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.

Xmas gift from Amazon

This year, Amazon made me a special gift. Instead of sending yet another coffee mug, they finally listed my JBoss book. Unfortunately, the nice cover graphics that you can see at the publishers page is not yet shown.
I am really looking forward to hold the real printed issues in my hand. Until then there is still some work to do.

Busy time

It's now over a month since my last post. I was just too busy to even read the Xdoclet and JBoss mailing list or even work on those projects. We had an important release at work which ate quite some time.

The other day I was asking are fop and batik dead? Meanwhile there is a new Apache subproject Xmlgraphics that seems to be the new umbrella for the new projects. But currently its mostly an empty shell.

With the release at work I am also not able to attend Javapolis conference in Antwerp and am so jealous about all the lucky ones that were ablt to go there.

Ws4ee tooling

I am currently having a discussion with Thomas Diesler on the JBoss Forum about the usage of Xdoclet for ws4ee (and especially in conjungtion with JBoss).
Thomas argues that there is no big gain in using Xdoclet for webservices, as it lacks support for wsdl-generation. He is of course right in the latter and I see the point that some work needs to be done here. Of course I am biased here as comitter on Xdoclet.
Thomas proposes wscompile from the sun JWSDP-package. But this also doesn't provide everything you need and you also have to write files on your own.
So the solution lies in the use of both tools: have xdoclet generate the service interface, ejb-jar.xml entries and webservices.xml and the jaxrpc-mapping, let wscompile provide the wsdl.
I outlined this at the JBossWS and Xdoclet wiki page.

Hewlett-Packard takes a new approach to software | CNET News.com

Hewlett-Packard takes a new approach to software | CNET News.com

This is interesting. As HP operates globally, they will take a good piece of the JASP cake. How will those service partners react?

For JBoss and open-source itself this is probably a good move, as many company including the classical IBM-customers (e.g. banks) will take JBoss and open-source more seriously and perhaps even consider switching from their "nobody got ever fired for buying IBM attitude".

German JBoss book announced

dpunkt.verlag listes a new JBoss book in their preview section. This is a German book and talks about JBoss 4.0. Target audience are admistrators and programmers that want to start with JBoss, but already have some basic J2EE and Java knowledge.
Why I mention this? Have a look at the author :-)