log4p

Yesterday evening I attended the EJB3 workshop at Amis, and NO I am NOT thinking about switching, it’s all about knowledge. I was told this workshop would not be focused at persistence, but mainly about session beans (i.e. remoting, security). Wrong.

The presentation (and hands-on part) was a brief overview of JEE5 focused at people completely new to the concept. Still, good to see it all once more. The main problem of the presentation was the lack of knowledge of the presenter (At least have the correct answer to ‘what is JEE5′, I really don’t think it’s just a book) and the unnecessary amount of errors in example code used in the sheets (missing casts, unsafe conversions, incorrect EQL).

The hands-on part of the workshop wasn’t any better, mainly due to poorly refactored documentation and the fact that we HAD to use netbeans.

Some advice for other attendees would be to just take a look at the JBoss EJB3 trailblazer.

Still, I learned a lot during and after this workshop:

• DOJO really rocks
• JDeveloper is getting better and better
• ADF isn’t much bit better than MyFaces
• OC4J is an applications server which presumably sucks at deploying WAR files
• More pizza then persons rocks!
• a Peugot 306 can be equiped with a warpdrive and instantaneous stopping mechanism

Some weeks ago I spend a lot of time building a new bathroom in my house. I promised people to put some snapshots online… but till now I wasn’t satisfied with the pictures I made. This was basically due to the lack of a wide-angle lens; I just couldn’t get a nice overview.

So, while have a nice beer at a brewery in Rotterdam during a Finalist meeting I asked one of the photo specialists how to solve this problem.

He came up with the great idea of stitching a couple of shots together using the excellent autostitch.

The result (I used 29 pictures as source) is a bit psychedelic, but I’m quite pleased by the way it represents the overall look & feel:

(I also tried to use linux based tools, they work… but require far to much manual involvement for this specific project )

Today Adobe fixed my main problem related to browsing the web using Linux: they’ve released a working version (9) of the Flash player plugin capable of playing flash 8 files for Linux. Release notes of the player can be found here the player itself can be downloaded here.

After installation Firefox prints the following info for the plugin:

Shockwave Flash
File name: libflashplayer.so
Shockwave Flash 9.0 d55

Works like a charm, kudos to Adobe (well… not for the inhumane timeframe… but still).

The release of the Intel version OSX a while ago kept me thinking about running OSX on my Dell notebook. Yes, I do have G4 iBook …. but I just wanted to know if it is possible.

While searching I found some excellent tips on http://www.osx86project.org/.

Testing applications in Safari would be the main purpose, so I took some time to get OSX running on vmware (server) (previous experience tells me having to reboot for a simple test just isn’t workable).

Installation took a while, mainly because I forgot to assign a fair amount of memory to the target VM, and I had to boot the installer in safe mode (-x in the boot menu). Apart from this the installation was as straightforward as it should be.

The resulting image does work, but is dog slow… and seems to be really unstable, but did I mention that it works? Here are some screenshots:

Now, if someone could find out how to get some performance out of this setup it would be really useful for multi platform testing!