Rules are made to be broken.

1 min read

moviesWe're going to go to see The Transporter later on today.

blogRuss: “I just hit my normal URL and it worked… WOOHOOO! ” — Welcome back, ese.

javaJavalobby: Eclipse for OS X now available.

javaJava Developer's Journal Newsletter:

todayOn this day in 1492, Christoforo Columbus, an Italian explorer, sighted Watling Island in the Bahamas. He believed that he had found Asia while attempting to find a Western ocean route to India.

surveySurvey: How many RSS feeds to you read on a daily basis?

This space for rent.

2 min read

javaJRun 4 Service Pack 1.

blogBrent: Northwest OS X Dinners.

newsSlashdot: C# and CLI Fast-tracked to ISO. “We're going to give a brand new car to the information technology industry, but we're going to keep the keys.”

javaThe JavaServer Faces Tutorial. I hate it when I read a tutorial which makes me utter statements like “Hmmm…”, “Ahhh…”, “Ohhh….” or even “No, no, no.”

blogDave on software, and Mike's law of diminishing software quality.

I agree, and I'd even go one step further. There are inherent expectations for most decision makers.

  • Licensing must be expensive
  • Support plans should be outrageously priced
  • Reasonable functionality cannot be accomplished without purchasing additional modules/add-ons
  • Finally, more buzzwords-compliance than actual features
As I said before it is not about technology, but hype. I guess that's what they call marketing nowadays.

Most people actually expect more out of a $49.99 piece of software. The minute something does not work quite right, they will start to send nasty emails, get angry on the phone, etc. and ultimately ask for a refund.

On the other hand, if the same problem occurs with a $50K+ ware, they'll gladly accept a cheesy hack, implement some crappy workaround or even patiently wait for a bug fix.

Charles explains that expensive software, such as SAP, would not benefit from easier installation procedures, etc. and that ultimately it has no bearing on the total cost. True. But in most cases a company can save a bundle by using a cheaper set of tools, assuming they hire the right people.

blogRuss: “IBM is offering free Websphere certification vouchers!!”

tvI'm tired of not being able to tape a show while watching another with AT&T Digital Cable. I've decided to buy a 2-Way Splitter and rig something up.

I've hooked my VCR directly to the cable and I seem to be able to get the analog channels. I'm hopping the splitter will allow me to tape an analog channel while watching a digital one.

Anybody experienced with such a setup? Please let me know.

[Update] Success! It works like a charm. The VCR is now hooked up to the TV via the A/V ports. I just need to get an additional cable to hook up the DVD player to the VCR.

blogSteven: Open Source product management.

WinCvs & cvs 1.11.2

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winI was able to solve my WinCvs problem by using the latest alpha version of CVSNT and turning TCP/IP compression off in the WinCvs client. Happy, Joy, Joy!

tvWe watched the Birds of Prey pilot last night. A little slow for my taste, but it definitely showed some real potential.

tvTiVo, We Hardly Knew Ye. DirectTV and AT&T Broadband have been offering co-branded TiVo services for a while now. Yet another wanna-be who failed to research what he wrote about.

linuxOpen Source review: Oggasm! Gotta love the name.

linuxTorvalds stays out of MS debate. Wimp!

sexMiss America told to zip it. She was furious. So tense. I've got the remedy, honey. If you wanna relax, don't beat around the bush, go get some!

javaI've Been Seduced by IntelliJ. Yet another IDEA convert.

javaLog4j 1.2.7 released.

javaTony Tang has released version 0.2 of his Java MSN Messenger Library.

macDantz has finally updated Retrospect Express for Jaguar. About damn time too.

blogRuss: It gets better…. I feel for you, man. That's exactly why I moved my domains as soon as I could. First with Register.com, which had some problems too, and now, GoDaddy.

blogRickard: Now, I don't really mind that they want to make money off of TSS… Big deal. What I *am* troubled by is that they're not honest about it.

blogSoftware Reality: JavaServer Faces.

surveySurvey: How many RSS feeds to you read on a daily basis?

Hack This!

1 min read

newsCERT: Sendmail source hacked.

newsMitnick's laptop up for sale.

javaHey, where'd my thread go?

javaQuite a few books about Struts coming down the pipeline:

javaDocumentation Enhancer for Java.

blogBetter Sex through Outer Log Thought Web.

windowsexe4j. Yet another Java executable maker.

macMacworld returns to Beantown.

macNetNewsWire Lite reviewed.

So much news. So little time.

1 min read

javaVersion 1.0 of Jakarta String Taglib has been released.

javaApache Axis 1.0 was also released.

javaJava 1.4 to be released for BeOS.

personalSince I've upgraded to Red Hat 8 and thus cvs 1.11.2, the shell window spawned by WinCvs always hangs. It needs to be manually closed for commands to complete. Extremely annoying!

blogMike is running a competition to design the JIRA 2.0 development team t-shirt.

javaTuning Java Swing applications for Mac OS X.

Red Hat 8.0

<1 min read

I've upgraded this server to Red Hat 8.0.

At first it simply refused to upgrade, complaining about a missing /SWAP partition. I had to comment it out in /etc/fstab and let the installer re-create it.

It took close to two hours to preform the upgrade, which gave me a chance to catch up on some shows I had taped last week.

I should have manually selected the packages. The darn thing decided to upgrade Apache 1.3.x to 2.0.x. I had to redo /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf pretty much from scratch. There're still a few things I could not get working quite right, nothing major though.

I also had to recompile mod_webapp. They say you're supposed to put module configuration files in /etc/httpd/conf.d/, which doesn't seem to work with mod_webapp. It kept on complaining about an Invalid Virtual Hostname. I should have left everything in httpd.conf. Serves me right for trying to do things the documented way.

It also downgraded my SpamAssassin installation. Weird.

As usual /etc/mail/sendmail.cf need to be rebuild. Apparently hash is now specified with -T<TMPF> instead of -o.

I also noticed that the rpm command no longer includes build options. There's a new command called rpmbuild. Not a bad thing. It makes the man pages somewhat less confusing.

I spend quite some time making sure all vital services where still functioning, and so far, everything looks good.

Knock on wood.