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After the big takeover of JBoss by Redhat, what else was to be expected then small companies smelling money. Slashdot features a post about Firestar filing a patent claim against Redhat claiming that they ‘have suffered and will continue to suffer substantial damages.’.

Funny to see this claim being filed after Hibernate moved to Redhat… I just hate this sort of non-constructive patent stuff.

O.k. for the outsiders, a bit more information:

• Hibernate is the de facto ORM (Object Relational Mapping) framework for Java, and a big part of the latest JEE standard is based upon it.
• Hibernate was/is a subproject of JBoss
• JBoss was bought by Redhat a couple of months ago
• FireStar alleges that Hibernate violates U.S. patent 6,101,502 — ” Object model mapping and runtime engine for employing relational database with object oriented software.” (wow, is this a valid patent? what about Ruby’s Active Record? Toplink? Kodo? JDO?)
• I never met anyone using Firestar products
• Patent experts seem to agree on the fact that the lawsuit appears to be skillful manoeuvring on Firestar’s part; they waited until after the JBoss Red Hat acquisition intentions were announced and notified JBoss about the potential infringement on May 26th, which was within the JBoss Red Hat due dilligence period.

A short discussion with my father today made me think about environments for software testing. One of my previous projects had a full OTAP environment for testing (Dutch acronym for development, system test, functional acceptance test and production). The current project features a testserver and database.

Eventhough it seems to be common practice to have isolated environments in which the application can be tested both cases as described above don’t even approach the final production environments:

• slower machines (less cpu’s and less memory, slower disks)
• less machines in the cluster
• far less concurrent users
• different configuration requirements (errors in configuration files are amongst the most common problems I’ve seen)
• different security setups (the current test machines allow outgoing HTTP requests whilst the production machines don’t)
• different JVM versions (the minor number, but still)
• test machines share the VM to other processes

The differences are so big that a application working for the full 100% on the test environment might not work at all in the production environment. So if the application is accepted as working on the test environment… what does that mean? Is it now safe to replace the old version of the production application by this new version? Who is responsible if a bug which only occurs in the production environment corrupts important data? What if the application suddenly exposes sensitive information when running in a cluster?

Is it actually possible to simulate the production environment in a scale which makes it possible to fully test the application, and is such a sollution still commercially viable?

Today I had my first, and best fathersday ever. Most people wouldn’t even think about achieving anything at such day at all, I managed to do quite a lot! Here a short summary of my day:

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I just passed my Swing – Basic exam:

Results speak for themselves! And YES I’m a brown belt now!

Google’s earth, a 3d interface to the planet, is now availlable for linux (natively) as well. Now if only they would include higher resolution pictures of my area (and yes, I wouldn’t mind the 3d building outlining either ):

But anyway, great job getting a native linux port out Google!

I know, Google is evil. But they now offer a great extension for Firefox called Google Browser Sync. It allows you to sync your Firefox profile (bookmarks, stored passwords, history) with a cenrtralized service; a roaming browser profile!
When I first read the announcement I was a bit scared by the implications on privacy, but the extension allows you to select which part of the profile should be stored encrypted:

I hope this will help me in loosing passwords for sites like Java Blackbelt, Amazon and Linked.in each time I reinstall or switch computers! Go Google!

— update —

It seems google sync can not cope with ‘complex’ firefox configurations: at work I tend to switch proxy settings quite often, this is the preferred way of selecting different stages in the OTAP environment (OTAP is a common used Dutch acronym for development, system test, functional acceptance test and production) for my current project. The problem is: if I forget to reset the proxy settings  at work  Google sync won’t let me start my browser at home….!! Unworkable!

Last week I devised a cunning plan to get myself a Streamium SL300i unit. I won’t go into details concerning the plan, but it included a travelsleeper, my dad, a superb performance of the Stripe bigband (featuring my dad playing his trombone) and last but not least: my son.
The SL300i allows you to wirelessly enrich your TV and audio system with multimedia (music, pictures & movies) from your PC or directly from the internet. The actual unit is nice and small, about the size of 3 DVD jewel cases:

After wiring the unit and installing the uPnP server on our main MP3/Video machine it actually worked fine right away!

Now we can access and watch/listing all our media content without the need of wires and buring cds/dvds. Wasn’t able to get the pinkpop live streams broadcasted by the VPRO today to work (according to the manual the format can be handled by the streamium) haven’t tried really hard yet… other internet radio streams seem to work just fine!

Cool!

….. update ……
Ok, it DID work fine after the initial setup. Things have gone a long way since then…

Last night the Streamium decided it needed to install updated firmware. During the proces something seems to have gone ill. The nice part is that the Streamium is smart enough to boot the previous firmware version if things go wrong. The not-so-nice part is that the Stream starts installing new updates as soon as it boots…. and drops back to the previous version…. and boots into the previous version…. and installs updated firmware…. and drops back…. (you get the idea).

….. update …..

Miracles happen! Somehow the streamium managed to install the updated firmware (after about 70 reboots). Everything seems to be fine again!