Marco Walther's Weblog
Thursday December 27, 2007
An Article about my Highschool/Gymnasium OK, this article is not really new any more. It took almost a year until I came across it. But it's always interesting to see what your old school is doing. Especially when a (German) national paper is praising it very much. Here is a link to the "Die Welt" article titled "Germany's Smartest Pupils".
I checked a little more into it and I even found out that three of my former teachers are still there.
-- Marco
( Dec 27 2007, 02:43:37 PM PST ) Permalink
Monday November 12, 2007
One Laptop for You and One for a Child Maybe you have heared about it. There is the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) initiative out there. Now it's your chance to get one of the first models. For a limited time (today until Noveber 26.) you can pay $ 399 and get one of those nice pieces. But more importantly one additional laptop is sent to a child in need.
Two nice pieces of adverticement for this action:
 |
I only have to convince my family that I need another work computer
OK, a little update. I did not buy the g1g1. Instead I decided that I did not need another computer, so I donated the money for one and the Sun Foundation should match that shortly.(12/27/2007)
Thursday October 04, 2007
Fun on my Bicycle - Waves to Wine 
For the weekend I joined Team Sun and 1600 other bicycle riders for the Northern California MS150 Bike Tour "Waves to Wine". I did not know what I get into since this was my first participation in such a fund raising ride. But I must say, it was a lot of fun. I did not really train for a longer bike ride since I'm currently really swampt with work. I do my daily two times 15 miles as part of my commute but that was it.
So I was a bit worried before the start on Saturday. But the weather was very nice and the ride was good. It was a great day to ride over the Golden Gate Bridge. The ride was smooth and I kept in my own time esitmates for the something like 77 miles. Highway One is beautyful North of San Francisco, but I guess a couple of motorists were surprised by those many bikes.
We spent the afternoon and the night in Rohnert Park. There was a nice program, a good dinner and beer and wine, but I did not drink too much after the days workout.My family joined us for the afternoon and the night in tents. So everybody had fun.
The next morning started a bit cold. But that was OK. I felt fine after the Saturday ride, so we started at 8:00. The route went over small roads through the wine country. We did not meet too many cars and it was all around very nice.
The 75 miles went by quickly and I reached the finish line around 2:30.
Overall it was a fun weekend. And the outcome as a fund raising effort was also quite good. I was able to raise over $ 750 and Team Sun with it's fifteen riders raised over $ 11,500. So it was a big success. The consensus from all the riders I've seen after the ride is that we will be doing that again next year.
As always, have fun out there.
Marco
Tuesday June 12, 2007
Perl, Solaris 10/OpenSolaris and Sys::Syslog - Solved I ventured a bit into different languages lately. Over the last couple of days, I tried to install and run the mailing list manager Sympa on OpenSolaris and the CoolStack packages.
Building the pieces were not a big problem. But the first problem I encountered, was the missing BerkeleyDB in the CoolStack packages. OK, BerkeleyDB is not hard to build and that was fixed quickly once I knew what was going on.
The next problem was, that the Sys::Syslog module apparently does not work so well in newer Solaris versions. I searched the web but I was not able to find any solution. So I looked at the code and decided that I would write a targeted Sys::Syslog for Solaris which would actually use the libc interfaces instead of trying to do everything by hand.
Here is my little modified module, I hope, maybe somebody will find this useful. It uses the same API as the original module, so it should work as a drop-in replacement with the only exception that it actually communicates with the syslogd
Have fun.
-- Marco
Fri Jul 13 17:12:06 PDT 2007
OK, today I checked and there is actually a newer version of Sys::Syslog which works just fine on Solaris 10/OpenSolaris. I compiled it and replaced the version in the CoolStack Perl. Now I'm happy with that That's what you get when you blindly use source packages of some software
Monday May 07, 2007
Eco Live 2007 
I know, I should have spend my Saturday preparing for JavaONE and NetBeans Day. But instead I went to the Eco Live 2007 and listened to Dave Douglas and Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. . Let's say I thought I knew quite a bit about what's going on, but Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.'s presentation was a real eye opener. I hope I can get a hold of that presentation, and then everybody around me will be forced to watch it I did not know really know how much damage was done to the democracy and to the environmental protection laws during the last six years I had seen some of it, but I did not even hear about half of it.
At least I got his book. So that will skip right to the top of the stack as soon as I have a little time to read on the train again. So, please my good American friends 'Get informed'. And I mean more than just your Fox News. The world is larger than your nightly speeder, Anna Nicole Smith or neighborhood shooting. I don't want to say that that information isn't important as well, but there is more out there, try to find it. The internet is your friend, use it.
I'm very proud that Sun did actually sponsor this event. One step in the right direction. Thank you.
The next step is Java ONE. which starts officially on Tuesday but with a lot of activity already on Monday. Take Public Transit or bike to the conference! Sun has again partnered with the San Francisco Bike Coalition to offer a free "Bike Valet" services. The "Bike Valet" service will be available Monday through Thursday from 8:00 am - 7:00 pm and Friday from 8:00 am - 1:00 pm in front of the Moscone Center South Hall. Please consider making use of this offer.
I won't take my bike, I tried to find a way last year, but I'll use BART to get to the Moscone Center. I hope I'll see you there.
Thursday February 15, 2007
The First JavaOne Flyer - Online Only 
Usually I try to stay out of the big announcements. But an email today caught my eye. You know, all those high-gloss flyers you get for diverse expos and conferences are using a lot of resources. Sun decided to to the first round for this years JavaOne online-only. If you have read some postings here, you will know that I really like that idea.
Here are the estimated resource savings:
"By producing this piece virtually, the Eco group has calculated the savings Sun has made:
Savings from not sending DM1 this year
-Assuming (based on last year) DM1 is equivalent to 2.5 pages of 0% recycled copy paper
-Total paper saved = 4.63 tons
-Greenhouse Gases reduced (CO2 equivalents) = 13 tons (26,297 lbs)
-Reduction in wood use = 13 tons
-# of trees saved (assuming 1 tree makes 16.67 reams of copy paper or 8,333.3 sheets) = 111
-Reduction in wastewater (and associated water pollution) = 78,616 gallons *(equivalent to 838K cans of soda)*
-Reduction in solid waste (stuff sent to landfills) = 5.1 tons"
I think that's a good start. So please head on over to the JavaOne web site to read more about the upcoming conference.
( Feb 15 2007, 03:34:38 PM PST ) Permalink
Monday December 11, 2006
VWP @NetBeans 5.5 and project update We finally released the Visual Web Pack for NetBeans 5.5 So I might actually write a couple of more entries here again.
Some people see problems when they try to take a project from the VWP TP and open/build it with the final version of VWP. Something like:
I installed the new version of VWP but when I want to use my
previous project it shows below error:
C:\TP_Project\nbproject\build-impl.xml:419: Warning: Could not find file C:\TP_Project\${libs.woodstock-components.classpath.libfile.6} to copy.
BUILD FAILED (total time: 1 second)
The problem is that the libraries for the components have changed. Normally that should be handled automatically on project open when the project properties are synchronized with the values from the IDE. But when there are no other changes, to the IDE, the regeneration of the nbproject/build-impl.xml might not happen.
So when you see this problem while building/deploying a TP project, do the following:
- Close the project
- Remove the nbproject/build-impl.xml file from the project.
- Reopen the project and work with it.
The reopen will regenerate the nbproject/build-impl.xml with the right information.
I hope this is helpfull
Thanks,
-- Marco
Tuesday October 31, 2006
A little update on our PV system It has already been a year since we generate a lot of our electricity on our roof. Starting in October 2005 we got our new meter. So this years October bill was the time when PG&E did the true-up over the year.
We did not have to pay for any used electricity
We only payed for the fixed connection costs (basically that PG&E runs a wire to your house and that they provide the meter) something like six dollars per month.Our PV system produced around 5080 kWh over the last year, that's more than the estimated 3700 kWh
Our household used an additional 1040 kWh from PG&E over the year. I know, other houses use that in a monthOverall I think we saved something like 720 dollars on electricity costs and we avoided around 10,000 pounds of CO2 from coal firing power plants.
( Oct 31 2006, 11:29:51 AM PST ) Permalink
Wednesday October 25, 2006
NB 6 - trunk, Java SE 6 and KDE Long time nothing on this blog. Sorry about that. But here I come again
I started playing with NB 6 on top of the Java SE 6 RC builds. And as always I'm not using the default configuration. So I ran into an interesting problem. The NB IDE was not able to open an external browser on my Kubuntu 6.06 system
That worked fine with all the NB 5.5 builds I played with, but as it turns out, NB 6 makes use of the new java.awk.Desktop classes when it's running on a newer JDK. But that class only throws IOExceptions when it isn't able to handle the browse() action.
So strace is your friend, and a few minutes later, I had:
[pid 15878] execve("/export/home/marcow/bin/gnome-www-browser", ["gnome-www-browser", "http://www.sun.com"], [/* 46 vars */]) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory)
[pid 15878] execve("/usr/local/sbin/gnome-www-browser", ["gnome-www-browser", "http://www.sun.com"], [/* 46 vars */]) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory)
[pid 15878] execve("/usr/local/bin/gnome-www-browser", ["gnome-www-browser", "http://www.sun.com"], [/* 46 vars */]) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory)
[pid 15878] execve("/usr/sbin/gnome-www-browser", ["gnome-www-browser", "http://www.sun.com"], [/* 46 vars */]) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory)
[pid 15878] execve("/usr/bin/gnome-www-browser", ["gnome-www-browser", "http://www.sun.com"], [/* 46 vars */]) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory)
[pid 15878] execve("/sbin/gnome-www-browser", ["gnome-www-browser", "http://www.sun.com"], [/* 46 vars */]) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory)
[pid 15878] execve("/bin/gnome-www-browser", ["gnome-www-browser", "http://www.sun.com"], [/* 46 vars */]) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory)
[pid 15878] execve("/usr/bin/X11/gnome-www-browser", ["gnome-www-browser", "http://www.sun.com"], [/* 46 vars */]) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory)
[pid 15878] execve("/usr/games/gnome-www-browser", ["gnome-www-browser", "http://www.sun.com"], [/* 46 vars */]) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory)
[pid 15878] execve("/export/home/marcow/usr/vspms/bin/linux/gnome-www-browser", ["gnome-www-browser", "http://www.sun.com"], [/* 46 vars */]) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory)
[pid 15878] execve("/export/home/marcow/usr/vspms/bin/gnome-www-browser", ["gnome-www-browser", "http://www.sun.com"], [/* 46 vars */]) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory)
[pid 15878] execve("/opt/Forte/teamware/bin/gnome-www-browser", ["gnome-www-browser", "http://www.sun.com"], [/* 46 vars */]) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory)
[pid 15878] execve("/export/home/marcow/usr/vspms/bin/linux/gnome-www-browser", ["gnome-www-browser", "http://www.sun.com"], [/* 46 vars */]) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory)
[pid 15878] execve("/export/home/marcow/usr/vspms/bin/gnome-www-browser", ["gnome-www-browser", "http://www.sun.com"], [/* 46 vars */]) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory)
[pid 15878] execve("/opt/Forte/teamware/bin/gnome-www-browser", ["gnome-www-browser", "http://www.sun.com"], [/* 46 vars */]) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory)
OK, once you know what the system is looking for, it's easy to fix
If your path does not contain a gnome-www-browser, create one via a simple symlink.Maybe this helps some people.
Have fun,
-- Marco
( Oct 25 2006, 02:35:11 PM PDT ) Permalink
Tuesday August 15, 2006
It's the LinuxWorld Time Again and Other Related Events So I'll visit the expo floor tomorrow and see what's new and interesting
I don't know why Sun decided not to participate in the expo. I didn't even see OpenOffice in the exhibitor list, I hope they are somewhere.I'm playing with [K]Ubuntu lately. So another event which might be interesting is the Ubucon Conference right after the LWE (18. &19.) at Google in Mountain View.
And to give the Linux week a good end. There is the anual Linux Picnic at the Baylands Park in Sunnyvale on Saturday.
So have fun and get out there
-- Marco
( Aug 15 2006, 08:44:19 PM PDT ) Permalink
Friday June 16, 2006
Application Server and Proxy Authentication
The problem came up at least twice so far on our Java Studio Creator Forum. How can the application server use a proxy to connect to remote webservices etc when the proxy setup requires user authentication?
It looks like the normal Java SE 5 JDK does not provide any system properties alongside http.proxyHost and friends. At least I could not find any reference in the official documentation.
I think I found a way
But -
I can not test it!! I don't have a proxy setup which requires
authentication. I did some tests with normal web site authentication
and those seemed to work as expectedThis will only work with Java SE 5 or newer! In that version java.net.Authenticator changed a bit so that I can distinguish between authentication requests from normal servers and from proxies.
The Authenticator is not hard to write, I wrote one which takes additional system properties, http.proxyUserName, http.proxyPassword and the https.* versions. You can also write one which will find that information in a file or from LDAP if you like. In a development environment you could even bring up a dialog
But that will not work
for headless systemsThe trick is, you have to get a default Authenticator registered with the jvm which runs the application server. That turned out to be a bit harder. I did not find any hook where I could execute some code in the global server at startup (or at least before the first connection attempt to the proxy). You can't add it to normal applications, the SecurityManager will not let you do that
My solution to the problem was a little jar file in the boot classpath
I took the java.net.Authenticator source from the JDK
src.zip and added a little static bit to it Something likestatic {
ProxyAuthenticator.registerProxyAuthenticator();
}
That will make sure, my Authenticator will be the default one
If something later overwrites it, that's ok I guess.So when a proxy server (or a web server) asks for authentication, my code will be invoked and I can do whatever I need to get the username and password
To use this approach, add the following into the domain.xml in your application server.
<jvm-options>-Xbootclasspath/p:<path_to>Proxy1.jar</jvm-options>
<jvm-options>-Dhttp.proxyHost=<host></jvm-options>
...
<jvm-options>-Dhttp.proxyUserName=<user></jvm-options>
<jvm-options>-Dhttp.proxyPassword=<password></jvm-options>
...
Here is my little NetBeans 5.0 project and a pre-built jar file. I hope this helps some people. Please let me know if it works
Have fun
-- Marco
( Jun 16 2006, 04:49:46 PM PDT ) Permalink
Wednesday June 07, 2006
Java Studio Creator Training in SF Bay Area - Soon in June Maybe somebody is interested in a real instructor lead hands on training
Check out the official Creator Training page
I've seen Gail & Paul Anderson at the J1 labs and I was surprised on how much they could pack into an one hour lab session. Now think three days, that will be a lot of fun
Have fun.
-- Marco ( Jun 07 2006, 01:21:23 PM PDT ) Permalink
Wednesday May 31, 2006
An Inconvenient Truth If you have read a couple of my posts here, you might have realized that I'm not only interested in Java Studio Creator. Sometimes I also look out of my window
So I was thinking if I should add a link to a film, which I find very important. So far I staid out of big product announcements etc. But in the end, I believe that's an important enough issue to bring it up here.
So if you want to watch a film, which might shock you quite a bit, try to find a theater which shows "An Inconvenient Truth". Here are some trailers
Thursday May 25, 2006
Late JavaOne impressions
Last week was a lot of fun
JavaOne time. But at the end of it, I was very tired.Everything started with the NetBeans Day on Monday. Or better with the registration to it. Seeing all those people standing in line to listen to what's new and coming in NB was quite a sight. I talked to a couple of people while standing in line about what tools they were using. Most of the people I talked to there where using more than one editor/IDE. Some little missing features can sometimes make the live harder than it should be. I pointed a couple to Sandip's blog to show them that there is more out there and how easy it is to write your own little additional modules.
The presentations were good, but the conference rooms in the hotel could not hold all the people. I was especially interested in Sandip's presentation of the future Creator pack. That went well and I think a lot of people liked the idea that we are finally combining the two.
Tuesday, the AXAJ and Semplice showings in the keynotes were well recieved. I don't think too many people understood really what Tor was showing there. I think a couple got it later in the week at the Semplice coming out session.
One session was called "Twelve Reasons to Use Creator". Charles Ditzel wrote about it. I know a lot about Creator but I wanted to see what questions and concerns would come up there. Overall, I think the audience did learn a lot about different corners of Creator. For me the best part was when Octavian tried to squeeze into a small NetBeans shell (ahm t-shirt
. I tried to take some pictures but those little digital cameras don't work so well at a distance I talked to a lot of people during my shift at the Creator booth in the Pavillion. Some things that came up again where Tomcat and JBoss, Java EE 5 support (and the unfortunate lack of Java SE 5 support in the current Creator), JDBC driver issues, and portlets/portal questions. Overall I somehow seem to see an increase in interest in the portlet area. At J1, at the Creator forum and I even get emails asking about deploying our portlets to different portals. So I used the pavillion to talk to the JBoss Portal and the LifeRay people. In the end I was successful to deploy our portlets to both of them
Later in the evening I went to the packed JavaPosse BOF. The room in the Argent hotel could hardly hold all the people. Ofcourse I know all those four guys and it was a fun evening. Listen to episode #55 to get an impression
But it ended (officially) at
23:20 and I had to get home.On Wednesday the most interesting talk for me was probably the Groovy talk. I come from a Unix background and did some scripting all along. I find that combination of Java and a scripting language good. I hope I can try to play with that a bit more in the near future.
Thursday started with the IBM keynote. I did not know what to expect but was surprised by the Eclipse and it's community talk. I found the demo of the tight integration of the IDE with the overall process very interesting. There was an old joke in the Emacs world: "When do you know that an editor matures? - When it can send email." I guess that process integration is a step into the same direction, doing more in the same environment.
Next was the Semplice talk. Unfortunately it was moved from the afternoon to the moring. So I don't know how many people did not make it. But the people who made it found it very interesting. Unfortunately the talk now collided with another talk "Dynamic Typed Languages and the JVM" which I would have also liked to attend
In the evening, the famous J1 Bash with James Gosling's t-shirt throwing-machine contest. Some time to relax a bit and have fun.
Later I went to two NetBeans BOF's. In the first one Geertjan and Petr showed how easy it is to extend or customize NB with a new Web Framework. The second one was about the NB collaboration modules with a twist. The transport layer was JXTA
At that BOF one guy came up and
talked about how he had tried to get the NB collaboration modules
working in Creator. He was not completely happy. I tried that as well
way back when. I got most of it to work but then too much other stuff
came in between and that never went anywhere.And it was again 23:20 and time to get home.
Friday started with the fun Sun keynote. I did not ride my bicycle that week
I was simply too tired and BART has restrictions on which
trains you can bring your bike, so it did not play out. But quite some
people did ride And one guy won the Lance Armstrong jerseyJames Gosling had the final of the RT Slot Car Race on stage. That race track was always surrounded by a lot of people at the pavillion. And I've seen quite a few people spending a lot of time there trying to get into that final. Four kids from Germany made it and ended up taking second place
Two interesting talks were the NB API development talk and a session on JSF in portlets.
Overall I trink it was a very good conference. I don't have any numbers but it looked more buzzing than the last couple of years. One thing, I have to think about, is how to better handle late BOF's, early keynotes and a 1.5 hour commute time.
And now I need some time to play with my new toy
The Jasper S20 phone. So far, it works pretty well as normal cell phone but I got it
to play with the devlopment for itHave fun
-- Marco
PS: I had big problems today. For whatever reason, my FireFox timed out all the time when I tried to write this post
( May 25 2006, 03:36:26 PM PDT ) Permalink Comments [3]
Sunday May 14, 2006
Planet Java Studio Creator ? I'm toying with a Planet Java Studio Creator site idea. So far I've my first attempt but I would like to know if other people find this useful and what they would like to see there.
The CSS is still completely messed up but look at planetjscreator and let me know if that would be useful. Currently it's only using feeds from Sun but I would like to open it to other Creator related feeds.
Please be patient, that's currently hosted on my little Cobalt Qube 3 on a DSL line. It might move or completely disappear depending on the responses I get
I've also created a thread on the Creator forum. So you can also discuss this there.
Thanks,
-- Marco
( May 14 2006, 12:43:15 PM PDT ) Permalink Comments [2]
