Marla Parker's Weblog

The JDDAC community on java.net is quite small, but it is very cool. A project under development by corporate, academic, and non-profit organizations has plans to deploy sensor arrays in the SF Bay and show the data realtime on the web...but for now, they have a little demo I decided to try to run. It monitors memory usage of my jvm.

I downloaded it and ran it on my linux laptop and it asked me questions I could not answer: name of the probe? activation key? Hmmm. Darn, guess I have to read something.

Found the getting started doc. Went to the Measurement Server, made an account, ran the client right into (not through) the firewall. Ran it outside the firewall; it worked! At least it is doing something every 10 seconds or so.

Next day: back to the server to see my probe! But the page now just shows me javascript code. Now that I actually have a probe, the page is broken. I send a question to the forum and got an embarassed email back saying the page had been done for IE and it would work on IE. Recall that I'm running linux. But my daughter (happy to be missing a day of school due to a sore thoat) opened up a 19th IE window (she said she was too lazy to close all the popup ads from the game she was playing) and got the graphs to show there. Kinda cool, it shows the data for the 4 hours I ran the client on my laptop the night before.

I'll try this another time and see if they've got it working in mozilla and maybe have a way for the client to run inside a firewall. I'll need that when they deploy their sensors into the real world so I can watch the data from the Bay someday, while working inside a firewall.