I just left project Xdoclet

I just left project Xdoclet. The basic reason for this is that I just lack the time to contribute any more to this. I try to update my JBoss book, write a new book (this is still a secret :-) and I also have to take care some more of my son, who currently is in a somewhat exhausting age. And then I have a day job as well.
In fact I did not contribute anything to the project within the last half year. Also from current employments etc. the need for Xdoclet is somewhat vanishing with with the new Java 5 annotations.
I still think Xdoclet is a very fine thing and it did help me a lot in the past.
So everyone still involved with it: keep up the good work.

EJB3 proposed final draft is out

The proposed final draft of ejb3 is out.
You can find it at the jcp page

iX-Conference on Better Software is over

I spent the last two days on the iX-conference on better software in cologne.
This conference had a different target audience than W-Jax where I have been last week.
Two highlights definitively have been the keynotes by Tom de Marco and Nilaus Wirth. De Marco was talking about why some companies are faster than others. Reasons are (amongst others) meetings that are held like ceremonies, intra company email spam or presentations that convey no information at all. He also identified the addiction to status reports as one of the retarding factors. All in all a very good presentation.
Niklaus Wirth, who became professor of computer science a year before I was even born, gave a retrospective of that time and about some values that have been lost. He clearly indicated that a (very) good formation is one of the ways to better sofware.

I my self had the luck to talk about tools that can help building better software, why this fails and what you can do about it. My boss was giving a talk about agile quality management and AspectQ.

One of the results of the many presentations is for me that the human factor is getting more and more important.

Nearly all tracks of the conference have been of high quality. Also the catering was good this time as oposed to last week. I am definitively looking forward to the next iX-Conference.

W-Jax is over

I've been the last two days at W-Jax conference in Munich. I only took a few sessions as I did quite some talking with conference participants. Overall it was quite interesting and I am sure that I will go to one of the next (W-)Jax conferences as well. In fact I just submitted some proposals for sessions on upcoming Jax in May 2006.

The sessions I participated in were

- EJB 3.0 by Oliver Ihns. At least parts of the presentation seemed to be based on the early draft and not of the public review version. So this might be confusing to some listeners.
- News in JBoss 5 (my own presentation)
- a few keynotes. In one of those, given by a tool vendor, there was the comparision between the software industry and the car industry with its assembly lines. 'd say, that this part of the development process has been solved in it as well. It just means putting software on cd and putting the cd into a nice little card box.
- a session on "why developers can't listen and domain guys can't develop" by two OOse gyus. This was a very good presentation about the needed soft skills in projets. Many projects don't fail because of technical reasons but e.g. because the developer is running in short through a bank where everyone is wearing a suit.
- (partially) in model driven software development by Markus Völter. Markus really has a clue about how to give good presentations. Also the content was very interesting. Unfortunately I had to run off to meet a client offsite.
- "How reliably is WS-reliability" by Marcel Tilly of Innoq. Well, this was hard stuff, but nevertheless interesting. The baseline was that if you want to use an upcoming standard in webservices, use it only if it is supported by IBM and/or Microsoft.

In total the atmosphere of the conference was good and there were intersting sessions and good food :-) The only real bad thing was that the hotel where the conference took place was not able to provide enough stuff to drink. And we are not talking about alcoholic beverages, but about soda water and coke etc.

Review of my JBoss book in c't magazine

German c't magazine has a review of my JBoss-Book in its current issue (24/2005) on page 228.

Upcoming speaking engagements

Hi,
I'll give presentations

• at W-Jax in Munic on 15.11.2005 14:30 on News in JBoss5
  
• at iX-Konferenz in Cologne on "Better software quality through tools". This is on 22.11.2005 17:25 (see http://www.ix-konferenz.de/showabstract.php?vid=481&stylesheet=style/konf0502.php)
  
• FH Rosenheim on 14.12.2005
  

JSE 5 and UML

As Java EE 5.0 is upcoming and Java SE 5 even out for quite some while, I was looking into UML-Tools that would help in reverse engineering those new language features as well. Older Tools from the Pre JSE 5 aera just insist that annotations and generics are errors :)
So I came over Omondo EclipseUML This is nicely integrated into Eclipse 3.1 and builds on GEF and EMF.
And best of all: it is able to export UML-Diagrams as SVG! This is something the good old Together6 was able to do and which Rose and XDE were not able to.

So if you 're looking into UML and Java SE 5, you really should have a look at Omondo EclipseUML

Introduction to JBoss Seam

JBoss guys - as I understand mostly Gavin King and Thomas Heute have written an Introduction to JBoss Seam. From a first glance at it this is a real neat document.
It looks like JBoss Seam has a good future to become a de facto standard for webapp development.

The funny part about JBoss Seam is that with it, there will be no more seamless development and integration. Nice marketing trick. Hey, who hat the idea to this name?

iPod dropout killer

Lately after the Stuttgart-Lauf, I started again with jogging. I thought that it might be a good idea to have my iPod with me. I had it in my trouser pocket on the backside, as I don't like carrying things in my hand when jogging. After about half an hour, the iPod had some drop-outs which led it into a state where a soft reset was needed or a soft reset did no help and I had to wait until home to plug it into the power supply to do a hard reset.
Since then I bought a sports wrap to attach the iPod to my upper arm. Since I have the sports wrap, I had no more drop-outs on the iPod.
Of course, the iPod shuffle and iPod nano don't need this as they flash based and do not need to access a hard disk to load the songs into memory.

JBoss rock solid under load

In the last days, I was able to run some syntetical load tests on a Sparc V490 with 4 dual-core cpus, having 16GB or RAM and running Solaris 9. As the target system will be JBoss 3.2.6, we tested against this one.

Tests were conducted with JDK 1.4 and JDK 5.0, having a separate machine firing http requests at the JBoss.

JBoss was rock solid, even when the test app first had an error, not removing stateful session beans, thus passivating thousands of beans.
As expected, garbage collector settings have a huge impact on the overall performance. With bad settings we were only able to saturate two cpus, while with the right ones we kept all 8 cores busy.

Also JDK 5.0 performs a lot better than JDK 1.4 (which was expected anyway).
We also found out, that top on solaris has a bug, only displaying at most 999 lwp, even if a process has much more of them.

For someone usually only having one to two cpus at his hands, this was a nice occasion to play with a "big iron" (yeah, I know that this still is a small box).

Job opportunities @ syngenio

My employer, syngenio AG, currently has several job openings in it four branch offices.
Most offerings are around J2EE but also around Lotus Notes/Domino.
So if you know Java, EJB, JBoss, Websphere, portals etc. then come and join us.

The offerings are described on the job page.

We also have an offering for a student worker to support us in project KOMPASS. This is a research project around service oriented architectures and webservices.

Webservices in JBoss5

In my book I complained that setting up webservices in JBoss4 (and not only there) is soft of a PITA.

Thomas Diesler recently posted about the new Webservices stack for JBoss.

With JBoss5 from CVS (not yet released as alpha) it really is as simple as Thomas described it. Just put a few JSR-181 annotations in your SessionBean, deploy them and you are done.

Thomas: keep up the good work!

Next SIG-JBoss meeting

The next SIG-JBoss meeting will take place on 1st september at Alte Scheuer, Stuttgart-Degerloch. The following link lists the aganda:
Java User Group Stuttgart e.V. - Veranstaltungen

Two days in Nürnberg

The last two days I have been in Nürnberg, doing JBoss consulting for my employer, syngenio.

I have (besides changeing tracks at the main station) never been in Nürnberg before and I am really impressed by their old city centre. Most of it has been rebuilt after WWII, as 90% of it was destroyed in the last months before the end of the war. At the northern end of the city center sits the old emperor castle on the top of a hill. Parts of it are always opened and from up there one has a splendid view on the city centre.
When rebuilding the city, they luckily did not commit too much sins by deconstructing good substance and replacing it by faceless 70th buildings. This propbably is also the reason that you can see many tourists from all over the world.

On the Hauptmarkt there currently is the big football by André Heller. This ball is a marketing instrument for the upcoming soccer world championchips next year in Germany.
The ball is supposed to be shown in twelve German cities until then.
Unfortunately, I can't tell what is in there, as it is only open from 10am to 6pm - business hours :-/

[svg] Inkscape

Inkscape is another svg drawing program. First impressions are quite good. Actually it is a spin-off from Sodipodi, which tries to be more SVG-centric.
Unfortunately it seems to have the same text placement code as Sodipodi, which results in the same svg as described in an earlier blog entry.

Press release about myself

This press release is probably the first one about myself :-) It has been issued by my new employer, syngenio AG, where I am working on JBoss related things like trainings and consulting. The press release can also be found on the press releases page on the syngenio website.

syngenio summer event

As some already know, I recently joined syngenio AG in Stuttgart after having left Cellent. At syngenio I will work in areas like JBoss training, consulting and support.

This weekend we had a summer event in Imst, Austria, where all syngenio workers came together. Besides eating, drinking, some workshops and talks by members of the board, the main attraction was rafting of the Inn river, which was organized by Lemming Tours.
This raftig tour took about one and a half hours and took us around 14 km by water. This was great fun. On one side the group feeling and on the other side that one safely made it to the finishing point (there was no danger, but I guess everyone was a little bit afraid, as rafting on wild water isn't really a consultants daily job).
So as summary of the summary: great! :-)

Eclipse 3.1 is out -- and unavailable

Eclipse 3.1 finally has been released. So far for the good news.
The bad news is that the eclipse download page is unavailable (no obvious mirrors). Searching through mirrors like the German one at fht-esslingen do not yet have the complete download as they seem to compete with downloaders around the world for the sparse capacity out of the main eclipse download page.
Perhaps the eclipse foundation should have asked the NetBSD guys how they do it. At NetBSD, when a release is finished, it will be published on the ftp server where only mirrors can pick it up. Later (after a day or two) the directory is opened for the whole public. This worked for years now.
Perhaps with eclipse 3.2 ...

1. JUGS SIG JBoss Meeting

Yesterday was the first meeting of the SIG Eclipse within the Java User Group Stuttgart (JUGS).

Thomas Diesler of JBoss, Webservices lead and the person responsible for J2EE 1.4 certification, gave a presentation about the upcoming EJB3 standard and some JBoss specific additions to it (like e.g. Annotations for MBean definitions). He also talked about the upcoming POJO-container that Adrian is currently working on.
After his presentation, we had Pizza, sponsored by Janine Eastwood of JBoss and a Q & A session afterwards.
Later on we talked about the future of the SIG and the interests of the individual SIG members. Next SIG meetings will be on 1.9.2005 and 3.11.2005 again at the Alte Scheuer in Degerloch.
Last but not least there was a vodka tasting organized by the three russian guys from iMedic.

It was a good first meeting with about 50 attendees.

Of course I had a printed copy of my JBoss book with me for attendees to glance at it.

Schumi is our hero.

Now, as Ferrari no longer dominates Formula 1, they can only win when fourteen other drivers just don't start, as (amongst others) reported by La Times in Grand Prix Is Where Rubber Meets Road.
So Michael Schumacher only had to compete against the underpowered teams like Minardi and he was even able to win then.

Lets celebrate Schumi and his victory!


NOT!

iX-Eclipse-Conference

Tuesday and Wednesday I have been on the iX-Eclipse-Conference in Heidelberg. Besides giving a talk myself on plugin development, I met some nice people, had fun and did learn quite some new things on Eclipse.
Erich Gamma did a keynote presentation on Eclipse 3.1 news. One of the things I remembered, was his description on how the team made sure that Eclipse 3.1 got faster in respect to 3.0. Basically, they set up a series of unit tests, which measured the runtime of some code and compared it to some reference timing (pseudocode):

public void testFoo()
{
startTimer();
runSomeCode();
endTimer();
commitTimingResultToDatabase();
assertFaster();
}

So this fitted in the framework, one is used to.
More important, they did learn a lesson: It is not enough to measure things, but to have someone (e.g. the community) to kick ass if there is too much red in the results.

Apple - Intel deal

In addition to my comment at Otaku, Cedric's weblog: What Steve isn't telling us

Universal binaries are available for Mac OS X for the last 10 years. Ok, it was called NeXTStep at that time though :-)
So go and google for 'fat binaries' and 'NeXT' to see what is available.
No one prevents you from supplying an app in three flavours:
- fat
- ppc
- intel

I guess, for Apple this is one of the few ways to survive. With the nice centrino chpisets, even Win* notebooks are not too bad these days. And they are way cheaper anyway.

The porting bit is not too hard if you ever contributed to an OSS like NetBSD. So I beleive that the Mathematica port only took two hours.

I think that Apple just needs some more time to e.g. offer new iBooks that are at least that performant than the average Centrino one, but still consume less energy.

By the way: when do you really need to care about byte ordering anyway? It is mostly only relevant when you want to access hardware directly (i.e. device drivers) or you want to use some assembler code to speed up compilation or when you design a new lower level networking protocol where you want some well known 'on the wire ordering'.
If you just write normal apps in C, Objective C or Java you don't care at all.
And for the other apps it is not that hard as for example NetBSD or mcntp prove.

Stuttgart-Lauf

Like last year I participated in the Stuttgart-Lauf. This time - again without practicing - I was over two minutes faster on the 7,6km run (which lead to hand measured 44:19).
The event again was great fun, so I will try to participate next year again.

Eclipse plugin versions

While preparing my presentation for the upcoming iX-Eclipse-Conference, I also tried 3.1rc1 and thought to switch my example plugin to Java 5.
There currently is a problem when one of the plugins uses Java 2, the export wizard of eclipse doesn't work (See my comment on bug 84767).
But worse than this: there is no environment option to tell a user "this plugin needs Java 5" (98269). There are options for the OS or the windowing system used though.
So the recommendation is either to use a custom build with the right environment set or to restrict plugins to Java 2/JDK 1.4.

Book chapters online

My publisher, dpunkt.verlag has now two chapters of my book online as well as the table of contents. The chapters are

Chapter 2: installation

Chapter 8: AOP

But before checking those out, buy the book and read them there :-)

Why do minor versions have to have radical changes?

Lateley I got mail from a reader of my book saying "I did follow all steps, but the example you provided just doesn't work. Whenever I try to add or search it will bomb." The guy appended the stacktrace saying that this is on JBoss 4.0.2 (which was out a few days earlier) and JDK 5. I asked him to try on JBoss 4.0.1(sp1) and he confirmed that it worked there. Actually it worked from 3.2.3 over 4.0.0 to 4.0.1.

In 4.0.2 the classloading defaults of the web container changed from UseJBossWebloader=true to false, which leads to a class cast exception if the war has the stub classes of the enterprise beans in it, which are also in the ejb.jar.

There are good exmplanations for this change. But still this does not follow the principle of least surprise. End users will be pissed, saying that if they have a bigger app, they can't afford chasing those surprises for weeks until migrating an application to a newer version, which even has valuable fixes for them.

A plea (actually to every developer, not only JBoss-ones): if such radical changes are made in the future, not only mention the issue-tracking number in the change log, but also write two or three sentences about it.

Book release party (updated)

Next Tuesday (10th) there will be a book release party in Stuttgart with cocktails.
Marc even mentioned it in his newsletter:

JBoss Book Offered in German ? Sacha Labourey, European GM of JBoss, will be present at the book launch of Heiko Rupp's JBoss Server-Handbuch für J2EE-Entwickler und Administratoren, 10 May 2005. To purchase this book, please visit http://www.dpunkt.de/buch/3-89864-318-2.html.

The party is hosted by JUGS, the local Java user group in conjunction with bwcon:

The party is free of charge. If you want to join in, please send a registration email to jboss-party-anmeldung@bsd.de

UPDATE!!
The start time is nom 18:30.
See http://www.jugs.org/veranstaltung-10-05-05.html
for details.

Now I am ex-cellent :-)

Friday was my last day at Cellent Finance Solutions. When former Bancotec morphed into Cellent FS, the joke always was that when you leave now, that you are excellent :-)
The former colleagues also provided me a sign of excellence - pictures will follow.

It is out!

Today I got the first copy of my JBboss book from the publisher. Really neat.
Within the next days the printing plant will supply more copies to the
distributors and stores, so it will be available until around the start
of next week in stores.
The accompanying web site also has the examples plus some errata online. I plan to also publish some additional material there, which is/will not be in the book.

Upcoming speaking engagements

iX-Eclipse-conference, Heidelberg, 14.06.2005
Java Forum 2005, Stuttgart, 7,7,2005

2raumwohnung concert

On saturday we have been in the concert of 2raumwohnung. This probably was the first (non-classic) concert together with Elke and definitively the first one since the birth of Orlando.

iPod, Win XP, USB and Firewire

Recently I moved my iTunes music collection from my business laptop onto my private desktop pc. This pc running XP SP 2 has a USB 2.0 card. The iPod did connect and directly disconnect again. Googling around showed me that a quite some folks had problems, but there was no definite answer to solve the issue.
Yesterday I bought a cheap FireWire card with VIA chipset. Installed it, connected the iPod and it just worked :-)

News from my book (updated)

My JBoss-book is currently in the last steps of being typeset. Expected in-store date is 28th of April (Amazon.de will have it a few days later).
We also changed the subtitle from "Konfiguration und Programmierung" to "Serverhandbuch für J2EE-Entwickler und Administratoren".

Unfortunately, the updated cover does not yet show up at the publisher site or at amazon.

[ update ]

The new cover is now online at the publishers site and looks like this:



Do you see the nice little JBoss-logo on the bottom left?
The book has been reviewd by Thomas Diesler and is officially entitled to have the logo on it. The book also has a preface by Marc Fleury :-)

The book is currently on its way to printing plant and thus will be in stores on 28th of April.

Printserver

Last week I bought a print server (Edimax PS 1205 Um). It has one USB and one ethernet port and fits nicely in my home network. It supports nearly everythign from lpd, over Windows printint to Novell and AppleTalk.
The web based configuration is a bit obscure (I could not figure out how the password fits in all of this), but there is no big need of configuration anyway. As there is a Windows based configuration utility as well, I took the bitter pill of installing this.
The print server can obtain its IP address over bootp, dhcp, rarp and can also server as dhcp server.
From the experience I have with it so far, I can only recommend it.

Some monitor resolutions

I was just looking through some sales material ...
XGA = 1024 x 768
WXGA = 1280 x 800
SXGA+ = 1400 x 1050
WXGA+ = 1440 x 900
WSXGA+ = 1680 x 1050
WUXGA = 1920 x 1200

Currently I am working with a SXGA+ Laptop - this is so great when you want to have a look at a double-sided PDF or to compare two PDFs next to each other at a reasonable size.
If it isn't for battery runtime, I'd definitively choose at least WXGA for the next laptop...

The Rasterbator

The Rasterbator is a tool to produce large rasterized images from a source like a jpg. It will return a multipage pdf, that you can print out, assemble it and hang it then on your wall.
The website has an online version and there is a standalone version of it as well - very cool!

XPlanner

At work we currently take an Excel-based approach on development time tracking and for workload estimations. Recently I stumbled over XPlanner, which could be a nice approach to get rid of the Excel sheets and have some centraized statistics and panning help. Looks like this tools needs some follow up.

JBossMQ, Oracle and IO-Exception (updated)

Lately I got a lot of those when trying to send messages via JBossMQ

java.sql.SQLException: E/A-Exception: Connection reset

After quite some searching around I found a posting that another user had other problems and they went away with the 10g driver. I tried this one with success as well.
The driver is 1352918 bytes in size and named ojdbc14.jar.
[update]
This specific problem that I was having was fixed, but other problems arised using the 10g driver in other areas of our JBoss 3.2.3 + CMP + Hibernate 2.1.6 application. We will investigate this.
So make sure to run extensive tests when changing the jdbc driver.

JBoss: Konfguration und Programmierung: preview at CeBit

The nice folks of German JBoss partner Objectone will exhibit a preview version of my book "JBoss - Konfiguration und Programmierung" at CeBit fair. Their stand is 4 B 58.

[update]
Heise Verlag will also have a copy at their stand (5 D 38).

So be sure not to miss it.

Good service example

In the past when shopping at our (best) local hardware dealer Arlt one often had to wait a long time even if one knew what to buy as some f*ckwit was discussing with the clerk if his new computer should be in dark black or real dark black.
Now they have a new service: you can order your stuff at home over internet at their webshop (which is not new) and you can order the stuff to the town local shop. They send you an email when your items are ready and you can go there to pick them up. Now the really good part: they have a separate lane only for those pick ups. This is a real time saver. In the past sometimes you had to wait half an hour for a small cheap item. Now you just go to the counter tell who you are, get the items, pay and your done. Super!

Parcel delivery sometimes sucks

Last Saturday I was expecting a parcel that was posted last Friday and it did not arrive.
You say: hey, that's normal that they don't arrive
But: the parcel was only posted one town away
and: it was posted with express delivery with an additional fee
and: it was posted with "next day delivery" option for an additional fee
and: a parcel from northern Germany posted on Friday did arrive on Saturday
and: this said parcel was even free of charge as the German Post had a "post one parcel for free" day.

The parcel arrived on Monday ...

The reason was that the clerk forgot to select the "also Saturday delivery" option :-(

This just sucks

Mutt, pgp and enigmail

Recently I am getting more and more mails from Mozilla/Thunderbird users that use the enigmail plugin to support digital signature / encryption via pgp/gpg.
Unfortunately, mutt does not flag them as being encrypted / signed by default. With the default settings, it does not even recognize them as pgp mails. I used to pipe those mails to gpg, but when replying, this gets ugly with saving into a temp file, editing this one etc.
The following message hook fixes this (partly):

message-hook '!(~g|~G) ~b"^-----BEGIN\ PGP\ (SIGNED\ )?MESSAGE"' "exec check-traditional-pgp"

If you don't want to use this hook, it is still possible by pressing ESC P to flag those mails as being pgp mails. After this manual signing, mutt will also call pgp to display them.

On the other side: engimal users should set their preferences to use pgp/mime, so that outgoing mails get the right headers. Mutt will then be able to signal them as pgp mails even if the above hook is not used.

End of Week end

A good weekend is over. After beeing sick for a week, I feel better again.
My book is now at the copy editor and spell checker, so I am confident that it will be in stores in April latest.
I also started to set up a home page for the book at Begleitseite zum Buch: JBoss - Konfiguration und Programmierung where I will put the source code of the examples and also errata.

The best about Montignac diet

Michel Montignac, a french business man has developed some 20 years ago a new diet basing on just eating the right thing at the right time (this involves knowing the glycemic index of food and of eating the right combinations).
The best thing about that diet is not that it
- actuall works well
- you can eat as much as you want (there is no need to eat less)
- you can even eat chocolate
but
that you can actually go out eating with your colleagues, following the diet rules and nobody will actually find out that you are on a diet. That is much better than those "you are only allowed to eat salad" or "only grapes" diets.

Ticket application filed

Yesterday I filed my the application to participate in the lottery for FIFA soccer world championship 2006. Even as there are six matches here in Stuttgart, I did not intend to go. But my dad asked me if we want to go together, so I field the application.
Now I am waiting what will happen next ...

Blogger profile stats bogus

Blogger.com also shows some statistics and last posts on the "view my complete profile page". This has not been updated since October last year. They should probably better remove those statistics if they don't want to update them.

Heise.de has been ddosed

The probably most popular German speaking IT new site has been mostly offline the last two days. www.heise.de has been victim of a distributed denial of service attack.

JOnAS - has passed the J2EE 1.4 CTS.

After JBoss in July 2004, the second open source J2EE server has passed the Sun J2EE 1.4 testsuite:

1st February 2005: JOnAS has passed the J2EE 1.4 CTS

The JOnAS open source application server has successfully passed the Sun J2EE 1.4 Certification Test Suite. The official Sun acknowledgement is expected in the coming days. This is the result of a 9 months effort. The corresponding JOnAS version is 4.3.1, which is first provided as candidate release.

It is interesting that two French entities (Marc Fleury and the Objectweb consortium) dominate the open source J2EE market.

RSS 2.0 Specification -- why RFC 822 date?

Harvard has the RSS 2.0 Specification online. Lately I was trying to convert atom feeds from blogger into rss with the help of xslt. Everything is relatively easy except the rfc822 date. While the month is easy to convert via

<xsl:value-of select='substring("JanFebMarAprMayJunJulAugSepOctNovDec",$num*3-2, 3)'/>

where $num is the number of the month, starting at 1=Jan, this is not so easy with the day of week. Others obviously have/had the same problem. Mostly this is solved by some xslt processor specific external libraries.
Without the day of week name, the date entry is not valid. Luckily do rss readers like FeedDemon still recognice the feed.

NetBSD Online Store -- Help Fund NetBSD | CafePress

Finally, NetBSD items are available at CafePress NetBSD Online Store -- Help Fund NetBSD | CafePress and not only at good will from some NetBSD enthusiasts.

Amazon.de finally shows the cover art

Amazon.de finally also shows the cover art of my book Amazon.de: Bücher: JBoss.

It doesn't make a big difference, as the book did not change and the comment stays the same etc., but when you look at the book list, it directly makes a better impression when the cover art is shown as well.

The power of perl

The LaTeX-style of my publisher has some special definitions for environements. When starting to write my JBoss book, I started to use just the normal LaTeX figure environement. Today I thought that it is time to convert those about 230 occurences of

\begin{figure}
... some text
\caption{bla}
\label{foo} % only sometimes set
\end{figure}

into

\begin{fighere}{always a label}{the caption text}
... some text
\end{fighere}

I decided to take perl for the task. Ok, it took me some time to get into perl again after not having it used for years. But at the end the complete task took me 3 hours.

I am sure, doing it by hand, I would sit there the whole week. The pattern matching ability of perl and the associative arrays just make it a pleasure job.

How many books / items does Amazon have in their catalogue?

Since my JBoss book is listed @ Amazon.de, I am looking at its sales rank. First there was no rank given. Then I ordered a copy and after a while the rank climbed to around 1.400.000. Then I cancelled the copy again and now there is again no rank given.

Does a rank of 1.400.000 for one copy ordered/sold mean that Amazon has around one and a half million articles in their catalogue? Probably they have more, as not ordered items can be found and there are ~ 1.400.000 items that got sold at least once.

Anyone has a clue?

Finally some time to work on OS again

Now that I am waiting with my JBoss book on an external event, I did not work on it this weekend, but was again able to work on Xdoclet and to help Andy to test the second milestone of JBossMail.
It really feels good to do a little patching here, a little debugging there without someone in your back with a MS project plan tracking your mouse moves.

Apple store not reachable

The apple online store is no longe reachable after todays keynote from Steve Jobs at MacWorld expo. It seems that everyone ran out of the store do directly order a new Mac mini :-)

JBMail back from stasis

Andy Oliver is now back on JBMail, the mailserver project that he started. The first preview that I got in hands wasn't that useful, as it made some wrong assumptions about DNS servers.

In contrary to the last release, this preview is a binary one, including the whole ant 1.6.1 distribution (30 MB unzipped) :-( That at least explains why the package is now so fat.

But after this, the install runs fine if no TLS is used.

Running the mail service is still a little problem for me, as the name resolution doesn't quite work, but here on my Windows box, I am not able to tell if this is a problem with JBMail or Windows itself.