While I was on holiday my ADSL provider doubled the speed of my connection to 2 Mbits. Guess I should go on vacations more frequently:)

I've noticed the change while downloading Hibernate's 19MB jar file: the progress bar was moving suspiciously fast.

Hibernate is one of the skills I'm hoping to update the next few weeks. I've last used it at version 2.0 together with Struts for a middle-sized web development project. Now I want to give it a try as the persistent strategy for a Wicket based application. The app is actually a home project: my girlfriend's father runs a chess book publishing business which has a very outdated static website and they've asked me nicely whether I would have some time to help with transitioning it into this century. I wouldn't like to lose my affinity for Java and after reading Gaertjan's blog entries on Wicket I though this would be a perfect opportunity to learn something new.

I've started experimenting with Wicket in NetBeans 4.1 - it was pretty easy to setup. I really like the html based templates of Wicket and the "real" component feeling I get when I use it. You can create reusable authentication pages/panels, reusable web forms and other components using it. And I do mean reusable without modification (just by subclassing a complex component to add new functionality or subclassing an abstract login form to add the functionality that actually logs the user in). Not copy-pastable... It's pretty amazing.

I've also downloaded Sun Java Studio Enterprise 8 Early Access yesterday (it's available from the Sun Download Center) and tried to open my NetBeans 4.1 projects from it. They opened without a problem (I actually had to add Wicket to the Library Manager again to resolve the fact that settings and customizations are not migrated from NetBeans 4.1) and I could create an UML model project by reverse engineering the Java classes for my Wicket pages. I like JSE8. I haven't used any new feature other than UML modelling but it feels more integrated and faster than JSE7's modeller.

A presentation showing the new features of JSE8 is available here (it is also available from the Help menu of JSE8 itself).

Image taken from developers.sun.com

After a two-week long vacation (which involved rain, showers, floods and more rain) I'm finally back in the office trying to catch up with work. Actually things were going smoothly without me: the StarOffice 8 localization project to Hungarian (which I'm coordinating a bit) is on schedule, the RFQ I was helping with was submitted.

Even now I'm using a custom StarOffice 8 build and even some sales guys have installed it on their notebooks to be able to show it off on customer visits. I can't wait to have the final bits: StarOffice 8 feels like something that is destined to be sold in large volumes. We're working on having a boxed version manufactured locally with some of the translated documentation (Programmer's Guide, User's Guide) in hardcopy: the boxed SuSE kits with hardcopy documentation have always been well received by this market. As we're mostly targeting small and medium businesses with this version I think it will be essential... I hope OpenOffice.org users will also appreciate the work we are doing as all localized content will be incorporated in the final OpenOffice.org 2.0 build

Before I forget... Chris is going to sit in the Budapest office for a few days). He's visiting the sales guys to position some new desktop stuff (like Tarantella) in their sales kit. We've talked in June about his visit in August and I told him it is usually a quite sunny and hot period in Hungary, so he also brought his wife to have some time off... Hope they don't blame me for the bad weather:)

BTW, after 5 years being with Sun as a contractor, looks like I finally get a chance to become a "real" Sun employee... Actually I've never really understood this contractor thing, but I'll be glad to receive a yellow badge afterall.

Today's most interesting Google search leading to my blog was this (things+to+do+esztergom). Somebody from the UK is planning to visit the town I live at? Wow. As Google's ranking system rates my blog as the 11th most authorative web page in this subject, I've decided to actually write up a few things to help those in dire need of information. I know the frustration when you follow a link with the expectation to find some tourist info only to find the blog of a geek full of IT stuff... :)

So, Esztergom had quite a history, still you will not see much of it walking on the streets these days. The old medieval town was destroyed in 1241-42 by the invading Mongols. The rebuilt town was then destroyed during the numerous sieges Esztergom had during the Ottoman wars (1543: Suleyman, 1595: Christians, 1605: Ottomans, 1683: Christian forces led by Polish king Jan Sobieski). What remains of this history can mostly be found in the numerous museums and exhibitions.

Cultural places to visit:

• The town is best known for the Basilica of Esztergom (virtual tour here). The Basilica was constructed on the site of the ruined Szent Adalbert Church of the 11th century on the Castle Hill (as shown on the picture on the top of the blog) during the XIX. century. This is the most frequently visited sight of the town: if you have only one afternoon to spend, spend it here. You can climb a whole lot of stairs to enjoy the view from the top of the Basilica (if the air is clear the sight is truely exceptional). You can also visit the crypts beneath the cathedral: many former cardinals and archbishops are buried here. Also don't miss the Cathedral Treasury:)
• Next to the Cathedral you can find the Castle which is a museum with different exhibitions showing the history of Esztergom. The museum also has an art exhibition in one of the rondellas (a round bastion) which changes from time to time. Currently you can visit an exhibition of Salvador Dali's arts: some of his lesser known paintings (parts of a private collection from Bamberg).
• A steep stairway leads down from the Castle Hill to the Watertown part of the town: where you'll find the Archbishop's palace and the Christian Museum. Not far you can find the Balassa Museum named after a 16th century poet who died during the second siege of Esztergom.
• Have a walk to the center of the city to find the Danube museum if you're interested in more technical things: the exhibition is primarily about the water management systems of Hungary. There are a lot of working miniatures which kids enjoy a lot. There are also seasonal exhibitions of modern arts.
• There is an international Guitar festival every year (this year: Aug 6-12). The classical concerts are performed in the Basilica.

Places to have some time off:

• Visit Párkány, the town on the other side of the Danube. It's much easier to cross the border since the Marie-Valerie build was rebuilt in 2001 - 57 years after it was demolished by the retreating German forces. The town is called Sturovo in Slovak, but as the majority of the inhabitants are Hungarians, you will not feel much of a difference. Párkány has a decent thermal bath called Vadas and there are fine Czech and Slovak beers in the numerous pubs.
• Also a new spa is being built on the island of Esztergom but it is not yet functional.

Esztergom from many angles: sightseeing.bejo.hu

I'm not a Sun Cluster guy but still got pretty excited when I came across this title while I was looking for some documentation on Solaris Zones on docs.sun.com. I'd love to set aside some lab time to play around with these two. Just imagine: virtual Solaris instances that migrate from one server onto another within a cluster...

Sun Ray 3.0 introduced some enhancements to the ALP (Appliance Link Protocol) that make Sun Ray thin clients adapt to lower bandwidth scenarios (like connecting to a server on the other side of a WAN link, or through an ADSL line - more about this setup can be found in the Sun Rays at Home white paper).

Last week I did a technology demo at a long time Sun Ray customer who is still using SRSS 2.0 and Solaris 8. I've used my notebook running Nevada build 18 and the SRSS 3.1 public beta (it runs fine - though it's a bit difficult to have the same Solaris instance set up for both SRSS demos and normal office work). Their conclusions were quite interesting:

• they seemed to like JDS
• Hungarian localization of JDS was a great plus (they also made me login with Slovak and Romanian locale, but these weren't completely translated)
• Exchange connectivity of Evolution is something that really started them thinking (some of their thin client users need Citrix licenses only to access Outlook running on a remote Windows Server - obviously there is a chance that utilizing Evolution they would not need to buy additional licenses when the staff grows)

Limiting bandwidth to 512k and showing how audio still worked ("AM radio" quality) while opening windows and browsing directories) was also impressive. It's interesting though how early graphical quality starts to decrease: you don't want to run any application requiring sharp graphics over an 512k link. Gnome terminal really suffered from low bandwidth while xterm and dtterm gives the user much better font quality (obviously gnome-terminal is drawing into offscreen pixmaps to "enhance" performance which in turn decreases it considerably on a Sun Ray remote client).

How to limit the bandwidth of a Sun Ray? There is a DHCP vendor parameter available for some time (I've used it with SRSS 2.0 as well) called NewTBW which can be added to a DHCP macro. The parameter accepts a numeric value which is interpreted as the number of bits allowed to be transmitted in one second to the thin client.

The easiest way to add the parameter to your config is via the GUI DHCP config tool available at /usr/sadm/admin/bin/dhcpmgr. You can also use the CLI:

dhtadm -M -m 192.168.79.0 -e NewTBW=1000000
svcadm restart dhcp-server

Note: low bandwidth is also about latency, so limiting the pipe gives you only one half the impression of a real low bandwidth/WAN setup.

Note2: a bandwidth limit of 1 Mbit/sec was quite acceptable, even with the default JDS look & feel. Medium sized flash animations also worked nice.

The old cinema on the other side of the road I'm living at is being cleared away in a big hurry...

Hungarian Unix Portal (hup.hu) just published a screenshot tour of OpenSolaris from installation of nv16 until a BFUing a newly built OpenSolaris system. The article (text in Hungarian, screenshots in English) can be found here.

Idén 10 éves a Java technológia, ennek örömére a Sun Magyarország Java programozói versenyt indít útjára. Bővebb információ a javaverseny.hu címen található.

Két kategóriában lehet nevezni: az elsőben egy általános, hálózati működésű alkalmazást várunk, mely J2EE alapú, webszolgáltatásként működő backend-del és Portlet (JSR 168) vagy desktop alkamazásként működő frontenddel rendelkezik. A második kategóriában bármilyen Java alkalmazás készíthető: egyedül a méret a lényeg! Az összes Java kódnak és felhasznált tartalomnak el kell ugyanis férnie egy 10k méretű .jar file-ban. A méret kötött, a tartalom nem: bármilyen kreatív ötlet, demó, a standard J2SE lehetőségeit kihasználó trükkös program indulhat ezen kategóriában.

English translation: Sun Hungary just announced a local Java competition available for everyone in Hungary. The first category is about creating a J2EE web service and a desktop or portlet client. The second category (10k compo) will accept any J2SE application with a maximum jar file size of 10k (to celebrate Java platform's 10th birthday) with any content. The latter is obviously about being creative and utilizing the J2SE platform as best as one can...

Index.hu reports that 44 564 PCs and 4 300 notebooks were sold during last year in Hungary with some version of Linux installed on it instead of Windows. This is 16,5% marketshare in PCs and 4.3% in notebooks... which sounds great (though I do not know how many of those PCs end up using a pirated version of Windows). Too bad JDS was not available in Hungarian with R2...

Recently I've became a loyal customer of bookline.hu - an online shop that aggregates the offerings of various Hungarian second hand book stores. My last order arrived yesterday and after getting home I've decided to skip the "sit down in front of the home PC" part of my evening agenda and read one of the new books instead. I happened to chose High Crusade from Poul Anderson - a quite entertaining sci-fi short novel. It tells the story of an English baron who's army is just about to go to war against France in the Middle Ages when suddenly a spaceship lands near them. The Englishmen do not panic, they slaughter the aliens and take control of the spaceship thanks to the fact that the alien's weapons are useless in close combat. The treason of a captured alien makes them travel a few lightyears away to another planet and the story eventually evolves into a crusade against the aliens...

The book was quite short: less then two hundred pages so I arrived at the last page not long after 11pm. Still it was as entertaining read. If you think between the lines there is some harsh society criticism (aliens enslaving weaker species to keep their own life standard high, but depend too much on technology to keep the control).

Anyway, I haven't set aside much time recently to read books, although I keep buying them at the same rate (2-3 new releases every month and varying number of second hand books)...

SpreadFirefox.com reported earlier detailed statistics of Firefox usage in Europe. Good to see Hungary in the top 3 with 22.6% (behind Finland (30.5%) and Germany (24.4%)).

Just read the NetBeans interview with Tim Cramer on theserverside.com. I've started thinking about what I would answer to the obviously provocative question:

"How many people are using NetBeans today?"

I guess my answer would have been: "1,245,354..."

"Really?"

"No." :)

Tim answered with the number of downloads (which obviously measures the success of marketing a bit better than engineering) and got criticized for it in the comments of the article. Come on people, what would Linus answer if somebody asked him how many people are using Linux today?

If you're looking for a way to kill some time and only have Solaris 10 x86 installed on your laptop/PC, here's your chance to give a try to the excellent Open Transport Tycoon Deluxe - an open source remake of the original TTD game. The Solaris 10 x86 package - created by Zwei, the owner of a portal called sunfreeware.hu - can be downloaded from here.

Note: the package installs into /opt/sfw/openttd and needs the SFWsdl package from the Companion CD installed.

A Hungarian news portal reports that the castle of Esztergom (pictured on the top of the page) was rebuilt in Ankara, Turkey's capitol:

I really don't know what to say. Occupation of Hungary is probably a glorious moment of history for Turkey. Esztergom was a very significant town of medieval Hungary (capitol until the 13th century then seat of the archbishop). Suleyman occupied the castle in 1543, then it was retaken in 1595 by joint Hungarian/Austrian/German forces. In 1605 Turks occupied it for a second time. The last siege in 1683 led by Polish/Bavarian/Austrian forces completely destroyed every house of the town and left the county in ruins. In the 15th century the area had one of the highest population density in Hungary. By the end of the 17th century most of the families were either killed, taken as prisones or escaped the horrors of war and dual taxation to more fortunate places. After the last siege the town never reached it's former significance - although the archbishop seat moved back and the Church even erected a new cathedral on the Castle Hill. People slowly moved in from other parts of the country. Many German, Slovak, Croat, Serb families came which is still reflected in many family names (although the people themselves rarely speak their ancestor's language).

Last December I was walking the streets of Grenoble, amazed by the old buildings. Then I suddenly realized that my home town could have such old buildings if the Kingdom of Hungary had better diplomacy towards Turkey. I'm fond of science fiction stories, especially alternative histories... So, what if Hungary allowed Turkish forces to pass through the country unharmed in the 16th century, or even allied itself with Turkey instead of going to war with an Empire 10 times larger in both size and manpower? I guess Suleyman would have occupied Vienna and Prague instead of Buda. Habsburgs would flee to Spain. The German territories would unite against the common threat (remember this is the time of Martin Luther, so even reformation could lose it's reach if suddenly a pagan invador was there to threaten Europe). Alternatively Suleyman could have turned towards Italy, captured/allie with Venice, and besieged and took Rome... of course this means Michelangelo's and other master's works would probably be destroyed (remember, islam doesn't allow humans to be displayed in arts).

Could these events have happened if Hungary decided not to fight the Turkish invasion? Who knows... Too bad Poul Anderson is no longer with us to tell the story...