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.