release is the arrival of Paylets. A simple plugin API to allow custom behaviour to take effect after a payload extraction.

MPAA killing TV program sharing (bbc article).

“Every television series depends on other markets-syndication - international sales - to earn back the enormous investment required to produce the comedies and dramas we all enjoy and those markets are substantially hurt when that content is stolen.”

Yet more attempts by the MPAA to keep a regionalized, enormously profitable industry under their firm control. If a show is not on in a country, we’re meant to wait until it is, if that lucky day should happen. If a program is broadcast, and we fail to see it, we’re meant to wait until the networks might deign to put a repeat on.

Brief note on the Payload 0.4 release. It can now recurse into archives inside archives and supports regexp matching for archive names now too.

The use case for this is a JNLP app, whose configuration is inside the jar, which is then put inside a war and then Payloaded. As Payload deploys the application, it needs to go into the war, then into the jar to edit the configuration.

(Payload 0.5 plans)

The only problem, damn jar is signed because it wants permissions on the client, so the new feature is not a full solution to the problem of how to put configuration into the application. The solution is the addition of the planned Paylet plugins, intended for such hackery.

After a payload extraction, all paylets will be executed in order. Two use cases are to remove files that aren’t wanted in that environment and to resign the jar (which is nicely inside the war, so that could be fun).

(Genesis)

Payload is just a small part of Genesis, a series of Perl scripts around CVS and Maven. Writing Genesis up as an article to describe one pattern for big-red-button deploys is an increasing priority.

Voting time tomorrow in the UK. I’m dismayed to see that one of the issues that the major parties seem to agree on is lessening or abolishing the existence of hereditary peers in the Lords. The House of Lords is the upper house of the UK parliament, and the last decade has seen an increasing move to replace the members of the Lords with an entirely elected body.

I’ve no huge desire to get political as the two primary choices in the UK election are equally undesirable and the third choice lacks the charisma of his predecessor; however…

While it’s all well and good to throw out privilege gained due to birth and not merit, people really need to look at what they’re replacing them with. Yet another group of voted in political cravens, moving us from a system in which the two houses had different central desires to a single house made of two parts, both with the same habits and urges, namely to get re-elected and make money.

Given the absolute corruptness of the US political system (except that few here seem to think it is corruption for companies to give donations to political figures for votes), having an upper house for whom money is less important seems like a good thing. Admittedly there are peers who are down on their luck, so the solution may be for the House of Lords to be replaced by the House of Richest British-persons.

Finally on the Lords topic, it seems that the wrong people are making the decisions here. N political parties are agreeing to throw out an older form of government and replace it with N political parties. Bit of a conflict of interest eh?

I’m also dissapointed that English devolution (Cornwall/Yorkshire/Lancashire/Northumberland etc) is not on the agenda. It’d make colouring maps in lots of fun and I’d love to see border control on the M1.

Tiger, aka OS X 10.4, is now available. It’s the biggest improvement to the Apple since the year dot according to Steve Jobs and as with every release I can’t see a single thing that I believe I’ll be using in 6 months time. There is one unspoken feature that I will be using though, and every day, and that’s Tiger, aka Java 5.0. I’ll be spending 100+ dollars on a new version of OS X to get the wonderful benefit of being able to program in Java 5.0, a year or so after the rest of the mainstream operating systems (aka Win + Lin).

Well, I love my powerbook. It’s only a G4 400mhz, but it’s a sweet piece of hardware. True, it’s a bit of a dog when I run Maven or when I use Ant to generate the Jakarta site, and the battery (second one in its lifetime) has gone senile, but it’s light, sturdy and has an internal wireless card.

However, a much cheaper, younger Dell Inspiron 4150, bought to play Windows games on the living room floor has been winking suggestively and making suggestive motions towards the SuSE 9.2 DVD. Finally I could take the temptation no more and succumbed to the heady joys of an install.

Last night was spent clearing space on the XP installation and using Partition Magic 8.0 to provide 15Gig or so for Linux. Tonight was spent doing a (hopefully) painless installation of SuSE 9.2. In the end, it was pretty painless. The only pain I hit was in terms of the Netgear WG511 wireless card I wanted to use, and after some googling and grumbling I found that I just needed to download a firmware file and put it in a directory. So very, very impressive. (oh, no mouse-scroll-wheel in KDE, but does work in Firefox).

JDK 1.5 was the first thing installed. SVN/CVS were there already from SuSE. Download Ant, Maven. Check out the Jakarta site and revel in the 10 second site generation (took 2 minutes + on the powerbook). Grab the osjava.org SVN repository and ‘maven jar’ osjava-payload in a wonderful 7 seconds (after the usual first time through setup).

After that, the night was spent playing with KDE, setting revolving backgrounds, installing Firefox, NVu and generally having fun. I won’t claim to have unswitched fully yet, but it’s awfully close. SuSE 8.2 on the same hardware was a bit hit and miss. SuSE 9.2 (and any other similarly aged distro I assume) seems a winner. Power-management (sleeping and length of battery life) is probably the biggest issue left to confront.