ATI Petition for Adequate Drivers in Linux Petition

ATI Petition for Adequate Drivers in Linux Petition

Are online petitions pointless? I don't know. But I'm an ATI user, and many laptops are ATI based. So let's ask ATI to please make us some decent darned drivers.

PHP Integer size

How to tell how big your php integers are:

<?php

  $one = 1;
  $big = 4294967297;

  $mod = sprintf("%u", $big);

  $a = ( $one == $mod ) ? 64 : 32;

  echo $a. "\n";

?>

Tested on 32 and 64 bit builds of PHP 4.4.1 on Solaris 8 (SPARC).

Mirror, mirror, on the wall

Here comes the mirror man...

On monday I start a new position as the full time developer of JISC Mirror. Yay!

Please send all comments through the normal channels (as opposed to me directly). Obviously there's a lot we (Eduserv) want to do. So let's get it on.

Duke in a wheelchair

I shouldn't laugh, but someone's heart is clearly in the right place designing this logo, but Duke's "legs" look really bad in this picture.

world of java

world of java

My new Java blog.

Gmaps Pedometer

Gmaps Pedometer

This rocks!

Apparently, it's a 1km walk to school, and just 700m from the park and ride stop in town to my office.

StrutsMerryChristmas - Struts Wiki

StrutsMerryChristmas - Struts Wiki

Merry Strutsing Christmas to you all.

Java Forums - Date Comparison

Java Forums - Date Comparison

Very funny!

JSP sucks arse

Is it me or is JSP the most god-awful, sucky language of all time? The following piece of struts taglib rocks:

 <html:select property="cpuManufacturerId">
  <html:options collection="cpuManufacturers" property="id" labelproperty="manufacturer"/>  
 </html:select>

(equivalent to a for/in loop over all cpuManufacturers to create an HTML Select box) but everything else about the language sucks arse. Is velocity or anything else better or just sucky in a different way?

Oh for a minimal Java implementation of PHP that can talk to Servlets...

iBATIS v. Hibernate

Man, Hibernate has been making my head ache. I just can't get my brain around the whole of it. I started writing my own DAO out of frustration (which isn't too hard/complicated) so what's the big deal with Hibernate? I only want to map SQL to Java and back.

However, while reading through Jakarta Struts Cookbook I came across iBATIS - what a piece of cake.

If you're looking for a DAO, and are wondering WTF Hibernate is all about, try looking at iBATIS (now an apache project) instead. It is simple. Apparenly, it's not a full blown ORM, but I don't want a full blown ORM. Who does?

Sun Hat

So on top of the OpenSolaris kernel there are several projects/rumours.

1. SchilliX - from Jörg Schilling (famous for cdrecord, star, etc.) "ego project"
   
2. BeleniX - Live CD failed on my main machine. "fan project"
   
3. Nexenta (GNU/Solaris) - Ubuntu (so, Debian really) on top of OpenSolaris. LiveCD worked on one of my machines. "Venture capital project?"
   
4. Pieter Vd Abeele's Metadistribution - Gentoo on OpenSolaris. "Vapourware".
5. Nevada - Sun Solaris 10 + 1.
   

The obvious next step is to create an RPM based distro on top of OpenSolaris (e.g. Fedora Core, Red Hat Enterprise Linux respin, OpenSuSE, etc.) Not me obviously. But someone will.

Clearly the name "Sun Hat" is never going to get past Sun or Red Hat's lawyers. :-)

MyEclipse and JSPX

Thank god - MyEclipse now supports JSPX (JSP Documents - i.e. written in XML).

Sun, JDS, scandal and OSS

Nice article.

l33t 5h1rt

Got my free OpenSolaris T-shirt through the post this morning.

This in itself makes me officially more l33t than you, regardless of any computing ability. :-)

Perhaps "T-shirt kiddie" should be a new phrase akin to "Script kiddie".

Tim Eden

Congratulations to Tim Eden for being appointed Professor of Teenage Oncology.

Just one of the cast of hundreds to whom I owe my life.

Strutting your stuff

So you think your clever? You've been around the web development block a few times. You know that MVC/Model2 is the future, and you can program in Java. So you decide to write a web app using Jakarta Struts.

What a fucking stupid idea.

Man, I suck!

My main problem is that when I decide to do something, I want to do it "as perfectly as possible". This of course means that I never get anything done, because I'm up against some infinite learning curve, which with Struts is infintely steep.

Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck.

Should have written it in shit PHP, instead.

MyEclipse

I've been using MyEclipse - a cheap wrapper around Eclipse that does one hell of a lot.

It can start and stop Tomcat and deploy to it (along with many other app servers).

One quibble, why does it include JSTL 1.0 versions in new web-app projects? (This took me for ever to hunt down...) Freaking stupid errors about not being able to understand the URI...

God damn! Anyway, back on with the show. Eclipse rocks, and my experience with it wasn't too great before paying 20 quid for MyEclipse, but in general, I'd recommend it to anyone wanting to start out with Eclipse with web apps.

RHEL licence is wrong

Seriously, what is the point of the RHEL licence?

There are so many "respins" (effectively identical versions) of RHEL (CentOS, Tao, WBEL) then why don't Red Hat bite the bullet, gain more market share (even with the same revenue base) and allow people to download and install RHEL itself.

What Red Hat are charging $349/£200/€279 per Basic ES server per annum for is access to RHN (without grouping a.k.a management) and updates. I am perfectly capable of fiddling the updates so that all servers can gain access them (I don´t - we have over 50 Basic ES licences and use CentOS for less critical machines) so why don´t Red Hat allow other sites to mirror them, and then non-licenced hosts to use yum/apt to get hold of them that way.

You can see bugzilla reports from the CentOS folk in Red Hat´s Bugzilla, so come on. Stop fannying about and bring Red Hat back to the masses.

Ubuntu all the way.

Well, all three of my machines now run Ubuntu Breezy (5.10). I gave up on Mandriva. Yes I still love Red Hat and Fedora, but Ubuntu is just that little bit more polished than FC4 which is a shame.

question.next() - will we support Ubuntu on the server when 6.04 comes out?

Français, s'il vous plait

Yay, I've registered with Alliance Française to study French.