garbage collection II

Monday Jun 27, 2005

$895 64bit Opteron workstation at JavaOne

The coolest thing I saw at JavaOne today (other than Peter Kessler explaining GC!) was the new Sun Ultra 20 workstation with the 64bit Opteron processor in it. Starting at $895! Sun employees get a further discount..muahhahah! I shall be ordering one this week!

Posted at 07:55PM Jun 27, 2005 by moazam in Java | Comments[0] | Permalink

Sunday Jun 26, 2005

On my way to the NetBeans Day event

I woke up a bit late but now I'm on my way to the NetBeans Day conference. I hope I can snag one of the NetBeans Field Guide giveaways!

Posted at 11:16AM Jun 26, 2005 by moazam in Java | Comments[0] | Permalink

Tuesday Jun 21, 2005

Reporting from JavaOne 2005

It's that time again folks! JavaOne '05 is next week and I'll be there for most of the week. I'll be taking pictures, posting them, and also reporting on whatever sessions I attend. I'll try to be as honest as possible, if a session sucks, I'll say so. If it's good, I'll sing its praises! :)

Posted at 08:08PM Jun 21, 2005 by moazam in Java | Comments[0] | Permalink

Monday Apr 25, 2005

JNDI connections not closing, remember to close those NamingEnumerations!

I just got off a conference call with a customer who had spent a lot of time debugging a JNDI problem where they would call Context.close() but yet they would still see that their connections were left open. The only way for them to get the connections released were by restarting the VM.

The problem was that the customer had a NamingEnumeration in use, and had never closed it. As per the JNDI docs,

If the Context instance is sharing a connection with other Context and unterminated NamingEnumeration instances, the connection will not be closed until close() has been invoked on all such Context and NamingEnumeration instances. [http://java.sun.com/products/jndi/tutorial/ldap/connect/close.html]

Now remember, even if you don't do a close, the GC will eventually kick in and clean up the Context and NamingEnumeration, but until then your connections will be open. Plus, that's just wrong, be tidy and close your connections properly.

Posted at 10:56AM Apr 25, 2005 by moazam in Java | Comments[0] | Permalink

Wednesday Mar 30, 2005

Can't unswitch, I've gone too far

Tim Bray let out some frustration earlier concerning his gripes with the Apple platform. Tim, I've been there, and I've unswitched, and switched, and unswitched..and finally switched back. The initial releases of Rhapsody and OS X had me doing a peculiar dance for a couple of years but I think I can now safely say that I have switched over for the final time in my life (since this is the Internet, that means 3 years).

Anyways, I could go on and on about why I can't unswitch from OS X, but I'd just end up sounding like a hacked together commercial, but here are the main reasons,

1.) Unix with 110% desktop usability, including cameras, firewire, etc.
2.) I can sync my cell phone to the address book and calendar via bluetooth.
3.) The apps look and feel amazing.
4.) The development environment is pretty kick ass.

5.) All the above did not take any major effort to achieve, at least on my part.

I run a 12" Powerbook 1.33ghz with 1.25gig of RAM and it suits me pretty good. Tim, my advice is to wait until Tiger hits the streets. Spotlight might possibly spoil you forever. This is another reason I've stuck with Mail.app. I have over 4gigs of Email data and I know that Mail.app will be Spotlight enabled right outta the box.

Posted at 07:52PM Mar 30, 2005 by moazam in General | Comments[3] | Permalink

Thursday Mar 24, 2005

Trip to Pakistan

It's been pretty quiet around here lately. I've been pretty busy and recently got back after visiting Pakistan. Got pics? :)

If you're wondering, I'm the guy on the right holding the tea cup. Inam Khan is on the left, and Ahmed Khan (owner of the shop), is in the center. He makes such amazing tea!

This is the view from the front door of Shi-Fang, a chinese restaurant in Islamabad.

Posted at 04:44PM Mar 24, 2005 by moazam in General | Comments[3] | Permalink

Thursday Jan 27, 2005

A long time ago in a JVM far, far away

Pretty funny flash 'movie', although I can't make out all the audio. Made by some guy over at MadBean, I'll call him "Bitter Coder".

Posted at 10:39PM Jan 27, 2005 by moazam in Java | Comments[0] | Permalink

Sunday Jan 23, 2005

Hacking an EPIA board into a SparcStation LX

My friend, Louis Florit, has managed to hack an EPIA board into an old SparcStation LX case. He inherited the project from another friend of mine, Kendrick Vargas. It looks like they used a new power-supply, but I'm not 100% sure. Current specs are: 800mhz C3, 256MB RAM, VIA Chipset, 60Gb HD. I'll have to nag Louis into getting me better pictures and a proper write-up.

Images here.

Posted at 10:25PM Jan 23, 2005 by moazam in General | Comments[0] | Permalink

Thursday Jan 06, 2005

An update to the Solaris Internals book?!

As per Paul Rogers, the authors of the venerable Solaris Internals book have been working on an update.

The information in the book has been updated for later versions of Solaris (8 to 10) in a set of 367 slides, dated November, 2004, in an Adobe acrobat file available here. Those of you on dialup do not want to download that file and you are already mad at me because of the number of images on my page. And in a late breaking update, Richard just asked me to review the new chapters for Solaris 10. Hope that the publisher can get the revised version out soon so the information half life will be longer. - Paul Rogers

PDF presentation with updates available [1.6MB]here.

Posted at 10:26AM Jan 06, 2005 by moazam in Solaris | Comments[0] | Permalink

Monday Jan 03, 2005

Best Slashdot post of the year.

This has to be the best Slashdot post of the year, and we're only 3 days into the year! Amazing.

A $499 Mac? How terribly crass (Score:5, Funny)
by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 03, @01:22PM (#11246218)

Oh no, here come the proles. The tasteless rabble. The masses who see nothing past the price tag. Of course you can’t blame them if their trust funds aren’t large enough to provide them with life’s very finest—they wouldn’t appreciate it anyways—but surely Apple should know better than to serve the poor peasants la crème de la vie on the discount rack at Sears.

There was a time, not long ago, when you could tell everything that mattered about a person by his or her choice of operating system. You would notice a man at the local bistro with his titanium PowerBook and a deep garnet Merlot, and you instinctively knew: here is a man with a certain flair, a je ne sais quoi that makes his company worth your while. You’d wonder if the dark-clad woman striding down the street was your type; then you’d notice tucked under her arm a Duo 2300c, so retro and so delicously delicate, and you’d be smitten, simply devastated. You’d go for coffee along Bedford and the two of you would talk about the next East Village gallery opening, or the latest collection from Philippe Starck, or how Frank Lloyd Wright had ruined American architecture.

And it wasn’t just about being able to identify like-minded individuals. As a Mac user yourself, you belonged to an exclusive club of discriminating individuals and creative geniuses. Artists like Picasso. Activists like Teresa Heinz. Revolutionaries like Václav Havel. Writers like Dave Eggers. Actresses like Chloë Sevigny. I remember at a cocktail party in SoHo once—it must have been in the mid-’90s—Susan Sontag, Haruki Murakami and I spent hours debating the merits of Mac OS 8’s new “Platinum” theme. Those were fine times, indeed.

But ever since the introduction of the mass-produced iMac and iBook, it’s been getting harder to distinguish the aesthetically conscious literati from the unwashed masses. It started with the yuppies, and now it’s moving on to state-school students and former Dell buyers. On Bedford Avenue, L Café is gone, replaced by a Baby Gap. Soon it will be smelly Linux enthusiasts (ugh!) popping their pimples over translucent keyboards and lickable widgets.

We Mac users were willing to forgive Apple the iPod’s popularity, but this... if this rumor is true, then this is going too far. Mon Dieu! Apple, why do you want to sell to these poor peasants? These people don’t appreciate beauty and elegance. They don’t understand it. They probably even voted for Bush—all four times.

Mr. Jobs, please establish eligibility requirements for the purchase of a new Mac. A good start would be to disqualify anyone who listens to Ashanti or anything they play on K-Rock. You could also disqualify people who think digital watches are cool, as well as all objectivists. In America, don’t even bother selling to the lower Midwest. Don’t accept applications postmarked from trailer parks. Ban the entire Hilton family.

One way or another, something must be done to preserve the Macintosh community. Anguished but unified, we cry out with one voice. Dam the river, close the gates, pull up the portcullis, keep out the tasteless proles. Please, Mr. Jobs, don’t wait until it’s too late.

------------
And for those who are comically challenged...it's a joke (or is it?).

Posted at 10:10PM Jan 03, 2005 by moazam in General | Comments[5] | Permalink

Wednesday Dec 29, 2004

pstack and gcore type tools for OS X?

I'm looking for pstack and gcore equivalent tools on OS X...does anyone know where I can find these?

I'm reading up on Shark [Optimizing Your Application with Shark 4] and while it seems pretty cool, I need something more like pstack.

Posted at 01:54AM Dec 29, 2004 by moazam in General | Comments[1] | Permalink

Wednesday Dec 22, 2004

Do you want your name on Sun bug reports?

I have seen cases where customers find relatively advanced bugs in software. These customers contact the vendor, the vendor acknowledges the bug and provides a fix for it. Now, the question is, should the public BugID refer back to the original customer/company who found this bug? i.e., Should that company get a 'cred' for it?

The reason I ask is because I have seen scenarios where certain customers (usually banks) will find a bug and after its been fixed, they will ask that their information NOT be made public as it relates to that bug. Then we have the flipside where the customer calls in and asks "Hey, so do we get any recognition for finding this bug?".

Soo..

Should it be:

1.) Let the customer decide
2.) Publish information on who originally found the bug
3.) Hide information on who originally found the bug

Posted at 10:35AM Dec 22, 2004 by moazam in Java | Comments[7] | Permalink

Tuesday Dec 14, 2004

New Nerdy License Plate

I finally got one o' them fancy personalized license plates! Photo taken in Niles Canyon area (Niles/Fremont, CA).

Posted at 08:40AM Dec 14, 2004 by moazam in General | Comments[9] | Permalink

Tuesday Dec 07, 2004

dtracing Linux programs on Solaris and peeking inside Java stacks

Somewhat belated on my part, but nevertheless..

Calvin Austin wrote up a quick little piece showing that he can dtrace a Linux program running on Solaris 10 (x86) and peek into the stack of a Java process.

Read here

Posted at 08:21AM Dec 07, 2004 by moazam in JVM Internals | Permalink

Thursday Nov 18, 2004

Solaris 10 Pictures

Solaris 10 logo inside the Santa Clara campus, opposite the cafe.

Solaris 10 logo at one of the entrances to the Santa Clara campus.

Posted at 07:48PM Nov 18, 2004 by moazam in Solaris | Permalink

Moazam Rajas Sun hosted weblog garbage collection II