Eclipse 3.0 is out

In this press release, the Eclipse Foundation announces the availability of Eclipse 3.0.
From the release plan this was not anticipated as RC4 was due on 25th and the final release only at the end of the month.

Interestingly enough, at the time of this writing, no download is yet available.

So was the press release only launched at (summer) solstice to announce another eclipse? :-)

Stuttgart Lauf

Today I did the 7km running at the 11. Stuttgarter Zeitung-Lauf.
The Stuttgart-Lauf is a mass competition: in total around 18.000 people were running, inlining or even driving wheel chairs.

I did run in the 7km run (which actually is 7.6km) and am happy that I was able to completely run through without pausing, although I did not do any practising at all.
As usual (this was my third participation), there were supporters all around the track, making noise, music and just having fun.

The following picture will give you an impression on what you see when you are actually on the track
Runners at Stuttgart-Lauf

Update: there have been 19.622 starters in total of which 9600 did the 21km run. (Reference: Stuttgarter Zeitung).

heise online - Mario Jeckle ist tot / Mario Jeckle is dead

Mario Jeckle is dead -- this is very sad news. Unfortunately I only met him once (at the
iX Conference last year). Mario was really a nice, cool and knowledgable guy.


He died on 2004/06/11 while he was trying to help others.

One reference amongst many:


heise online - Mario Jeckle ist tot

heise online - Open-Source-Server für Java 2 Enterprise Edition 1.4

Heise online reports that JOnAS did their first J2EE 1.4 release, beating JBoss in that area.

heise online - Open-Source-Server für Java 2 Enterprise Edition 1.4

heise online - Sun will Java-Quellen freigeben

Heise writes that Sun wants to put java into open source: heise online - Sun will Java-Quellen freigeben

EJB 3.0 steered by politics? A conpiracy?

There are various articles like Forums - EJB 3.0 steered by politics? that express that EJB 3.0 must be the result of a conspiracy or of politics or what ever, but in any case not the result of technical discussions.

I don't think so. I have to admit, that I am pro JBoss, so I am biased.

The voices that come up are from the usual suspects in the established commercial market like commercial app server vendors or JDO vendors that really fear their market share being taken away by Open Source like JBoss. But not only JBoss, but also new frameworks from Apache etc. The biggest difference between Apache and JBoss is probably, that JBoss Inc. is now a company, while all Apache stuff is always hyped no matter what good it is.

It might be good for EJB and J2EE that someone from a different viewpoint is now leading the technical discussion. Who knows - perhaps in EJB 4, IBM will be the technical lead. Or Macromedia. Or ...

War driving? War walking!

Just went out on our balcony to see if my wlan has access there. It hasn't. But I found an access point of one of the neighbours. No WEP, no nothing. While I was still pinging around a bit, it offered me a IP address. Pinging the .1 in that subnet was successful. Directing the browser at that host gave me a login screen of the access point asking for a password.
Next to the password entry field, there is a text saying "The default password is 0000".
And yes, the user didn't change it ...

My Ixus is broken

My Ixus is broken and only shows a 'E18' error.
There is a website that shows in many picutures how to fix it.
After diassembling the first parts, my girlfriend decided to get another
one on eBay.
It looks like fixing that error is a task for a long winter night. With a big table covered by a white sheet, so that you find all parts again.

freshmeat.net: Project details for XDoclet

Marcus updated the
freshmeat.net: Project details for XDoclet. I am curious how many people will have a look at it or if downloads and website hits will increase.

Over the last two days, I had some very strange behavior of JBoss. I was fiddling around with JAAS, EJB security et. al. The code just didn't want to do what it should. After Explorer (this was on Win2k) crashed a few times, I rebooted. And voila: JBoss behaved as it should with my app just running. *sigh* This really cost me a day.
In the past (as a (former) NetBSD hacker) I told people that WinNT and 2k isn't that bad and that they are stable bla bla bla. This really changed my opinion :-/

Today we got a presentation by an IBM guy on the Rational Tool Suite. The presentation wasn't too bad.
One interesting point was that he was using JBoss as AppServer. I would have expected that they have to use Websphere. So much about "Eat your own dog food".

I am now (for nearly two weeks) invloved with Xdoclet as commiter. Xdoclet is a code generator, where you add tags in javadoc format to your source (@foo.bar). Xdoclet then generates Java files and deployment descriptors. Currently I am wading through JIRA, their trouble ticket tool. It's quite some work. But fortunately, you see a result.
I am also currently writing an article for iX magazine about Xdoclet. I submitted it to the editor two days ago in the afternoon, saying that it is not clear when there will be a next release. In the evening, there was a mail on the developers malingl list saying "hey, do we want to release this weekend?" :-)

Gavin King (the hibernate guy) is writing about SFSB. While not everything he wrote is correct (according to the comments, which I did not verify), his last sentence Lesson: beware J2EE folklore! is completely true.
I often hear "CMP is useless". When you ask people why, they tell you some myths or results from a foaf or things they experienced years ago, which is not true on a modern CMP 2.x server like JBoss.

We have been at our local OBI store on Saturday. Over the loudspeaker, the lady was announcing "And now, just in time for eastern: out four million megapixel camera is on stock again". She was repeating this every then minutes.

Wow, they are having such a product at a consumer store, while you can't even buy that in high-end shops. :-)
Experience from the past (marketing guy is pretending that a megapixel screen can display 16 million colors simultaneously) showed that it doesn't make sense to tell the lady that four terra pixel cameras are still a bit in the future.

Remakably: Six barriers to open source adoption in the enterprise.

In Bruce Landon's Weblog for Students
he is writing: Jython really needs is more recognition from Sun and IBM .
I am not sure on this. To me it seems that at least IBM has a tendency to use things in a way that if you started with it once, you can't really move to another tool. Best example is WSAS 5 with WSAD. Support for DB/2 is far superior to support for other databases.

Now back to Jython: what could more recognition from one of those companies mean? Will there be a WSAD4Jython that gives comfortable editing et. al., while no plugin for Eclipse is supported?

I have been at CeBit, worlds largest IT exhibition.
Amongst others, I met Marc Fleury and Sacha Labourey from JBoss again. JBoss really seems to start now - also in Europe. The two guys had one meeting with the press after the other.
As in all the years, the parts at Heise publishers was great. This year it wasn't at their booth, but in EMC near central station.
I met quite some people therer, but didn't really see much new things. I think meeting old friends again there is the real purpose of all the fair business.

Today I stumbled over the this articles about Continous Integration.
I agree with it. The most interesting part is about being able to do a daily build and the pros and cons of it.
I often hear the same ("No, I don't run the testsuite between edits, this takes me 10 minutes each").

Then it says:

We are pretty aggressive about what we mean by a successful build.

* All the latest sources are checked out of the configuration management system
* Every file is compiled from scratch
* The resulting object files (Java classes in our case) are linked and deployed for execution (put into jars).
* The system is started and suite of tests (in our case, around 150 test classes) is run against the system.
* If all of these steps execute without error or human intervention and every test passes, then we have a successful build

I am not sure, if this is enough when done on a central test machine or if even developer has to run through this before even being allowed to check changes in.

Oh well ..

It looks like social networking sites are the new in things on the net. Lately I got invitations to Orkut and OpenBC. While browsing at Orkut, i found lots of people that are not only attached to one networking site, but to many of them.

I think that those networks can be very additive - especially when they allow to rank others and to be ranked, when they show how popular one is etc.

I really wonder when those communities start their business plans. OpenBC as an example first offeres their commerical premium services. When after a month you are accustomed to all the features, the account falls back to the normal version and you have to pay to get the level of service that you know.

And by the way: the grandmom of those sites, Sixdegrees is currently down for relaunch.

Die iX-Konferenz: J2EE, .Net, Web Services - Hype und Realität ist gelaufen und war sehr interessant. Die Vorträg waren (fast) durchgehend von guter Qualität.

Habe viele Kontakte knüpfen können.

Der Hardchor vom Abendprogramm war echt ein Brüller. Muss man sich für ähnliche Veranstaltungen merken.

Die Print Media Academy ist ein architektonisch sehr interessantes Gebäude und war ein sehr schöner Veranstaltungsort.