the corner office

As you could guess from my previous post, it's JVM muckabout time. I've been having grrrr moments with Sun's 1.5 JVM the past few nights, after finally getting around to upgrading my home box from Java 1.4. After a heap of googling and forum scouring, I've come to the conclusion that Linux AMD64 users are either all running hopelessly over-powered machines, or they don't have very high expections of Java.

The problem boils down to the fact that Sun's 1.5 JVM for 64-bit platforms doesn't come with a client HotSpot VM, only the Server version. But as Sun's own documentation says, a 'server' class machine should have at least 2 CPUs and 2 gigs of RAM. What that means is that more modest AMD64s are biting off a touch more than they can initially chew when they fire up a 1.5 JVM.

Using Eclipse is ridiculously slow - mouse juddering slow. Starting up Tomcat via MyEclipse with my collection of web apps takes about 5 seconds using IBM's 1.4.2 JVM. Using Sun's 1.5 JVM slows things down to 15-20 seconds, which is just insane. Over time the server VM's performance would even out and be the better bet, but if you're starting and stopping Tomcat a lot, which is typical for lots of edit/tweak/break/edit work, you're never going to benefit from it.

Thankfully, IBM's 64 bit 1.5 JDK has debuted in the Gentoo world, so here's hoping that'll solve my problems. Installing it (and for bonus marks, getting the java-config tool to play nicely with it) is tonight's job.

Readme file extract from IBM's Java 1.5 SDK:

IBM SDK for Linux, Java 2 Technology Edition, Version 5.0
---------------------------------------------------------


This READMEFIRST file applies to Version 5.0, and to all 
subsequent releases, modifications, and service refreshes, 
until otherwise indicated in a new READMEFIRST file.

This READMEFIRST file provides late-breaking information that 
was not incorporated into the User Guides.  This file must be 
read in conjunction with any User Guides listed below.


Currently, there are no late-breaking changes for this platform.

Woah. If you have 28 megs to spare, download this video of a 4-legged robot being developed as a mechanised pack mule for the US DOD. This thing is powered by a 2-stroke engine, and can climb 35 degree inclines, move across all sorts of terrain, and can even recover its balance after being kicked.

In the video, the legs are wrapped are in black cloth, which gives them a pseudo-cartoonish human-in-a-tracksuit look. One part of my brain is telling me it's a machine while other parts of my brain are thinking that this weird thing is moving almost, but not quite like a real walking animal. A strange sensation. I amost felt sorry for it getting kicked.

Freaky, but incredible.

(via jwz)

The Koeberg sabotage story is the most brazen bit of political BS I've ever seen. Imagine if it were true. That sort of security lapse at a nuclear power plant would be quite a big freakin' deal. Chernobyl big, not so? I don't think anyone's buying it though.

Local bloggers have been having a ball.

Farrel Lifson:

When it comes to looking at a situation I tend to follow a few simple rules, and one of the most prominent is 'never attribute to malice that which can be attributed to stupidity'. Where Alec Erwin sees Hellen Zille in ninja garb rapelling down the side of Koeberg's reactor housing and snapping the necks of innocent security guards, I see growth in the economy without any growth in the infrastructure to support that growing economy

(Laurence beat me to the quote, and punch line).

Jonty Fisher:

The story goes like this: Said saboteur scales security fencing, gets through high security throughout the outer reaches of Koeberg to reach the inner workings of the reactor, somehow avoids the IAEA cameras in every room, grabs a loose bolt, runs into a room where the heat would undoubtedly combust any normal human, and hurls the bolt into the generator.

You can't help but poke fun at this, but beyond the humour, it's just plain embarassing for the country.

A new virtual server to play with!

Well, it's an entry-level virtual server with 256 megs of RAM, and about as much horsepower as an old wrist watch, but still: I'm goin' large with this baby, as they say. I chose Debian Sarge as the distribution because I've never used debianesque distros before, and this will be a fun way to learn the quirks. In addition to the web stuff, it'll give me a chance to play with some admin-ey things as well. First start, learning how to make apt-get do my bidding.

First observation: I don't know if it's because this is a bare bones installation, but this is the first *nix machine I've ever been on that had more, but not less.

Our local voting station was queued up to the parking lot at lunchtime, but dead quiet after 6. A 'party official' was having a bit of a disagreement with an IEC official about some irregularity, but they settled it rather quickly. Booooring.

I always have a strong irrational fear in the voting booth that I'm going to screw up. I get all nervous about whether I've marked the right block, if my cross is big enough, too big? Should I have made a tick? Do corrections have to be initialled? Did I really mark the right block? Double-check, no turning back now, yes, oh bugger, now I have to put the voting slips in different boxes? Am I getting them right? White on white, yellow on yellow. Am I sure? The box looks kinda full, what if I can't fit the paper into the box? Are people staring at me? Am I taking too long at this?

Stupid, but there you go. Haveta suffer for democracy.

Somewhere between learning about ls and rm, one's introduction to the world of Linux will include a full indoctrination into the danger of working as root. To this day, when I su into a root terminal, I feel a little dirty. This is different to the Windows world, where most people I know (including myself) don't think twice about putting themselves into the administrator group when setting up the OS.

I digress. Not having admin rights means that it's not as easy to use the Eclipse update manager to install plug-ins to system directories, because your normal user account doesn't have permission to put files there (and firing up Eclipse as root to do it is just, well, even more dirty-feeling). I usually revert to manually setting up plugins (also allows me keep the install files archived), but it's a bit of a schlep going into the eclipse program directory to do it. I did a quick search and found two blog posts (here and here) which helped me to set up an independent directory as an external plugin site, and then link to it as an extension. This keeps your basic Eclipse installation clean, and it means that if you automatically update your installation a la Gentoo, you have less hassles keeping your plug-ins functional across upgrades.

No more excuses, time to get back to the much-neglected new blog template. This post is just a few thoughts on defining URL structure.

My current blog has links of the form http://www.thecorneroffice.org/plink/060225-0915. That's a nice and clean URL, but there are two things I plan to change. First, not all blog content is behind the plink directory, so the blog effectively sits in the 'root' context. This is fine for a domain name that's blog-centric and little else, but one of the things I liked about 'thecorneroffice.org' as a generic host name was that I could hang other sites (user directories, etc) off of it down the line. So the first change I'm keen to implement is that the new blog will be sitting in its own context, something like www.thecorneroffice.org/blog/plink/ze-plink.

Since that breaks incoming links already, I can tackle the next pet niggle. I don't like the fact that my permalinks don't have a file extension. It's not strictly necessary, but I think it's good netiquette. What extension will I use? They'll have .html extensions. A principle I'm quite partial to is that bookmarkable (ie. long-lived) links should hide implementation details. Mypage.php is going to break if you move away from PHP. Ditto for jsp's and asp's and nsf's and whatnot. I'm not sure if the web powers that be would frown upon it, but my feeling is that if a page is serving up HTML, then giving it a .html extension is not a bad thing, irrespective of what's actually generating it.

Apart from being able to switch web app engines without breaking URLs, it also means that you can dump the entire site to HTML one day and serve it statically, if you want to. That's another reason why I'm not fond of index.php?id=12345 URLs. Not only does it tie you to a particular platform, but it means that your web server is going to have to dynamically handle these URLs in perpetuity.

Obviously, there are some things where that doesn't matter. Summary views aren't meant to be static, long-lived, or bookmarked. Ditto for comment-posting actions and the like. Moving from a doc?CreateDocument to a postComment.do in a form action isn't going to bother anyone.

There's another issue I haven't decided on, yet. Many blogging apps sort posts in a year/month directory structure, like 2006/02/mah-blog.html. The month/day division is a Good Thing - having all posts in a flat structure, hanging off of plink, screams 'database-retrieved'. A few thousand posts down the line, that virtual plink 'directory' is getting rather busy. As I said, I'm still thinking this through, because while it makes sense, I think it looks a bit uglier. Do aesthetics win over principles?

The jury's out.

How will I deal with incoming links to existing permalinks? Weeell, I don't have many incoming links to my posts, so I can get away with a simple app sitting on a /plink context, serving out 301 redirects for known permalinks and 404's with 'hey, try over there' comments for the rest. Most of my traffic apart from RSS feeds and faithful friends and family hitting the front page, is via Google for esoteric technical posts, and Google will sort itself out soon enough.

The only downside of the move, is going to be the eventual retirement of the colinp.dominodeveloper.net host name. When I started hosting with DDN, that was the only host you could use. Four months later I added thecorneroffice.org, and have used that in web comments etc ever since, but waaay over a year later, colinp.dominodeveloper.net still gets 4 times more traffic!

I felt a bit bad about postponing a number of my Honours exams last year, and this makes up for it a bit. I wrote (and passed) the Sun Certified Web Component Developer Exam today.

All credit to Head First Servlets & JSP, which I'd enthusiastically recommend to anyone writing the exam. I got 84% which was more than I expected (or deserved), but I definitely could have done better with less cramming and more diligence. You really have to know lots of API nitty-gritties for the exam, and it's a rare bird who's really going to try to memorise all the various J2EE specs and APIs. In addition to the HF format which does a good job of getting concepts into your noggin, the fact that the authors were involved in setting the SCWCD exam helps when it comes to knowing what to focus on. Also, with a number of questions I could see why certain niggles were emphasised in the book.

Also, if you're out on the West Rand and looking for a quiet Prometric venue, give these folks a shout. I had an expiring voucher so this was a bit of a last-minute thing, and I was able to book last Thursday, and write today. Even better, I was the only one in the exam room - nice, quiet, easy.

Cape Town seems to be the place where the real politics is happening, in the run-up to Wednesday's elections. Power failures providing fodder for spittle-flying anti-ANC rhetoric, forgot-to-register court shenanigans with the ACDP, and real personalities in the mayoral race (except for the ANC, where The Mystery Mayorial Candidate will jump out of the victory cake at the celebrations if they actually win). It's fun stuff, it makes for Good TV.

Joburg, on the other hand, seems rather stale. Ultimately it's all a bit disconnected, and I don't think many people around here are that involved in the local politics. Driving down Pendoring/Weltevreden road, there're posters for a DA candidate named Van Zijl (iirc), and an ANC candidate named Twala (iirc, again) (correction: drove past, I had her name wrong). Which just goes to show, I have no bloomin' idea who these people are and I'm barely sure if I'm remembering their names correctly (correction: I wasn't). I don't even know if they're candidates for my ward or one of the wards next door to us.

The only other memorable posters down Pendoring are Uncle Tony staring longingly into the distance, dreaming of a Bright New Tomorrow where black people vote for him, and Oom Pietie Mulder trying to look as impressively conservative but good-naturedly earnest as you can get.

If I had to vote purely on how dynamic and capable people looked in their posters, I'd vote for Ms Twala.

But I won't. It really just comes down to old-fashioned opposition politics, and because of that, the ANC doesn't get my vote, and the DA does. They haven't done much to earn it, but since they're not the people calling the shots, I hope they'll at least make life difficult for the people who do.

It is nice to see, though, that people are standing up and giving the ANC what-for in places where the ANC has really failed to deliver.