The Professional Service Delivery Experts

After my last MacBook Pro kept blowing up batteries, and my two previous Powerbooks suffered horrible defects which caused the power couplings to rip off the motherboard (the area near the power cord is very weak due to too many ports right next to it, so it is no good for say airplane overhead cargo storage), and obnoxious customer service, I swore off Apple. I buy a new laptop on average every 3 years. I always get the top end because screen resolution is everything. I had planned to buy a Dell this time. For one it is easier to put on our company credit line with them. However, when looking at the top end with the features I wanted, I realized it would cost more than the 17" MBP.

Posted here.

I'll be attending the Open Source Business Conference in San Francisco. Matt Asay and Roy Russo recommended that I go. I'm interested in connecting with other members of the Open Source Business community, software developers and in particular those in the financial sector. My email is acoliver at the above domain (osintegrators.com).

On Monday, February 16, 2009, I'm giving a talk on Appcelerator to the Triangle Java Users Group. I hope to see you there.

UPDATE: the slides are attached to this post.

I'm on the way to the Free and Open Source Developers' European Meeting (FOSDEM), first for the Open Source Initiative Board meeting and then to Germany on business. Lot's to do before I go. One of those thing that has been really neat is tracking a memory leak for a client.

I noted before that I'd upgraded my MacBookPro to Ubuntu 8.10. In Hardy, I had everything working: suspend, sound, you name it. Ibex broke most of it. You can find out what MacBookPro you have by typing "sudo dmidecode -s system-product-name" and reading this.

To make sound work after searching through a lot of stuff and the lying wiki, I found this post which gave me:

Ubuntu 8.10 has, as mentioned, been a sub-optimal release for me. 8.04 made EVERYTHING work perfectly after relatively little twiddling. 8.10 broke it all again. The latest annoyance is a set of bugs and feature-losses in network-manage-pptp which allows me to connect to Windows-based VPN networks, a frequent occurrence as several clients use them because they are a lot cheaper than Cisco and pretty easy to set up.

Which jar is the class in?


cat /home/andy/scripts/findinjar.sh
#usage ~/scripts/findinjar.sh directory classname

for jar in $(find $1 -name '*.jar'); do

if unzip -l $jar | grep $2 ; then

echo " found in $jar"

fi

done

For example: ~/scripts/findinjar.sh $JBOSS_HOME/server/default/lib Session

Or: find . -type d -exec $HOME/scripts/findinjar.sh '{}' PortalSession ';' - would find PortalSession class in any jar file located in a sub directory of the current directory.

In Weblogic you can authenticate for remote EJB authentication via JNDI like this:


Properties p = new Properties();
p.put(Context.SECURITY_PRINCIPAL, "user");
p.put(Context.SECURITY_CREDENTIALS, "password");
...
InitialContext ctx = new InitialContext(p);


In JBoss you have to do this (official verbose explanation for the bored):

I had a lot of trouble with the Annotations example based on the Spring In Action book with regards to its build and dependencies. Rather than debug Maven and keep this POM file up to date, I made an ant-based example. No comment on Maven other than dynamic dependency resolution on an example app leave you wondering what is wrong.

Attached is a new example app based on a Programmer performing Tasks and a project manager talking about them. The only thing you need is a recent ant and java.