Raible Designs

New Tomcat Releases: 4.1.29 and 5.0.14 Beta

I know these have already been announced on javablogs.com, but no insight was given - so here's some lovin'. 4.1.29 seems to be merely an upgrade to DBCP 1.1 - which is great AFAIK because the "kill abandoned connections" hasn't been working for me. Hopefully DBCP 1.1 fixes this. Unfortunately, I'm running 5.0.12 on this site (where I'm still having connection issues) and the 5.0.14 release seems to only have DBCP 1.0. Oh well, maybe they'll upgrade to 1.1 in the next release. I'll still upgrade this site to 5.0.14 - maybe sometime this weekend.

Later: I upgraded this site to 5.0.14 and it does appear to have DBCP 1.1. Also, the abandoned connection timeout might actually work - or at least it's doing some logging - as indicated by the following message:

AbandonedObjectPool is used (org.apache.commons.dbcp.AbandonedObjectPool@1077fc9)
   LogAbandoned: true
   RemoveAbandoned: true
   RemoveAbandonedTimeout: 60

The Last Day

Today is my last day at my current contract - my new contract starts on Monday. This has to be one of my best "last days" in quite some time. I gave my notice a month ago, and everyone has been super nice ever since. To show you why I think it's a good day, let's review some other last days I've had:

• [Highschool] Fired from McDonalds after 1 1/2 years for calling in sick and going to a basketball game (a co-worker saw me and reported me).
• [Real World] Gave two weeks notice (contract was ending as well). Escorted out of building two days before my last day for telling head honcho of Marketing that I'd be available to do work after my contract ended. I was advised to do this by the webmaster (who was a contractor). Apparently, this was a violation of my contract with IBM and the VP immediately told my boss I'd sent the e-mail. Started new job at eDeploy the next day.
• [Real World] After three rounds of layoffs, the CEO announced that we'd be closing the doors. Started drinking at noon, found contract two weeks later. This led to full time work through Raible Designs.
• [Real World] We were told we needed to re-estimate the project since we were over budget. They told us to take a week off while they figured out some budget stuff - when we came back, they told us we had one week left. Javadocs and knowledge transfer all week. Didn't find new gig for 2 months.
• [Real World] We had nothing to do for the last two months of the project - finally found out ending date. Quit one week early to do a small side project.

Any good last day stories out there?

Hibernate 2.1 Beta 5 Released!

Normally I wouldn't announce a Hibernate beta release (since it is a beta and I'm not currently using it), but there's a bunch of bug fixes (see release notes) that folks might be able to use. You can also download this bad-boy if you so desire.

On a side note ~ I find it amusing how my real-world projects influence my open source contributions. I don't follow Hibernate much because I don't use it day to day. On my last few projects, I've used it a lot. When I've used it, I've also used AppFuse, and therefore - I tend to contribute the AppFuse's development more. Same goes for the displaytag - which I haven't used in a project in several months - hence, no code commits from me. The good news is that on my current project, I have been using Struts Menu a LOT and I've committed some wicked new stuff to CVS. I'm busy writing documentation on it now so it will be easier to use for all. Maybe I'll try to convince my next project to use Roller for Project Status Reports...

Rsync Bookmarks

Chris has a couple of nice links about Rsync. I've been looking to use rsync to backup my iTunes Library on my Linux box in case my laptop dies. Hopefully these links will serve as nice bookmarks when I finally get around to doing this.

Easy Automated Snapshot-Style Backups with Linux and Rsync - You know you need it. (Also see OSX-specific tasks and tips.) [cwinters.com]

Panther ships with postfix instead of sendmail

I've been using localhost as my smtp server for quite some time on my PowerBook. It hasn't worked for a couple of days, and therefore, I've just stopped sending e-mail when I'm at work (I use my ISPs server at home). Finally, I buckled up and did 5 minutes worth of research to figure out the problem. It turns out that Panther doesn't ship with sendmail (which I previously had configured), but rather postfix - which I've never even heard of. Thanks to a little searching on the Apple Support site, I came across this discussion which has detailed instructions on how to configure postfix. The bonus is and that they actually worked! I still don't know what postfix is, but I assume it's just like sendmail, but for some reason it's better (or why would they have replaced sendmail).

What do you get a 1 year old for their birthday?

Abbie turns 1 year old next Wednesday - a birthday so good that they've decided to release The Matrix: Revolutions on the same day! We're having a party this weekend (yes, a keg will be there for the papas) and I don't know what to get her for her birthday. So I'm asking all you Dads out there - what was the coolest gift you got your kid(s) for their 1st birthday? When I say cool - I mean to say that they thought it was cool. Of course, if Mom thought it was cool - that counts too (esp. since it seems to be just as much for her as for Abbie).

Apache 2.0.48 and 1.3.29 Released!

The most popular web server has some new releases for you security conscious developers. What's changed? View the release notes for Apache 2.0.48 or for 1.3.29. You can download both versions here.

I found it strange that Panther shipped with 1.3.28 rather than 2.0.47 - luckily, I was able to quickly install 2.0.47 (thanks to a backup of /usr/local) and disable 1.3.28.

Mozilla 1.5 Released!

The Mozilla Foundation has released Mozilla 1.5. I don't really have any reasons to use Mozilla anymore because of Firebird, but since Mozilla Firebird depends on the same core as Mozilla - I suppose this is good for me. I wonder if it means that Firebird and Camino will have new releases soon?

Panther vs. Jaguar ~ The results are in!

According to my performance tests, Panther is faster than Jaguar for most things Java related. Compiling whole projects with Ant is a few seconds faster. Opening IDEA is only 1-2 seconds faster. Opening Eclipse is actually slower. Booting is considerably faster - they've managed to trim off 1/3 of the boot up time.

I really like Panther so far, but I've discovered today that my 3rd party memory will have to come out and stay out. I've had 5+ black screens of death and after talking to tech support from OWC, they've confirmed there is an issue with all 3rd party RAM. They said they'd be tracking down the issue and getting me a replacement ASAP.

Things I dig the most: the Finder (more like Windows Explorer), Mail and Expose. I can't figure out what Expose's "Application windows" is for - it just seems to highlight the current app I'm in.

Things that suck? Photoshop gives errors on startup but continues to run. Ant puked at one point but seems to work fine now. A few of the haxies I've purchased aren't available yet (for Panther). XCode kinda sucks too - it forces you to use it's directory structure for projects. It looks cool, but we all know that good IDEs don't force you to do anything.

[Proof] Panther ships with Ant, XDoclet and JBoss!

Simon mentions some treats that Panther has for developers:

I've just installed Panther and since you don't get stuff like CVS installed by default, I decided to open up the XCode CD and install the developer tools. To my surprise there are some Java tools tucked away including Ant, XDoclet, log4j and JBoss.

Here's a screenshot to prove it really does exist:

Wicked cool. It sucks that Ant is out of date (1.5.3), but that's OK since I already have it installed.

Oh yeah, and the 3rd Party RAM I have that was causing the Panther install to hang? I re-installed it and everything seems to work just fine.