Initial bit of issues. Followed some guides I found of the net and now its flying. I enjoy working on it, it so small and versatile...and made me wonder why I should use any other machine when at home or somewhere else. The netbook easily browses the net, chat, play divx movies and all my music. This is essentially all I have been doing on my big pc. So it made me think about the relationship between amount of processing power versus the amount of usage. I can say honestly that I am of buying the latest and greatest kit, and only get what I need.
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( 2.7 / 35 )The whole Java community has been discussing the possible acquisition of Sun Microsystems by IBM. There seem to be a consensus going around that it might mean a slow death for both Glassfish and NetBeans. Taking my experiences with IBM software and as a company, I tend to agree.
On my current project all the J2EE apps have been running on Glassfish and has been running well in my opinion. Today I have been instructed to port all our J2EE apps from Glassfish to WebSphere. This is simply because the client had a bad experience with SUN App Server clustering a year ago, and for that reason we must port. I suggested that we rather port to WAS CE (Geronimo) and use it as a path to move to WAS 7.
The installation of WASCE as well as the Eclipse 3.4 Server Adapter was straight forward, but all came to a halt when tried to create a web application with WASCE set as its target runtime. Eclipse kept returning a NullPointerException. After checking the internal logs, it came down to a JAXB Exception. After few hours of trial and error, I realized the Server Adapter plugin is failing because my Eclipse has not been started on the IBM JDK. It seems that the SUN JAXB Provider keeps failing the code in the WASCE Server Adapter plugin but the IBM JDK Provider accepts it. This on its own gets me worrying already.
So after setting my Eclipse ini configuration to start using the IBM JDK things started to work. Problem is that all my project have been compiled on the SUN JDK 1.6, so I will have to recompile and re-test especially since some of my modules are complex multi-threaded concurrent applications.
With this experience, my opinion of IBM's acquisition of SUN is becoming more pessimistic. I can say out of experience that IBM has even written a Java applet for its internal staff that ONLY runs on Windows and ONLY runs on Internet Explorer. So much for the "write once, run anywhere" goal.
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( 2.8 / 88 )Woman are so lucky, they have just to look down to see boobs...
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( 3 / 62 )I am currently on a project, experiencing the joy (and some bites) of fully concurrent software development. Writing call queue management components for a new call center implementation. One thing i have been introduced to is SIP.
Had an interesting experience so far. Took a while to get my head around the design and how to go about implementing code on it. And since i am able to start using it... the cracks are starting to show.
A protocol so simple, yet it can get horribly abused by SIP based servers, loading messages with implementation specific data...making reuse damn near impossible. Unfortunately plans are in motion to drop the current SIP server, and now I have to basically reverse engineer the business components to be able to use it in a JSR289 container. But i am not too bothered about it, kinda like re-engineering software, always gives me chance to write better improved code.
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( 2.9 / 57 )As blogged several times, I take pride and joy in my interest in martial arts and in particular Aikido. But I came upon an interesting situation a few weekends ago.
I went to a club with a mate and walked into an old high school friend whom happens to be the bouncer of the club. After the usual chit-chat I question him about what he has been up to last few years. He had a much larger build since high school, typical mean bouncer...but only in appearance. He started chatting to my how he has been doing a number of martial arts all they way thru to cage fighting.
I did not remember him as the fighting type when we were in school. He did went on to explain why he did all that training without me even asking. He told me that he felt its his duty (and pleasure) to fight those who pick on the weak and timid. The reason he developed this aggressive attitude is because road he walked during high school. Unfortunately this road included being bullied often and at one time being beaten up to such an extent that he has a permanent dislocated jaw.
He still harbor ill feelings for certain individuals, which he will probably try to beat up when confronted. All this desire for revenge, is it just? I kinda felt sad, that it seems he main focus for the last 9 years has been to take revenge on what happened to him.
I hope that his ways and opinion of life changes, to focus more on his own happiness rather the suffering of others...no matter how much they might deserve it.
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( 3 / 68 )Elegance is unnatural, only achieveable at great expense.
If you just do something, it won't be elegant, but if you
do it and then see what might be more elegant, and do
it again, you might, after an unknown number of iterations,
get something that is very elegant. -- Naggum
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( 3 / 83 )Through my martial arts training, I believe I am beginning to develop a higher level of understanding and intelligence of life. I don't perceive myself better (or worse) than the person standing next to me. The only thing that differentiate us is that I have been able to abstract myself of everything (actions, emotions, words) and look at it from a third person's perspective. This is a concept which is fundamental to Buddhism, what they call being mindful of the universe. Through this approach (I believe) you are truly able to find yourself, and not judge yourself or base all your actions and decisions on random thoughts and emotions.
Now, lately I have been approach by several individuals. They usually start the conversation with “..i see you really into your martial arts” which I take with compliment of course, but do get disappointed with soon after. The following question 9/10 is always something about punching, kicking...fighting. These question often is based on some clip watched on YouTube. But this is not me, I believe that my martial arts is about fighting yes, but more importantly about living. Why fight if I can avoid it? Why hate if I can love? I have the habit to disappoint as well, when asked how to block a punch, I response '..why allow a situation where the person wants to punch you in the first place?'.
The concept of a martial arts (principle, discipline, understanding...the list goes on) is core to most or at least can be applied to any martial art style in the world. Yet it seems that the modern world has disconnect most styles from these core fundamentals. Without them, is not any style just plain fighting? Surely society should know better?
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( 2.9 / 97 )In September I started on a project and decided to load Ubuntu 8.04 on my Dell laptop. And I must say I was very impress. Everything was working from install, especially all the hardware which always seems to took some effort with other flavors of Linux I have worked with in the past. Since I develop in the Java space a lot of the IDE/tools are ported to Linux, so there was no migration period for me to learn anything new. Over the weekend I upgraded to Intrepid Ibex (8.10) and already things seems to be working even more smoother, especially the latest Gnome environment. Got rid of the distro version of Open Office and loaded the latest 3.0, which also seems to be a huge improvement. Startup time for Open Office Write and Calc is sometimes sub-second.
Oddly I have not find any thing stopping me of doing ALL my computing needs, no "dammit I need Windows" situation. But saying that, I do have window apps running inside a VirtualBox instance. The main consensus for me personally is wondering why I have not switched earlier. It is fortunate that on my current project there actually quite a few Linux/Mac OS users. Cant wait to install latest Ubuntu 8.10 64-bit on my home pc.
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( 2.9 / 106 )Yet again I have identified a subtle phenomenon on a project. It seems that there is this "given" that all developers on a project team should work in parallel (with the high school interpretation that parallel means faster). Yet all developers are not equal (or the political correct version according to South Africa's labor laws, not equal YET). Anyways, in the real world at any given point in time, each member on a development team has his/her's unique set of skills, knowledge and experience. So logic will suggest that if you place each team member next to each other like metaphorical pillars, the pillars would vary in height and width. I don't understand why this practice still continues, because the simple truth is that the resulting system will be inconstant from a design perspective, and more difficult to maintain from `n implementation perspective. Its not a case necessarily of having incapable team members whom are not skilled enough, but simply utilizing the skills in a area of a design where it provides the most value.
Let say there are two developers, both tasked to develop a web application on the J2EE stack. Developer A is skilled in database design and core J2EE API, and Developer B is skilled in JSP/CSS/Javascript. If you were to task these 2 developers in parallel, the end result would obviously be different, not wrong... just different. This difference of design/implementation of code could and probably will have lasting results in terms of scaling, spec changes, migration, refactoring and integration. The work effort for overall system changes could possibly become simply unpredictable, even more so if components developed in this way needs to inter-operate. This something that usually does not get picked up by management, since each team member are usually viewed as on par with his peer in terms of skill level (as in he knows databases, or he can code Java... and that's it).
I have found some success to turn this paradigm on its side, organizing developer skills in horizontal layers, each working as provider to the next following "Software as a Service" principles. The resulting stability and consistency is undeniable in my humble opinion. This approach for task-resource distribution I feel fits very well in your typical "Onion Architecture".
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( 2.9 / 106 )
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