log4p

Web Services Basic

2006-04-26

exam page

3

Passed…. bumped my total to 56 knowledge points… now… I’ll have to wait for new exams to become stable, it’s just not possible to get a brown belt yet.

Today I replaced our US Robotics access point by a Linksys WRT54g, hopefully to get rid of all the connection problems we had before. After configuring the iBook and WinXP machine I tried to get my laptop to associate with it using dappers’ BCM43xx kernel driver. Couldn’t get it to work…

Finally I decided to get back to using ndiswrapper… after removing dappers’ kernel module and installing this driver using ndiswrapper it got everything to work again. Security seems to be much more mature as well:

wlan0: encryption modes supported: WEP; TKIP with WPA; AES/CCMP with WPA

I’ll see if it works in the office tomorrow!

After using compiz/xgl for a week (yes, you DO get used to wobbly windows and rotating cubes). I kept noticing the huge ammount of memory used by compiz/xgl… On my 1Gig system it was using arround 500MB! Since running eclipse in combination with open office and magicdraw screams for memory I decided to turn of xgl/compiz for the moment.
To bad because all those fancy effects really make windows people want to run linux!

Passed my OO Intermed today, and skipped the green belt… straight on to the blue belt! Since I’ve been busy passing exams lately, I’m now only 7 knowledge points away from my brown belt… which is currently the highest achievable goal.

Today I passed the magic number of 45 knowledge points by passing the Ant basic exam. I hoped this would be sufficient to get my blue belt… but no…

So, I’ll have to wait a couple of days so I can finally pass my OO Intermed exam…. to bad.

As a kid I was (and, come to think of it I still am) intruiged by the way the archer fish hunts. The fish hunts insects and other small animals by shooting them down with a small ray of water:

Now I was pointed to this article in Nature magazine about a fish that can wriggle from Africa’s tropical swamps to snaffle a snack on land.
The article also contains a video demonstrating the ‘wriggling’.

So why do I think fish hunting on land is more special then mammals hunting in water… since live has evolved from the oceans, how can it be that we don’t see many examples of fish hunting on land?

I pointed my colleagues at the VPRO to Java Black Belt, and some of them (rob / edwin) seem to be really enjoying it. Rob is approaching my level at rampaging pace, hopefull I’ll be green belt before he manages to reach it (gotta love competition!).

So today I did the Spring Basic exam, and passed…

To bad I managed to fail the OO Intermed exam a couple of days ago; made one mistake to much… I found it to be harder than expected! Failing OO Intermed exam resulted in not being able to get met green belt in the next seven days, let’s just hope Rob has some troubles as well!

Posting wireless now, got wireless to work using ndiswrapper

Took me a bit longer than expected, mainly caused by  lspci reporting the cards as: Broadcom Corporation BCM4306.
I tried to get stuff to work using a driver for this card, but this didn’t work. The following worked much better:

1. download the winxp drivers ftp://ftp.dell.com/network/R115321.EXE (almost 50 mb!?)
2. unzip the file, yes I know the extension is .exe
3. install ndiswrapper (sudo apt-get install ndiswrapper)
4. install ndiswrapper gtk application (sudo apt-get install ndisgtk)
5. go to: system >> administration >> windows wireless drivers
6. select ‘bcmwl5.inf’ from the extracted DRIVER directory
7. configure the network

First time I used ndisgtk, and I like it… it works!

Today my accountmanager brought me my company laptop:a full blown inspiron 5150! Allthough I’ll really miss the widescreen of my Inspiron 8500 lots of stuff to be happy about:

• 3.2 Ghz P4 /HT
• 1 Gig of ram
• 80 Gig hd
• DVD RW
• GeForce FX Go 5200
• XVGA (1440×1200)

The first thing I did was wiping the disk and install Ubuntu (5.10), took less then 40 minutes and I’m allready typing this post from a fresh installation!

Didn’t put time in getting the onboard WLAN to work, doesn’t seem to work OOTB…. I’ll give it a go after doing the dishes
In a couple of days the 8500 will probably be transfered to my wife, she’s getting really annoyed by the 1024×768 screen of the iBook G4 she’s currently using.

Today the DWR project has released version 2.0 milestone 1. The releasenotes claim the most import new feature is ‘reverse ajax’:

The biggest new feature is what we call Reverse Ajax. DWR 1.x allowed you to asynchronously call Java code from Javascript. DWR 2.0 builds on this to allow you to asynchronously call Javascript code from Java. Reverse Ajax makes writing interactive applications much easier. It can use polling or Comet (long-lived HTTP) queries.

In the past I used pushlet alike technology to get this to work, which basically keeps the response stream open to write javascript calls to the running javascript engine. Having used this technology for a couple of years to send events to connected clients I can only conclude: it doesn’t scale well / at all. Flipping through the ‘comet’ page doesn’t really convince me they solved to problem. Great they also offer polling support, which is much easier in the sense of scalability.

Some other new features include:

• support for generics (no more signatures!!)
• support for metadata in the call (will be stored in request attributes)

Looks promising, a bit of a dissapointment is:

So please do not use DWR 2.0 in a production system until we’ve had more testing and inspections.

In the paragraph on Security and Stability… I’ll try to wait until it is safe spending time!