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Eclipse Callisto

As some of you might know, there is a new version of eclipse out. Well together with that version came some other eclipse projects. One of them was BIRT (Business Intelligence And Reporting Tools) well I think it’s really amazing. If you don’t believe me checkout this screencast and tell me I’m wrong!! Actually funny as at the moment we are doing a Crystal Reports integration and I had mentioned Jasper Reports here (an java opensource reporting tool), guess they have a strong competitor on the market. Let’s hope they push eachother to the limits and the community will only benefit from it!! To bad we still are working here with Crystal Reports, believe me I’m trying to convert everybody to opensource.

UPDATE
my bad, callisto is the name of all the projects combined 🙂
END UPDATE

Totally unrelated, I’ve been very very busy the last couple of weeks. I’m trying to get my needed capital to start my own sweet BVBA or better EVBA. On saturday I hope to get the approval for renting a nice 2 bedroom appartment in Leuven. If everything goes well, I’ll be having a lot more spare time in a few months and I can finally can help some projects I like but don’t satisfy my needs at the moment. I maybe sound stupid but I always get the feeling I’m not doing enough for the oss, I’m spreading it everywhere I come, I submit bugreports, now and then a small patch nothing fancy yet. I even set myself a goal “for every company I’ll work for, I have to at least introduce 1 opensource project”. But I hope to have achieved much more in a year from now, probably one of the first projects I’m going to take a look at is Diva. If you don’t know Diva go check it out!!

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Eat your own dogfood

Well yesterday I told someone, I mostly use the eat your own dogfood rule. Well for most parts I really do that, but today I had to use our webinterface for sending mails. Well we are using roundcube and because I mostly use rich client appz, evolution and thunderbird I haven’t used roundcube that much. Well as I already mentioned today I had to and boy do I hate it now. At first it seems really nice and smooth, you have drag and drop, everything is ajax (buzzword alert!!) nice nice nice. I wrote a mail +60 lines, I hit the send button and I got the alert your session has timed out!!!! Okay hit the back button nothing, again back, still nothing. After hitting that back button like a maniak I realized I had to rewrite my email and believe me that sucks!!! I pulled up my scite editor wrote it in there and copy pasted it into roundcube.

So task for this evening, setup squirrel and imp mail. Maybe even try the new jboss callobaration stuff as the vidcast seemed nice. To bad you have to have the new flash 9 beta installed.

So all suggestions for other good webmail clients are welcome!!

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Podcasts and vidcasts

As you might know, I listen to a lot of podcasts. Here you’ll find a list of the podcasts I listen to, hope you’ll start listening to them 2

javaposse : podcast on java
the linux link tech show, podcast on linux
lugradio, another podcast on linux
php architect, podcast on php
linux questions, podcast on linux
software enginering radio, podcast on software enginering
jboss, podcast on jboss stuff
ubuntu podcast
novell podcasts
eclipse podcasts

My vidcasts

hak5, vidcast on everything geek related
podcasts and vidcasts on jboss

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Spiderman 3, what I saw in the trailer

This morning I found this in my mailbox, as I was/am a big comic fan I had to check it out. The sound started and I was already sold, I’m such a softy for that kind of movies. Still have to wait a year until it comes out 🙁
A couple of weeks ago I was actually telling my girlfriend about this movie, I had read somewhere that they had chosen the lizard as spidermans opponent for the third release. I told here it was actually a bad choice, there were so many more arch enemies they could have chosen. I told here the best choice they could have made was Venom as that one is the story I like the most, well guess what they started that story in the third version. If I’m not mistaken I saw the guy how will become venom and in the trailer there were also some glimpses of the symbiont that plays the leading role in the venom story.
Off course there were some actual enemies in the trailer: sandman,green goblin (reincarnated as the son of the original, however no lizzard, hmmm strange. Anybod got some more info?

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Continuous Integration

As the first deployment has gone to it’s dot O pains I had some time to setup a nice continious integration environment. As the application I redesigned had been working for a couple of years, and mine probably will 2 continious integration is almost a must.

In the past I already had read some books on this matter, and in those cases they mostly opted for cruiscontrol , an opensource framework (ffcourse). So yesterday I did the setup, except setting up the automatic checkout from CVS everything wen’t flawless. Except some usecases that weren’t up to date with the data in the db. (I know, I can use dbunit for doing that, but don’t think that’s necessary).

Today I’ll be fixing my testcases, as I only ran the fast ones for a while (as the whole testsuite took much to long). Well with this in place I can sleep more safely 🙂 Now subscribe to the RSS feed and off we go! I forgot how nice it is to have an environmnt in your back that checks everything you ever wrote. So for you peepz who don’t know what I’m talking about, go read up on it!!!

PS as On my work I’m on a win machine, I’m giving flock a go, this is blogged using flock so i’m rather interested in the result 🙂

Blogged with Flock

A screenshot :

cruisecontrol

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Strength of opensource

Friday I had a performance problem at work. We were using hibernate to do all the DAO for us, so no Select statements. We optimized a view for faster retrieval of the data, but it still took the application a long time to retrieve a large resultset, a small resultset went fast. Okay let’s do a small testsetup to very this issue, in the small testcase (1 mapping onto the same view) it was fast. Hmm bizar, okay let’s try it back in the application. Again slow, hmmm very odd!?

Okay what now, go to #hibernate on freenode and ask their. They told me to check with a profiler. So I did, hmm even more bizar. There wasn’t any extra cpu performance or memory usage. Wait, what’s this. The normal jdbc drops his cpu for a very short time (waiting for the database response) while the problem use case waits 10 seconds longer. Hmmm, okay how do we solve this. Well if you download Hibernate you get the source for free.

Okay put the source into our project and start debugging. After some time, I came to the conclusion that in our application the PreparedStatement.executeQuery() that just returns the Oracle cursor takes +10 seconds while in the testcase it only takes 1 second or less. So if we enable all the hibernate mappings something in the Oracle jdbc driver goes insane. Well for now I retrieved the java Connection object and perform the query myself. But I sure hope the guys over at hibernate or oracle can tell me what the problem is. Just imagine I had to debug this in a closed source environment, I’ld prolly still be waiting for them to create a use case like ours. 🙂

GO OSS!!!! 😀

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mythtv finally!!

This weekend, I wanted to setup my mythtv box, I had planned already a couple of times, but almost everytime something came up. Well this weekend, I almost locked myself in and started it using the knoppmyth cd. Peace of cake you would think!! Well actually if you know what you’re doing, yes, otherwise no!!

First I had some very strange hardware issues. The computer I wanted to run it on was a used pc I bought half a year ago. Well I put in a 180 Gig hd instead of the small one that was in there first. The strangest thing happened, the hd was primary master and the cdrom was secondary master. The freakin thing wouldn’t recognise the hd. Okay unplugged the cdrom, k now it worked. Plug it back in, and same problem not recognised!!
Okay put the cdrom on slave, hd detected, but cdrom not? :s Okay put them on the same ide hd master with slave, cdrom slave (even cable select), none got detected? Finally I tried a new ide cable for my hd, the cdrom on another cdrom and the final thing I changed was I removed the plug on my hd. It was set in master with slave (there was no master only option). And finally this worked, okay already a couple hours lost 🙁

Then first install, but I remember from our lug meeting that knoppmyths be support was very poor. So I downloaded all the scripts, to bad I was running a different version then the scripts were for. The channels.sql script dropped the channels table and the whole thing blew up (hmmm, no backup of mysql made, pffff, restart).
After some hours testing and breaking it, I came to the simplest solutions thus far. Install the knoppmyth, scan for your channels. Use the guide.xml for the tv guides and then start renaming your scanned channels to the ones the tv guide has. Now my myth box is setup, I already recorded a csi miami and temptation island show 🙂
I still have to do some reading as the shows both are an hour and are 2 Gig in size. I did find a xvid option somewhere, well that’s for another time.

A funny note, my girlfriend isn’t always interested in my it stuff, but I showed here this thing and after 5 minutes I got a list of stuff I had to record for here. 😀

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togetherJ

Here at work they payed quite a bit of money for Together J. This is an uml environment based on eclipse. They want it to reverse engineer some of my implementations. I already made a sequence diagram using Dia before the project started, this took me about half an our. Now that the code is finished you would expect that this would go much faster as Together J has a reverse enginering feature. Let me say that for removing,moving and unlinking of my diagram took me more than an hour thusfar and I’m not yet finished. Just wanted to do a shoutout that I really really dislike TogetherJ, this kind of tools give java the name that it is slow. While it’s actually not (okay, the startup of the vm has to be included in each app, but once started it really isn’t slow. Really, BUT don’t use it in places where you shouldn’t. Modelling in my eyes is a very graphic intensive thingy,and java isn’t there yet, maybe if they used java3D (may they even use it, don’t know the status of java3D). If you really want to do this you have 2 options imho, do it the mono way then, create a c or c++ object that can do native drawing and create some bindings for it, but then you get the problem of java not being fast going outside the jvm OR just fix the freaking drawing in java and give it a performance boost. Maybe this is already faster in the next editions of j2se, maybe it isn’t really that slow in 2d, but then it’s even worse that would mean that the people over at Borland can’t program and I find that hard to believe!!!

I’m trying to persuade my boss here to use pvanhoof his generator and build some reverse enginering features into it. Let’s hope he goes for it, I did say his code was (L)GPL so all features would have to be commited back to the code.

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google docu

I saw the end of a google docu on dutch television. I searched it on an came up with this link, it doesn’t work on my ubuntu box yet, but on the site it says it only is available from monday. I hope to watch it in full, it really was interesting. It wasn’t pro google, they were more pushing to saying google is a monopolist and the EU and US should start monitoring them.