Fred's Random Thoughts Frederic Jean's Weblog

Last Week At Sun

I decided that it was time for me to move on after six years of working at Sun. Next week is going to be my last week at Sun. I wanted to blog about my departure earlier though.

Sun has certainly been an experience, with very good moments and some very frustrating ones too. It's what happens when you work with a lot of very intelligent, passionate and opinionated people :). Thankfully, there are plenty of capable people who will be able to take my work on the Sun Update Connection delivery services and carry it forward.

I will start working with another bunch of very intelligent, passionate and opinionated people at OpenLogic. They are very involved in the Java Open Source community and the local Java developer community. Their main product is BlueGlue, which automates and validates the installation and integration of about 170 open source projects. They also provide support and consulting services to their customers.

I'll still be around the blogosphere though through my new blog titled “Out of My Mind...” Feel free to visit :) I'll keep discussing Java and software development, but I will also blog about Ruby, Ruby on Rails and the adoption process that Mollie and I are going through.

( Mar 24 2006, 10:59:44 AM MST ) Permalink

Technorati Claim

Nothing to see here... Technorati Profile

( Jan 30 2006, 05:26:44 PM MST ) Permalink

Suffering From Mac Envy All Over Again...

I have used my PowerBook G4 15“ for almost 2 years now. It is a great machine, with usually enough performance for what I do (although I could use more memory...).

Yet, I cannot help but feel a little pang of Mac Envy after Apple's today's announcement. I just can't help but want that beautiful MacBook Pro. It just brings me back to the days before I bought a Mac.

But I must be good. There are other things right now that are more important than to satisfy my latest Mac craving.

Must... Stay... Away... From... Apple... Online... Store...

-- Fred

( Jan 10 2006, 05:02:59 PM MST ) Permalink Comments [1]

Montreal and Vancouver Considered Fast Cities

Fast Company, an icon of the dot com bubble, has been posting a series of articles on what it calls “Fast Cities.” Fast cities combine culture, education, technology and tolerance to attract the creative class. After listing fast cities in the US, they turned their attention to 5 global fast cities.

I find it very interesting that out of the 5 cities, 2 of them are in Canada. Montreal is cited for its mixture of old Europe charms and modern amenities, while Vancouver is praised for it's video game industry.

As a Montreal native, I really do like to see the city recognized as such. It is a beautiful city, and it has a unique feel to it. I do enjoy visiting it when I can.

-- Fred

( Nov 11 2005, 05:00:28 PM MST ) Permalink

I Think I Caught That JUnit Bug...

It would appear that I am test infected. It's odd since I used to resist writing JUnit tests as much as I could. There were so many things that were just hard to test.

I did play with Cactus to try to test my servlets and filters, but never quite could get it to work. HttpUnit is fine, but it is more geared toward functional testing rather than unit testing. I ended up pretty much giving up on testing them properly.

Two things happened though.

First, I played with Ruby on Rails. I was curious, so I downloaded the framework, watched the demos and worked through the tutorials. I even got both the PickAxe and the Ruby on Rails book from the Pragmatic Programmers. I realized then that unit testing didn't have to be so painful and frustrating.

I then started to use Spring. Spring is amazing as an Inversion of Control container. So far, it has made my job a lot easier with its focus on Dependency Injection. When it comes to testing, Spring ships with a library of mock objects mimicking J2EE objects. It makes testing the application a lot easier and a lot more fun. Tests aren't difficult to setup anymore, they run fast. And with a little work, it integrates nicely into NetBeans.

I still have a lot more work to do. I guess that I should get back to it...

-- Fred

Technorati Tags: Java, JUnit

( Nov 03 2005, 05:59:42 PM MST ) Permalink Comments [1]

TextDrive Using Solaris 10?

TextDrive is a hosting provider that is specializing in shared servers. They are very popular with the Ruby on Rails crowd due to their openness and willingness to provide a very solid environment for hosting Rails based applications. So far, they have used FreeBSD as a foundation to provide their services.

TextDrive does share a Flikr photostream where they share pictures of their recent move or of ongoing work that occurs in their colocation data center. In this stream, there are a few of pictures showing Solaris 10 CDs, including one showing CD 1 in the tray of one of their database server.

It's just speculation on my part, but I do think that Zones would be a great tool for the type of services they provide to their customers. It would be very interesting to see where this goes.

-- Fred

Technorati Tags: TextDrive, Solaris

( Oct 19 2005, 10:37:37 AM MDT ) Permalink Comments [2]

JavaOne 2004 and 2005 Presentations available

I didn't have the chance to attend JavaOne in San Francisco this year. Beside the travel and attendance costs, Sun is trying to keep the seats for our customers.

It doesn't mean that I have to miss out on all of the content. Most of the technical sessions are now available at http://developer.sun.com/learning/javaoneonline/ . There are the PDF slides, which are a good start for an overview of the subject.

Even better are the multimedia presentations, where the slides are synchronized with a recording of the presenter. It's still not close to attending since you can't ask questions, but it does provide the whole content rather than just the slide deck. You do need an Sun Developer Network subscription in order to access the content.

-- Fred

Technorati Tags: Java, Sun

( Oct 18 2005, 10:31:58 AM MDT ) Permalink Comments [0]

AOP @ BoulderJUG

I attended the BoulderJUG meeting last night. Ramnivas Laddad presented on both sessions. Ramnivas is the author of the AspectJ in Action book. He is an authority on AOP, and his enthusiasm for the technology is certainly contagious.

He first covered different techniques available to monitor Java Enterprise applications. He covered monitoring through:

• External Monitoring: scripts, load generators, Mercury Tools.
• Process Monitoring: System Monitor, DTrace.
• VM Monitoring: JVMTI
• Component Monitoring: JMX, Servlet Filters

He did try to compress what takes about an hour and a half into an hour. As a result, the presentation itself suffered. Still, it was a good way to generate ideas on how to monitor an application.

He then proceeded to talk about what's new in AspectJ. Here are some of the changes he mentioned:

• AspectJ/AspectWerkz merger. Adds load time weaving to AspectJ and the @AspectJ syntax.
• @AspectJ syntax, where aspects are declared using Java 5 annotations.
• AJDT enhancements. AJDT is an Eclipse plugin for AspectJ development. The AspectJ Visualization perspective is an interesting way to visualize how much code is impacted by a project's aspects. Small details like the crossreference view also made me wish I could use Eclipse for development.

Ramnivas provided step by step demos using Eclipse and writing aspects on the fly. He adapted his demos to the questions and requests from the audience. He is certainly someone that you want to spend time with if you are grappling with AOP.

As usual, Scott Davis was actively plugging the No Fluff, Just Stuff conference. They will be in Broomfield, CO, on the weekend of November 11-13. I would recommend attending the conference if you have a chance. He also took the time to peddle his latest book: JBoss at Work.

It was certainly yet another pleasant evening spending time with other Java heads.

-- Fred

Technorati Tags: AOP, AspectJ, Java, JUG

( Oct 14 2005, 11:55:24 AM MDT ) Permalink Comments [0]

It must be October...

Mollie loves to decorate for the different seasons and holidays. She really loves to decorate around Halloween and Christmas. If I let her, we would have pumpkins all over the house in mid-september :) Thankfully, we arrived to a compromise, and she usually waits until october 1st before decorating the house.

She doesn't limit herself to the inside though. The outside of the house also has to reflect the current holiday. So say “Hi!” to Frankie:

-- Fred

Technorati Tags: Halloween, Holiday

( Oct 10 2005, 04:31:13 PM MDT ) Permalink Comments [0]

Flying on 9/11

I've been summoned to the Santa Clara campus for planning meetings around the next iteration of the Sun Update Connection. Since our director wanted us to be ready to work early on Monday, we were asked to fly in on Sunday if possible. So there I am, preparing myself to board a plan in a little more than one hour.

Well, it happens that today is 9/11. At first, I was a little nervous to be flying on that date. 9/11 still has a strong imprint on the American psyche, and it is easy to bring back the horrible images of the planes crashing into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and a field in Pennsylvania. Still, I did convince myself that everything would be OK. So there I am at the airport, getting ready to leave.

Mollie, my beautiful wife, is worried though. She can't help it, she is a worrier and would be worried on any other day of the year. She made me promise to call her as soon as I am allowed to do so. I'll of course do so since I know that she will be worried sick until I call her.

Flying on this day is certainly a sobering experience.

-- Fred

Update: The flight was uneventful. I called Mollie as soon as we were allowed to use a cellphone. She was very much relieved.

Technorati Tags: puppy, Sun, update

( Sep 11 2005, 10:50:57 PM MDT ) Permalink Comments [0]

iTunes 5: Worth the Reboot

Well, today was the Big Day, where Steve Jobs & Co announced the long rumored iTunes phone as well as the iPod nano. The phone leaves me indifferent. I'm not about to switch carrier at this point in time since Cingular's plans are more expensive than my current carrier. The iPod nano does look really, well, slick. Still, I'll hold on to my iPod mini until it's batteries just wont recharge anymore. Possibly longer, who knows.

iTunes is a different story though. I use it every single day to listen to music or sync up my iPod mini. Sure, it's DRM laced, but there are ways around it if you really object to DRM. Well, today Steve Jobs & Co. released iTunes 5. Beside the new design (a mix between the metal and unified themes), a few new features were added. These include parental controls, a search bar, and a play list folder.

You can either download the new iTunes from the Apple web site or through the Mac OS X Software Update feature (which is an inspiration to all Mac users working on the Sun Update Connection). With it comes an update to Quicktime, which will require you to reboot.

Still, I think it was worth the reboot.

-- Fred

    [posted with ecto]

Technorati Tags: Apple, iPod, iTunes, Quicktime

( Sep 07 2005, 11:16:47 PM MDT ) Permalink Comments [0]

Running Firefox/Mozilla under VNC

A favorite past time of bloggers at Sun is looking at the referer list to see how people get to their blogs. The vast majority of people come to my random thoughts through a direct link. There are some interesting Google searches though.

So, this hint is for the individual who googled [sic] for vnc "solaris 10" -x86 and found me on the second page. If you are having problems with Firefox crashing your VNC session under some web site, configure your VNC server to start using an 8 bits depth rather than a 24 bits one. Sure, it will not look as nice as it could, but it will run and not crash.

Things you learn doing distributed demos :)

-- Fred

[posted with ecto]

Technorati Tags: Google, Solaris, VNC

( Sep 06 2005, 11:50:42 PM MDT ) Permalink Comments [0]

MCI Neighborhood Broadband Update

It's been well over month since I transferred my home phone number to the MCI Neighborhood Broadband VoIP offering. The sound quality of the call is pretty good (having Comcast Broadband service does help). I hadn't had issues placing or receiving calls. They even allow 10 digits dialing rather than force us to do 11 digits dialing.

A positive is that MCI did transfer my phone number as promised, when promised. It happened on my birthday to boot. This certainly beats Vonage's "6 months and still no transfer" story.

As a result, I am now free of the local loop tyranny brought to Denver by Qwest. My calls are going over the internet. And I'm saving well over $70 a month.

Maybe I can use that for gas money...

-- Fred

[posted with ecto]

Technorati Tags: Broadband, MCI, VoIP, Vonage

( Sep 06 2005, 11:30:10 AM MDT ) Permalink Comments [2]

Apple's Preview Nice Touch

Did you know that if you close Preview while reading a PDF file that it will open the file at the page that was displayed? This made reading books such as My Job Went to India or Agile Web Development With Rails: A Pragmatic Guide a lot more pleasant than I expected.

Apple: Thank you for paying attention to the little details.

-- Fred

( Sep 02 2005, 12:49:43 PM MDT ) Permalink Comments [0]

Reach out, help someone (or a few)

We have all seen and witnessed the tragedy that was brought by Katarina on the Gulf of Mexico's coast line, mostly around New Orleans and the Mississippi coast. We are bombarded by the media with images of terrible destruction, pain and misery.

In spite of this, most of us cannot rush out to the affected areas to lend a hand personally. We still need to work, pay the bills and take care of our families. We have our obligations to our communities and our employers. Yet, we still feel that we must do something to help.

Many organizations have staff and volunteers who are either there already or on their way. Thanks to organizations such as the Red Cross, supplies, food and rescue workers are making their way to Katrina's victims. Shelters are being put together, refugees are evacuated, people are cared for and rescued.

All of this isn't free. It isn't even cheap. If you haven't done so, go to Amazon, iTunes or the Red Cross web site and give some money to help pay for the rescue efforts. See if your employer has a donation matching policy in order to amplify your donation. It doesn't need to be much to help. Even $5, $10 or $20 can make a difference and bring a little hope to a hopeless situation.

So reach out. Help a few people in great need.

-- Fred


( Sep 01 2005, 10:04:16 PM MDT ) Permalink Comments [0]