Links for June 3, 2007

Fedora 7 is released!: I really liked the last Fedora release, but I believe it was slightly plagued by problems with some of it’s package management utilities. I have already installed this release and am quite impressed. Wireless now works with WPA out of the box and their new re-spinning feature is something I will try out someday.

XML Parser benchmarks: I have always had my own suspicions of which XML parser model would be faster (Sax or StaX), but I’m glad to see this benchmark done by the O’Reilly folks.

Fear and loathing at Cupertino: Jeremy Allison’s terrible experience while trying to prepare a talk for his Apple WWDC presentation. Jeremy works on Samba, along with Tridge, who they all call “the smartest man in Australia” Jeremy works at Google now. Smart man.

LinuxWorld 2006

LinuxWorld started yesterday here in rainy London and I had a great time! It was the first time ever that I wasn’t a visitor, but was helping out at the Jokosher stand. I did several demos of the app to tons of people and we managed to distribute more than 130 Jokosher flyers to interested people.

I was quite surprised at the level of interest in the app, and we managed to solicit a great many feature requests from people, some of which will hopefully end up in Jokosher someday, making it rock even harder! I will definitely try to help out at more of these events in the future

You can find the photos I took with my camera phone at my flickr photo page.

Wierd Java error on my Mac

I turned my computer on today to get some work done, started Eclipse and started coding. When I tried to use the command-line though, I got this strange error:


Error: no known VMs. (check for corrupt jvm.cfg file)


I couldn’t run 'java' or 'javac' from the command-line at all! I immediately went to /System/Library/Frameworks/JavaVM.framework and looked for 'jvm.cfg'. I have 3 VMs installed on this machine, 1.3.1, 1.4.2, and 1.5.0. 1.3.1 and 1.4.2 had a proper jvm.cfg file installed but for some reason 1.5.0’s jvm.cfg was a zero-length file. Googling didn’t turn up anything useful except this tip, which wouldn’t work because in my case all my permissions were correct. Fixing permissions using Disk Utility didn’t show any permissions problems at all.

In the end, all I did was copy the 1.4.2 version over to the 1.5.0 directory and all was well. The tip above mentions that Eclipse might have had something to do with this, and there might be some truth to that, as I did update my Eclipse to 3.2 recently, but I have been using it for a week without any problems …

Always buy RAM from Crucial

I needed some extra RAM in my 512MB laptop to do some Java heavy lifting (Eclipse, Netbeans, JBoss, Profilers, etc). Those things can take up a lot of RAM, not leaving much for Firefox and other apps. Seeing that my laptop does not cover upgrading RAM under the warranty (very strange) unless done by authorised personnel, I went down to the store I bought my laptop from (Micro Anvika) and asked for a quote. 130 pounds is how much they wanted for a 1GB stick; in contrast I could get the same type of RAM from Crucial for 89 pounds!! That’s a saving of just over 40 pounds! I was hoping it would all go smoothly and the RAM would work because if something messed up I would be without a laptop and a warranty

It all went perfectly of course and a month later I’ve had no problems with the RAM. It’s so simple to buy it from crucial too. They have a comprehensive database of products (computers, laptops, motherboards, etc) and the type of RAM these products take. Simply make the right selections and they tell you what to buy, even how many slots you should have free by default. If even that’s too much for you and you happen to be on a Windows PC or laptop they have an ActiveX applet that will download and try to figure out the RAM type for you. This didn’t work for my system though.

Anyway, the moral of this story is: Always buy RAM from Crucial. It is crucial that you do so

Apple’s Boot Camp – easily install XP on a Mac!

Wow this is unbelievable! Apple has officially released a public beta of Boot Camp which allows anyone to take a Windows XP CD and install it on a Intel Mac complete with dual-boot! I haven’t seen this discussed anywhere today as yet, but in just a short while this is going to be huge. Ars Emporium and Macintouch seem to be the first to have this story. So this is why Apple joined that Windows benchmarking group a while ago. The next version of OSX (Leopard) will also include technology to let you run XP on a Intel Mac. I think Leopard will also include some virtualization technology so you won’t have to reboot your Mac just to use Windows.
From the Boot Camp page:

Boot Camp lets you install Windows XP without moving your Mac data, though you will need to bring your own copy to the table, as Apple Computer does not sell or support Microsoft Windows. Boot Camp will burn a CD of all the required drivers for Windows so you don’t have to scrounge around the Internet looking for them.

Well … I never thought I would see this day. Everyone has known that Apple wouldn’t officially support Windows on Macs and they still won’t offer support for this but it was always assumed that people would have to use hacks to get Windows to run on a Mac. With Boot Camp people will no longer have to rely on hacks and it will also burn you a CD of the required drivers for your XP system. Very very cool indeed.

Scoble’s Dashboard Spy

With all the April Fools jokes flying around, The Scobleizer Dashboard has got to be funniest thing I’ve seen in a while. It would be great if someone actually came up with something like this so a blogger can instantly monitor what’s being said about him all over the web. Kind of like web stats but for an individual blogger or blog; maybe I’ll call it BlogBuzz or BlogStats. BlogBoard, BlogDashboard, dont’ sound that nice. Maybe MemeBoard? That sounds better.

Doing quick tasks in Python

A lot of the time at work I have to come up with quick solutions to various programming problems, and I mean *real* quick. There is usually very little time for finding the right library or open source toolkit that has already solved the problem or some part of it and then to figure out how to integrate that into our own workflow. It is usually much quicker to simply write a few scripts that get the job done.

In such situations I increasingly find myself solving these problems using the Python programming language. I’ve usually whipped up scripts using bash scripts and even Perl but I often find that I have to “re-learn” Perl again and again, or at least the part that I’m temporarily using to solve some problem. Python just seems (and looks) so much natural and cleaner. I’ve been fascinated by Ruby recently after my brush with Ruby on Rails and I am seriously trying to find a project to use it in all the time!

Anyway I wanted to give some examples of Pythons’ ability to solve quick problems. I’ve used it to make remote backups, check if certain services are running remotely and to fetch and delete mail off a remote server. For example, the following snippet of code can be used to send mail:

import smtplib

mailServer = smtplib.SMTP(serverURL)
mailServer.sendmail(sender, to, message)
mailServer.quit()

Really sweet and simple. I’m sure you can do this in only 1 line or even half a line in Perl (or even Python!) but this is really clear and concise. When I needed to write a script to send mail, I simply googled for it and dug this up in literally 20 secs! That’s one other reason I like writing scripts in Python: you can always google for snippets of code to do stuff.

Similarly, the following can be used to check if SSH is running and accepting connections on a remote server:

IDENT_STRING = "SSH"
s = socket.socket(socket.AF_INET, socket.SOCK_STREAM)
s.connect((HOST, int(PORT)))
data = s.recv(1024)
s.close()

if data.find(IDENT_STRING) == -1:
sys.exit (1)
# if everything OK, exit normally
sys.exit(0)

If you put this in a script and run it, you can use the exit code (echo #?) to determine if SSH was running or not. Very useful if you’re writing a script to make backups to a remote server; you need to make sure that the service is up and running on the server and that it is accepting connections from the local machine.

I will try to see if Ruby makes any of these tasks even easier to do or perhaps easier to write and comprehend. I might even give Groovy a try since Java is my day job and Groovy is described as a scripting language for Java programmers.

Windows XP on a Mac!

The motherboard on my server died 2 weeks ago and it’s taken me this long to find a replacement and get the server up and running again. A benefit of changing the motherboard is that now the server is even more quieter than before! It’s all because I took more time to isolate the noisier case fans and to re-install them.

So I haven’t been able to blog for 2 weeks and *so* many things have happened. narf and blanca finally managed to get Windows XP running on a Mac! This is awesome news, especially after disappointing news a while back that Vista will not support EFI either. It seems they have managed to emulate a regular BIOS for the XP on Mac competition. Soon after the announcement, Leo Laporte did a great segment for MacBreak where they install XP on a Mac Mini and that’s the first place where I saw it actually running. A lot of people can now dual-boot their new Intel Macs and have a choice of XP or OSX (and even Linux!). I’ve never seen such a versatile machine! These are interesting times indeed.

Ruby on Rails

“Rails is the most well thought-out web development framework I’ve ever used. And that’s in a decade of doing web applications for a living. I’ve built my own frameworks, helped develop the Servlet API, and have created more than a few web servers from scratch. Nobody has done it like this before.” -James Duncan Davidson, Creator of Tomcat and Ant

I tried out the Ruby on Rails (RoR) framework this weekend and I’m quite impressed. I used Apple’s new tutorial for developers which explains how to install and quickly get up and running with a simple Accounts/Expenses webapp. I did encounter one minor glitch while following the install instructions because I was installing on my Debian Linux webserver, instead of an Apple machine. It seems the default ruby install no longer comes with the ruby-zlib library, but that was quickly fixed by following these instructions.

Rails applications all have a consistent directory structure, so you always start by running a command to generate the directory structure for you. This creates directories like app, config, doc, test, etc. The names are very familiar and easy to remember and they reinforce the purpose of the directory, i.e. the test directory is used to hold unit tests and functional tests for our application.

Automatic test creation makes testing an obvious and integral part of the development process, not an afterthought. It encourages you to think of a testing strategy upfront. This is perhaps the single most appreciated aspect of Rails development for me. You are supposed to test your code in other environments, but programmers often write code and if time permits, write tests. Rails tries to make it easy and painless (as much as possible) to test your code.

The next thing I learned about was the fact that Rails, like the Struts framework, tries to explicitly embed the notion of Models, Controllers, and Views within the development workflow. The concept of Actions, which are sent to Controllers in Rails is familiar to Struts. It is very easy to take a Rails URL (as shown in the example) and figure out how the server is going to parse and execute it.

Validation came next and I was suitably impressed. You simply need to add a few lines to the model, describing what each field should validate as, sort of like describing a type for a variable. Simply restart your server and voila, type rubbish in a field and Rails will highlight the field in red and ask you to re-enter it.

After all that, the tutorial shows you how to create a relationship between two models, much like in a relational database. The relation is that ‘one account can have many expenses’. This is accomplished in Rails by adding a ‘belongs to’ field in the Expense model (an expense belongs to an Account) and a ‘has many’ field to the Account model (an Account has many expenses). Simple as that.

Other things covered in the tutorial were:

• adding business logic to total up the expenses for the account
• using helpers to change the view slightly and show the total in red if we are over budget
• writing simple unit tests and running them

Overall an excellent introductory tutorial which has left me wanting more. I will definitely go through the Rails website and find out more about RoR and what it can do.

I know this is a small toy example and I want to know how RoR handles in a real mission critical business app as those are the only kinds of apps developers write these days RoR is easy to code for, but is it easy to maintain? After we get past the simplicity of the example app, how hard is it to write huge apps in it, and how long does it take a new developer to become familiar with and productive with a new codebase? These are all questions that I need answers to and I have the feeling that RoR won’t disappoint.

Yahoo’s new RSS + SMS service

Yahoo has started a new RSS + SMS service, but reading about it, I’m really not sure what I use I would put it to:
RSS + SMS

As Russ has already mentioned, it’s typical use case is not the elite digerati who subscribes to 500 feeds, it is instead useful if you have a more focused feed (let’s say within a company) and want employees to be alerted to certain critical events. The use cases i’ve thought of so far that might work for me are:

- Sysadmins being texted when there are new updates on a server? This is assuming that whoever provides the updates publishes an RSS feed to go along with it.
- Employees being texted reminders from their Outlook or iCal calendars. A lot of online calendaring apps like Backpack allow you to publish your reminders as RSS feeds so you should be able to get alerts for those.
- Any other scenario where someone needs to stay updated on a certain topic every hour or so. I assume you can configure the Yahoo service to send alerts out only every hour or so, so it sends them in a “batch” format instead of 10 updates per hour. This should help alleviate the 50 updates an hour problem.

The only problem I see is that I’m sure people *already* have ways of doing this stuff. I can easily write a script that checks my server for updates every day and sends me an alert or email about it. Granted, Yahoo’s service is supposed to be free, and SMS will cost me, but still, it’s already been done.

When this comes to the UK (if), I’ll probably configure it to send me an alert about system updates for my servers, etc. If there isn’t an RSS for it, I’ll create it.

Mmmmm – Just look at that glaze!

Mmmmm – 20051101_0047

Originally uploaded by EngelFish.

They look like Krispy Kreme, been so long since I’ve been there …

Microsoft at the PDC

A lot of cool stuff has been coming out of Microsoft recently at the PDC. You can watch the webcast of the event here.

Here is a short summary of some of the announcements, linking to a Channel 9 video of each (if possible):

Sparkle – separating visual components and design of an application from the data representation.

Start.com / Gadgets – nice, clean start/home page which can be extended using “gadgets”. and these gadgets can be re-used through inheritance. The windows vista sidebar will also sport gadgets which help people get to commonly used or needed data or tasks.

Microsoft Max – a kind of a cross between iPhoto and iMovie. allows you to create rich interactive photo albums with slick effects and to export these albums so that almost anybody can view them.

LINQ – a really cool idea of trying to remove the impedance mismatch between object and relational databases. From what I have seen, manipulating XML should be easier. It’s all done in C#. Creating and populating objects after using SQL joins should be easier.

WCF or Windows Communication Founcation (formerly Indigo) – Much more than just another web-services framework, it implements a lot of the plumbing that a lot of developers usually have to manage all the way from SOAP to P2P to some other method of app-to-app or pc-to-pc integration. So if you want 2 machines to talk to one another somehow you don’t have to worry too much about the plumbing going on behind all that communication. At least that’s the easiest way I see to summarize it

One the of absolutely coolest things that Jim Allchin showed off was the ability to increase the available memory of a PC running Vista by simply plugging a USB key in. It’s ingenious and I haven’t heard of anyone doing anything like it unless I am mistaken.

WPF/E or Windows Presentation Foundation / Everywhere. WPF was formerly Avalon, a new way to build rich interactive web / client apps using XML. They showed a very cool Netflix (video rental online) demo that they ran on 4 different machines and it scaled, etc flawlessly: a desktop machine, Media Center PC, Tablet PC and a PDA. Everything being vector based makes this a lot easier. Another cool North Face demo here

A lot more stuff than this has been announced of course but it is good to see at least a few cool things and possibly 1 innovation come out of Microsoft so far! They are pretty gung-ho on security nowadays and let’s hope that Vista finally gets security right (by right I mean a lot better than XP by default). Note that I’m usually *not* very pro-Microsoft, but I do believe in competition, and I hope Apple, Google, Linux et al give Microsoft all they’ve got because it makes things a lot more interesting for the consumer and gives us more choice. That is always a good thing.

PlayLouder MSP: legally share music using P2P!

[PlayLouder MSP](http://www.playloudermsp.com/thenews.html) is a new Music ISP that’s going to be launched in the UK in a few days. They’ve got a brilliant idea that frankly a lot of other people should have thought of sooner. Basically you can freely trade music from the full Sony-BMG catalog on their networks (your own ripped music and other people’s music) and a percentage of your payment to the ISP goes to Sony. They use audio-analysis software to determine what songs are being traded on the network and I suppose that’s how they know how much to pay to Sony. Cory’s got a great and much more in-depth write-up [here](http://www.boingboing.net/2005/08/22/customers_of_new_uk_.html
) at [Boing Boing](http://www.boingboing.net).

For their money, PlayLouder MSP customers get their regualr DSL lines, as well as:

• The right to share any song in the Sony-BMG catalog
• Even if it’s out of print
• In any file-format
• Using any file-sharing software
• At any bitrate

PlayLouder MSP’s customers’ license includes Sony music sourced from P2P networks, ripped from CDs, or digitized from vinyl, cassettes, or radio broadcasts.

WebOS and the future of the Web

[Jason Kottke](http://www.kottke.org) has an interesting write-up about how he envisions the future of the OS and the Web. The gist of his post can be summed up in the following points:

1. The OS can be made irrelevant by people writing for another OS, let’s call it WebOS.
2. People now only need to code for one platform (Java, anyone?)
3. A local web server on the client machine will mean that an app can continue on working even if it’s offline (think local app for Gmail, etc).
4. When users are back online, the app will synchronize itself with its online counterpart. Think adding Flickr pictures locally, and then uploading them.

The OS is still there whichever one it is, but it is no longer going to lock-in developers to only developing for that OS. One of the things Jason is saying is that people will no longer need to write for 3 OSes but for just one OS. This sounds just like “people will no longer have to write for 3 OSes but for just one platform: Java”.

Jason has already outlined some of the problems he envisions with this approach, such as web apps accessing local content on your hard drive. Java applets have solved this problem for a long time by using a sandbox model. The only problem is that these applets have to be downloaded and run locally for them to work. A WebOS app, however, will run both locally and remotely, it will live on your local hard drive and perhaps a sandbox model will help there as well. Are vulnerabilities detected in these local apps any more dangerous than vulnerabilities for remote apps? Perhaps there isn’t much different because at the end of the day, a security hole is the same thing whatever app it affects. However, I suppose a local security hole can do a *lot* more damage than a remote one.

Some other suggestions like: “Read newsfeeds from bloglines locally” sound no different to NetNewsWire, FeedDemon or SharpReader, etc. These are all locally accessible feed readers which, when online, update your subscriptions, etc, otherwise they work fine when offline.

I think, as [Paul Graham](http://paulgraham.com/) said, a WebOS will allow totally new kinds of applications to exist and we don’t know what they will look like at all. So this is definitely an interesting space to watch.
Some great examples of new ways of using the web are: [Backpack](http://www.backpackit.com), [Basecamp](http://www.basecamphq.com/), [Gmail](http://www.gmail.com) and [Google Maps](http://maps.google.com). Another up-and-coming app is [Hula](http://hula-project.org/Hula_Server) which has been open-sourced by Novell and is being actively worked on by many GNOME hackers. If you want to see a demo of how the future of web-calendaring might look like, take a look at [this](http://www.nat.org/2005/august/#Hula-Web-Interface) amazing demo on [Nat's](http://www.nat.org) blog.

In other news, I would love to get my hands on one of [these](http://joi.ito.com/archives/2005/08/25/wearing_firefox.html) [Firefox](http://www.getfirefox.com) T-shirts that [Joi](http://joi.ito.com) managed to pick up from the [Mozilla](http://www.mozilla.org) offices. I have ordered quite a few T-shirts from [ThinkGeek.com](http://www.thinkgeek.com) in the past, and I will order one of these if they stock them someday.

Back online!

Finally after waiting for over two weeks I have my net connection back. We just moved home again and it seems we are too far from the exchange this time to get a 2Mbps connection so we’ve settled for 1Mbps. It’s not too bad I suppose at least it’s not dial-up.

With the bank holiday coming up I hope we do something interesting like our trip to Oxford last time. That was a good day out and perhaps we should do a more scenic day trip like the Cottswolds.

Wikis

I’ve been experimenting with wikis as a documentation tool. The collaborative editing facilities that wikis provide are invaluable when writing documentation or doing analysis / design / requirements work. After I first installed it, I was completely confused about how to use it. This was because I was expecting it to be similar to many web-based content management systems where you create a page for a topic and start writing on it with relevant links added to the body of the text. In this wiki, however, I couldn’t find any way to create a new page on a topic! I was dumbfounded until I read some documentation and realized that you could just create any page you like by simply typing in a link to a page that doesn’t exist and then editing it to add your content!

I’m using MediaWiki at the moment which is the same wiki that the famous WikiPedia project uses. If you haven’t checked out Wikipedia yet, I strongly recommend it. It is fast becoming my choice for looking up information on almost all topics; it’s far better than Google in many cases where you are looking for historical-type information, for example Television.

I came across another really interesting wiki project today called wikiwyg. The idea is that you double click on any of the entries and the entry changes to a full text area complete with a toolbar and formatting options. You can Cancel or Save your changes right there and then. You need Firefox to make it work, though. It’s another example of how everyone is trying to find more and more interesting ways to make the web more interactive and user-friendly, in the spirit of GMail and Google Maps

PSPCasting?

Having written about podcasting in the last post, I was reading this month’s [Wired](http://www.wired.com) magazine when I came across the word pspcasting and was perplexed I hadn’t come across it before. It’s basically a way to use RSS again to sync a video file from a feed and then convert it into a format that the PSP can play back. Some good info on it is [here](http://www.pspvideo9.com/pspcasting.html), [here](http://www.makezine.com/blog/archive/2005/03/pspcasting.html), and [here](http://www.engadget.com/entry/1234000033038817).

Some superb testing for virus infections has been done by the F-Secure folks on the Toyota Prius. For now, they have disproved the myth that the car can be infected with a bluetooth virus such as Cabir. Read the full post on their blog [here](http://www.f-secure.com/weblog/archives/archive-052005.html#00000553). Further down in the same blog they have pictures of what it looks like when your phone starts to get infected with Cabir. The easiest solution in this case? Walk away from the immediate vicinity and the annoying pop-up should disappear. It’s not always obvious, especially for the average phone user, but this will get rid of that annoying pop-up.

A Quieter PC

I agree wholeheartedly with Inderjeet [here](http://weblogs.java.net/blog/inder/archive/2005/04/quest_for_a_sil.html) about quieter PCs. I have also rebuilt my old Athlon PC which I had lying around by doing the following:

* Replacing the case for a [special case](http://www.quietpc.com/uk/cases.php#acc6607) designed with noise reduction in mind.
* Replacing the processor heatsink with [this Zalman unit](http://www.quietpc.com/uk/p4cooling.php#7700)
* Replacing the case fans for [these Acousticase 120mm fans](http://www.quietpc.com/uk/casefans.php#acoustifan). They are bigger than the normal 80mm fans hence they don’t need to rotate as fast to move the same amount of air.
* Replacing the power supply for [this one from Qtechnology](http://www.quietpc.com/uk/psu.php#qtechnology)

I didn’t need to replace any graphics card fans as the machine had an older NVIDIA Geforce2 MX card which comes with a heatsink. I was only planning on using this machine as a medium power server so the graphics card didn’t matter to me.

After all this effort, I had a virtually quiet machine! Note that I said virtually quiet because there is still some residual noise but it is so low as to be imperceptible from about a meter away. It doesn’t bother me anymore and that means the exercise was a success

The first comment on that post says to get a Mac because they are quiet and I would like to point out that I recently sold my Power Mac G4 because it was **too** noisy. I know the newer Power Mac G5s are quieter but some people are still quite unhappy with them because they make strange chirping noises. I’m not making this up, I tried hard for a long time to buy another Mac but couldn’t justify the hassle of finding out whether it would be quiet enough for me. After a month, my G4 machine started making rattling noises. At that point I had never opened up the machine and so I had to peek inside and couldn’t figure out why it was doing it. I took it back to the repair shop and as expected they said there’s nothing wrong with it and I had to pay them for doing nothing! I brought it back home and it was rattling again. This is **not** quality. I somehow figured out that placing a stack of books underneath it reduced the noise.

There are definitely issues with Macs as far as noise is concerned. Russell has a [good rant](http://www.russellbeattie.com/notebook/1008309.html) on it. What is he supposed to do about it? Nobody is going to fix the noise issue because as far as Apple is concerned it’s normal noise. Check out [g4noise.com](http://www.g4noise.com) for more G4 related noise issues and a petition to Apple to replace the power supply in the older PowerMac G4s. The problem Russell describes about the fans increasing or decreasing their rotation speed and hence noise based on load drove me insane! Whenever I did something slightly heavy on my machine (like going to a certain page in a browser \***gasp**\*) the fans would ramp up. Then they would go down again. It drove me nuts.

Many times on forums people are literally *shouting* about the bad service they got from Apple. Just go to the ArsTechnica Mac Achaia forums to witness this yourself. Do you know what the final course of action is if nobody helps these people? Email Steve Jobs himself! These people have actually had their problems fixed this way too! I mean, I understand that may be a good thing but come on! You’re supposed to get top-notch support from these people if you call the regular support line!

To be honest, though, I really love the Mac operating system but I hope they sort out their hardware problems or at least ensure that **everybody** gets a quiet machine if it is advertised as one. I won’t be buying one until they do.

J2EE/EJB Persistence Frameworks

I need to start investigating alternative persistence frameworks whenever I get some free time. I’ve tried looking at Hibernate in the past but just couldn’t find the time to implement a small project properly in it and understand the benefits.

A great write-up about another alternative, iBATIS SQL Maps which seem to have found the sweet spot between full O/R and hand-written JDBC can be found here.

As others have found out entity beans can be overkill in situations and that’s basically why I’m looking for some persistence alternatives. I’ve got to buy this book on J2EE Without EJB as well at some point, I’m sure it’s a great book as I have another one by the same author.

On the Swing/AWT front, SWT seems to be emerging as a good alternative for cases where you need a simpler interface which doesn’t need to have all the customization benefits that Swing gives you. Some evidence of people who like this approach is here and here is Bruce Eckel’s take on what Gosling has to say about SWT. Basically Gosling prefers the flexibility of Swing and the complete emulation and hence customizability it gives you while Eckel and some Smalltalkers think Swing takes it too far and suggest that using the interface objects underlying the platform and wrapping them to give a Java interface is a much better idea and yields better, more lightweight and faster code.

I have to agree on the faster and lightweight issues, even though the only SWT app I use is Eclipse. I know Eclipse is huge but it feels a lot snappier than a pure Swing implementation of it would have been. It has *never* crashed on me and much simpler Swing apps have crashed for me in the past. It is also proof that SWT is indeed suitable for huge projects.

John Carmack is blogging!

http://www.armadilloaerospace.com/n.x/johnc

This is very cool, I’ve always admired Carmack for his technical abilities and his abilities to quickly get down and dirty with any new technology. For example in his post about mobile games he starts off with “dusting off my java in a nutshell book” and then talks in details about java’s threading issues, mobile latency issues, java bytecode disassembly, portability issues, timing issues, circuit switching standards.

Very refreshing reading and definitely something to look up to. I wish all tech people had this much intimate knowledge of the platforms they work on everyday. I know that at least I will try even harder to achieve this from now on.

The only thing disappointing about the site is the lack of a feed to subscribe to, RSS, Atom, whatever so I’ve bookmarked the page in http://del.icio.us/kerneljack instead.

Debian security updates for testing branch

So I decided to install a full anti-virus and Spam filtering system on my web/mail server using Amavisd-new/ClamAV/SpamAssassin. This has gone pretty well especially since I’m using the Razor plugin for SpamAssassin.

Razor is like a collaborative network of machines which hold signatures for spam that is currently circulating around the Web. Each time I receive a mail into my system, a unique signature is generated for it and this signature is checked against the signature database in Razor servers on the net. This catches so many spam emails it’s not funny. On certain days I Razor catches 77 spam messages and all my normal emails are untouched and end up in my inbox. Razor is a true lifesaver.

ClamAV is also pretty good at catching viruses in email. It just scans each mail as it comes in and if it’s infected, puts it in ‘quarantine’ and sends the admin an email about it. Very transparent and it works nicely.

The only downside to all this was that I had to pull some packages from Debian’s ‘testing’ branch which may not receive timely security updates. I didn’t think that I could rely on ‘testing’ to give me timely updates and this seems to confirm it. The official word seems to confirm this as well. I guess my only choice is to add:

deb http://security.debian.org/ testing/updates main
deb http://security.debian.org/ stable/updates main

to the sources.list file and hope I get timely updates from both.