Tomcat dedo-dedo-doo

Most amusing. But the last sentence is a huge insight into the real world.

New job

Long time no blog. Well it's been an interesting few weeks to say the least. After 4 years (and a total of 7, if you include my previous stint) at my previous employer, I've left for pastures new.

I've been offered a job (subject to medical and references) at Ericsson Services Ltd. and have accepted. I'm looking forward to working in such a big company with a major IT, technical and service focus.

FC5 and stuff.

OK. So I'm still feeling rubbish. But enough about me.

Some stuff about FC5. FC5 in a nutshell: Fedora finally catch up with Ubuntu. Suspend works on my laptop (yay!). Using the testing kernel (2069) I can get fglrx to work which means that X no longer runs at speeds of c.1998 :-) I haven't got AIXGL working yet.

FC 1 and 3 were really good, 2 was average and 4 suX0red. Ubuntu's releases have all rocked. But now I can revert to the fold and use my Red Hat knowledge and feel safe and secure in that. :-)

Congratulations to Red Hat, Fedora people and Livna.org for picking up their game and getting back up to scratch.

Around the world:

40+ suggestions to improve GNOME

Manager 2.0 (Kathy Sierra does it again!)

From around the blogosphere....

Porky Prime Cuts:

Someone at Sun linked to this, the most amazingly useful book, with the best customer review ever at Amazon: How to Avoid Huge Ships.

Another Sun-ite linked to FreeMind which looks damn useful.

Changshin Lee ponders over whether we should have Java Widgets. Well yes, Java is a better language for this sort of thing, but I don't have that much RAM. (Can you imagine using 256MB just for a clock :-).

The IT Training Doctor explains how to train properly through the magic of Lego and Harry Potter. He also links to an amusing video of if Microsoft redesigned the iPod packaging.

Creating Eclipse Warnings with AspectJ

A good use of AOP. At last I begin to see the light.

Creating Eclipse Warnings with AspectJ: "We have made some experiments with the creation of an Eclipse Warning to detect the usage of the println in the code. Every time a developer type System.out.prinltn(...), the warning icon appears beside his code. A sample code is provided."

Go Bristol!

Bristol Switches to StarOffice.

Anyone can do it... Some PCs (in Woolworths of all places) come with StarOffice pre-installed. When I was at Amtrak (UK parcel company unrelated to American trains) they had thin client (X11) access to 3 Solaris 8 (x86) PCs which ran StarOffice 5.2. Enough for 100 users.

Yes, MS Office 2003 is pretty damn fine and some people may use sharepoint etc. but not many people do. So stop paying for MS Office, please. StarOffice is cheap and OpenOffice is free.

Sometimes I hate PHP 4...

PHP4 is OK. Let's face it, it's the Perl 5 of web-languages. It has an OO system that's not that great but it's there and means you can do most rudimentary things. But apparently you can't do this:

$this->getFoo()->bar();

which pretty much is a standard way of thinking in my brain. Arse.

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.