I love Sun

 1 Response »
Sep 292007
 

I also love sun (with a lowercase s), but we’re heading for winter, so that has to wait. What I meant was the company Sun, of course.
Recently I downloaded Netbeans 6 beta 1 and the full release (you can choose which you want to download) comes with Glassfish V2. For a customer I needed to create a working sample of a webservice that accepts 3 parameters and returns an XML document with information from an Oracle database. The webservice (without the actual database access) and the deployement to Glassfish takes about 20 mouseclicks and some typing because I did not want to use default names/packages/etc. And it actually works the first time. I have some experience (not too much) with creating webservices in Oracle’s JDeveloper, but my goodness, what a difference Netbeans makes. Thanks guys for such a wonderful product.

 Posted by at 01:32

Joel on the Excel 2007 bug

 No Responses »
Sep 272007
 

Joel (Spolsky) maintains a good weblog, with accurate observations or stuff to think about. I wonder if this post was written by himself, or by some of his interns that hacked into his computer. Joel would never defend software that contains bugs that are not dealt with. Joel would also never contradict himself (explaining that 77.1 binary is a repeating number and in the Q&A saying he can’t think of anything of the top of his head that’s causing this behaviour). Finally, Joel would never lie to you (“this bug actually mattering to you as an individual is breathtakingly small” but not only individuals use Excel).

So, either I’m right about the intern hacking into Joel’s computer, or Joel had found out about sarcasm. I stick with the hacking story. Anyone?

 Posted by at 23:20

RSS reader: this is why!

 No Responses »
Sep 242007
 

Bruce Eckel is an intelligent guy. He wrote “Thinking in Java“, in case you did not know him. In this post he discusses the RSS phenomena and why it’s wrong.

Now I can agree to the fact that RSS readers create way more traffic than people that ordinarily surf to a website and click on a bunch of hyperlinks. RSS readers do in fact poll each website the reader is subscribed to whether there is a change. Yet. Can’t agree more.

But this (knowing a subscription changed the day/minute/second it has changed) is not the reason why I use an RSS reader. Nor is it anonymity. The reason is the sheer number of subscriptions I have. How on earth am I supposed to click through a couple of hundred websites to see if something changed? And when I am at number 176, of course just when I missed it, number 173 has changed. So while waiting for an answer in a forum, a patch to a bug or just the news about the latest release of your my favorite piece of software, I missed it because I was manually browsing the internet. Manually browsing the internet is from the past century. The internet is too big to do that.

Of course I could subscribe to a mailinglist. And create a gazillion message-rules in my mailreader. Why? I have an RSS reader. And yes, it gives me anonymity as well. Even Artima needs you to sign in to even comment on Bruce’s post. Why? Afraid that Anonymous_Coward would leave an inappropriate comment? Don’t allow anonymous commenting then. Create a clever check for the email address or display the IP-address. Why should I want an Artima ID just to place some comments?

Get a life. If you don’t want traffic on your website, don’t create an RSS-feed. How’s that?

One other thing: how about reversing the situation. You update your website, and you send a notification to all subscribers. Do you know what would happen? Right. Your ISP would cut you off, because of….spamming activities.

 Posted by at 01:33

Scala on Ubuntu

 No Responses »
Sep 232007
 

As I am experimenting (not more than that) with the Scala language, I needed to reinstall that in my Ubuntu 64-bits. The repositories only have version 2.3, whereas version 2.6 is already the final (as in: non-beta) version. Ubuntu is a fine OS, but it’s repositories are far from up-to-date (you need to modify your repositories-list to get Thunderbird 2, the regular repositories only have 1.5!).
So I uninstalled the 2.3 version and downloaded the sources. The Scala wiki has excellent instructions on how to build the binaries, so I decided to give it a go. I tried with Java 5 and with Java 6, and to no surprise the Java 6 version was built faster and ran the tests faster. Considerably faster: the Java 5 version ran all tests in 29 minutes, the Java 6 version in 23 minutes, about 20% faster.

As I just installed Oracle 10g (64 bits Linux version) I will try to do some Scala-Oracle tests. We’ll see.

Changing the AMD64-X2 cpu speed

 No Responses »
Sep 202007
 

Funny. I thought my system was fast since I had installed the AMD 64 X2 6000+. This thing has a dual-core at 3GHz (hence the 6000+). And indeed the system was a lot faster than my “old” Pentium4 2.66GHz. I just installed the cpufrequtils package. It turns out that cpufreq-info reveals that both CPU’s ran at 1GHz. So I changed that to 3GHz. Guess what I think of the system performance now?! 🙂

switchbl8@rrs01:~$ cpufreq-info
cpufrequtils 002: cpufreq-info (C) Dominik Brodowski 2004-2006
Report errors and bugs to linux@brodo.de, please.
analyzing CPU 0:
  driver: powernow-k8
  CPUs which need to switch frequency at the same time: 0 1
  hardware limits: 1000 MHz - 3.00 GHz
  available frequency steps: 3.00 GHz, 2.80 GHz, 2.60 GHz, 2.40 GHz, 2.20 GHz, 2.00 GHz, 1.80 GHz, 1000 MHz
  available cpufreq governors: ondemand, powersave, userspace, conservative, performance
  current policy: frequency should be within 1000 MHz and 3.00 GHz.
                  The governor "userspace" may decide which speed to use
                  within this range.
  current CPU frequency is 3.00 GHz.
analyzing CPU 1:
  driver: powernow-k8
  CPUs which need to switch frequency at the same time: 0 1
  hardware limits: 1000 MHz - 3.00 GHz
  available frequency steps: 3.00 GHz, 2.80 GHz, 2.60 GHz, 2.40 GHz, 2.20 GHz, 2.00 GHz, 1.80 GHz, 1000 MHz
  available cpufreq governors: ondemand, powersave, userspace, conservative, performance
  current policy: frequency should be within 1000 MHz and 3.00 GHz.
                  The governor "userspace" may decide which speed to use
                  within this range.
  current CPU frequency is 3.00 GHz.
 Posted by at 01:06

Netbeans 6 has gone beta

 No Responses »
Sep 182007
 

Finally, Netbeans 6 is out of its milestones period and has entered “beta 1” stage. I’ve already tested several milestones, so the beta1 predicate is only to scare the newbies away. The milestones were rocksolid already. Look here for details and downloads.

 Posted by at 01:10

Disappointing 64bits experience

 2 Responses »
Sep 162007
 

Sofar, I’m disappointed by the 64-bits experience. For starters, Solaris 10 would not even boot the DVD. Not the normal Solaris 10 DVD, nor the Solaris Express (latest build). The Express version got a little farther in the boot process, but gave up with some error too.

Ubuntu amd64 works. But that’s about it. I installed it on a different partition (duh!) but had to manually add it to the grub config of my 32-bit installation. If the install is recognizing my 32-bit installation and offers me to import my settings (which it did brilliantly) why not add the boot image to grub?
Firefox and Thunderbird2 are NOT in the Feisty AMD64 repositories. Getting them compiled from the sources is not for the faint of heart. It’s not a matter of “./configure;make“. You need to install many development libraries, create config-files (for which there are no examples in the tarball). Eventually I got the Gutsy (Ubuntu 7.10) sources working (not the standard tarball). For Firefox I installed Swiftweasel (the Epiphany browser does not even show its address and buttonbar), an optimized unbranded version of Firefox.

The soundcard on my motherboard (7.1 C-Media) is not supported (well). At best I get sound without the ability to control the volume. So I disabled the onboard soundcard and plugged my old Sound Blaster Live!1024 back in. It goes without saying that this card is properly supported.

More and more consumer PC’s and laptops have AMD Athlon64 X2 or Intel Core 2 Duo processor, both of which are 64-bits. If the 64-bits support will remain on this (Ubuntu) level, I can see a lot of happy Linux users switching BACK to a Microsoft OS. Don’t worry, I will not, but Vista has proper 32-bit and 64-bit versions.

So tell me, If Ubuntu amd64 is not the way, which Linux distro is?

BTW Very NOT disappointing is the performance of Ubuntu64. Things run just a little smoother than the 32-bits version. But it can be that 32-bit applications runs slower on a 64-bits processor. And of course the big version recognizes all of the 4GB of memory instead of only 3.5.

 Posted by at 02:36  Tagged with:

Soundproblem solved

 No Responses »
Sep 142007
 

Thanks to the Ubuntu-forums (they are there for a reason) I found out that the onboard sound of the AsRock AM2NF3 actually works as an USB-soundcard. You can verify this with the lsusb command. It should contain a device with a description like “C-Media Electronics, Inc.”. If that’s the case, go to System->Preferences->Sound and change the devices to “USB Audio”. The test-button besides each choice should play a sound now!

Also: install package lib64asound2.

 Posted by at 13:12

Ubuntu saved the day

 4 Responses »
Sep 142007
 

My PC died two days ago. I thought it was the powersupply, but it was the powersupply and the motherboard. I guess one caused the other to break.

I bought new hardware. P4 mobo’s are hard to get nowadays, so I decided to dive into: 64 bits. AMD’s are cheap nowadays, so I bought a Athlon 64 X2 6000+ (dual core, 3GHz each), a motherboard that had AGP (instead of PCI-e), 4GB of memory (4x1GB) and to complete it all: a 500GB SATA harddisk to replace two old, noisy, heat-producing SCSI disks.

Today I assembled the whole shebang. Whilst putting together the system, I was still in doubt whether I would install Solaris 10 64bits or Ubuntu Feisty 64bits. I like Ubuntu very much, but Sun has tons of experience in 64bits. And I like Solaris.

Not knowing what to expect when powering up the system, I could never have guessed I was in for a very very pleasant surprise. Not only did I get the normal Grub prompt, no, the system completely booted into my existing Ubuntu. Of course the devices in fstab had to be renamed, but that was it. Sound does not work, but that’s because I did not reinstall the soundcard (since the mobo has onboard 7.1 sound).

So here I am. Basically with a complete new system and my OS still runs as always. Are you paying attention, Mr. Gates?

Of course I still need to install Solaris/Ubuntu 64-bits, to use the new hardware to its extends. But that’s an exercise for later.

So whatever these socalled experts say about all the Ubuntu-blogging out there, trust me: Ubuntu rocks big time!

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