A visitor to the site (Frankie - post here) mentioned that I never replaced the ssh binary within the SSH Tunnel Manager in order to take advantage of the intel binary! Doh!
So, without further ado, it's now recompiled with the intel version of ssh.
Download here. (this is a thinkfree office link, once you go to the page, use the menu in the upper right to download the file)
Thanks Frankie!

java -Dos.name=unix -jar server921_generic.jar -mode=console

I know a wrote a snippet on how to do this previously, but for some reason I think it disappeared. Just open up a Terminal.app and type the above in (after downloading the generic Weblogic installer from BEA).

The -Dos.name option gets around the 'insufficient disk space' erroneous error that the installer gives.

Came across this image on the net after not seeing it for many years, so I HAD to share it again with all.

Enjoy!


Also found a fantastic document on how to write unmaintainable code to ensure job security! Too funny.

Enjoy as well!

I recompiled img2icns as a universal binary. Should be available here.
img2icns.app

Thank you Matteo Rattotti for a great little utility!

Make sure to check out my mobile blog (right side of page... the pictures). I've put a few pictures that I've been snapping throughout JavaOne up there and I'll be adding more as I get the chance to upload them!

I'm out at JavaOne this week. Biggest let down is that Borland is no longer around! The Borland party was a legend at this thing. Oh well. I think Tangosol and BEA invited me to a shindig tonight.... so maybe that will make up for it. And Sun is supposed to have their Developer's bash tomorrow night. With any luck I'll meet some great people and get really liquored up.

Wish me luck!

I like the Tynsoe projects "SSH Tunnel Manager" application, and have been using it since I found it. However there was no Universal Binary yet, so I decided to compile it.


I linked it off of my ThinkFree office account:
SSH_Tunnel_Manager_2.0b3_Universal_Binary.dmg

The original project is available at it's home website! Thank you Yann (I think that's the author's name)!

<rant>

OK. This is something that has been bugging me for a while, and I just havn't written about it; so here goes. Who in their RIGHT MIND would publish IDL in PDF format? This is amazing to me. It actually takes extra effort to do this. And how, may I ask, should someone extract IDL from a PDF cleanly? I'll tell you: you can't. It's a painstaking process of converting to text, removing page numbers, headers, footers, adjusting the IDL manually so that it is actually parseable and then saving it.

It is absolutely amazing to me that this is done, but it is. I've gotten IDL for implementation of CORBA interfaces in PDF format, not just once, but many times! For instance, Verizon East. Their preorder interface. All IDL in a PDF. And when asked specifically for a plain jane text file, the response is: sorry we don't have the IDL in that format. Are you kidding me??? How did you get it into a PDF in the first place??

</rant>

I got it! My MacBook Pro arrived, and it is awesome! A project that I used to compile on my old trusty PowerBook would take upwards of 3 minutes now compiles in 25 seconds! That is a massive improvement in javac compile times (and it's only using one of the cores, oh yeah!). I have the 2.16 and a buddy of mine has the 2.0 ghz MacBook, his compiles the project in 30 seconds.... so the .16 IS noticible! Ha! My wait was worth it

I've attempted to use several IDE's since I got the unit. My first attempt to use NetBeans since about one and a half years ago was not the success I had hoped for. After a long night (loooong night) of hacking out a replacement for Quartz (that's another story, man is it a poor implementation of a good idea), I came to the conclusion that 'losing' my cursor within the IDE is NOT amenable to writing and debugging code quickly. NetBeans would CONSTANTLY loose my cursor (it just disappears) and would require me to quit the IDE and relaunch it in order to get it back! I must have launched NetBeans close to 20-30 times that night. Other than that (huge issue) the IDE ran very nice, and I can see how someone could get hooked on it.

My next IDE is Eclipse, which I am very comfortable with, as I have been using it for the past two years or so. Eclipse has a Universal Binary version (required due to SWT) released in their 3.2 stream, so it's not a 'production ready' build and I've seen a few glitches here and there, but it doesn't seem to be anything 'MacBook' related. I plan on continuing to try to use it.

And of course, the old standby, JDeveloper. Oracle has really worked hard on this IDE and it works beautifully on my MacBook Pro. I have no complaints, well, almost no complaints. It's kind of nitpicky really. JDeveloper is ugly. The IDE is very unappealing. With that being said, it IS functional and does most of what any developer would need.
I don't use many bells and whistles in the IDEs that I use. I mostly just use them for the editing features, so I can't really comment on J2EE server integration, Notation implementations, etc, etc. I am strictly a descripter, build.xml (ant) type developer. This is mainly due to my current environment where the builds of my projects are actually done by our data center during a deployment - so it is necessary that they be able to build the applications without having some spiffy IDE to do it for them. Don't ask me why we don't deliver binaries - that would just start me on a different rant.

I'll comment more on the different IDE's in the coming weeks. That's all for now.

I'm back for a rant. I just spent a day figuring out a little bit about OO PHP. I must first comment that I did this for selfish reasons (was too lazy to write an entire java servlet or jsp inside a container or .... you understand). It's admittedly nice that I can pump out a little php and use it on an 'almost' plain-jane apache installation. That being said, my experience with OO PHP was not as grand as I'd had hoped.

I needed a simple graph, something to pull data from a file and stick it into a png/jpeg/whatever line-graph for me. There are several PHP 'pay for' type products that do this, however it wasn't so important that I needed to 'pay for' it, so I of course found an opensource graphing tool. Graphpite, which, by the way, has been merged with Image_Graph now. However, because of the sourceforge front page (not saying anything about such a merge) I was hacking away at the Graphpite library for half a day before I started looking for 'bug reports' for it. This is the point at which I finally made the discovery and switched over to Image_Graph (which wasn't too bad of a migration, considering I had only 100 lines of code). The big noticable difference in the two libraries is the use of a 'factory' within Image_Graph in order to create objects. The factory accepts 'special codewords' in order to create the correct object, so that is a little time consuming looking through the code to determine which 'codeword' I needed to pass to generate the appropriate object. The other minor annoyance with Image_Graph was the immediate need to download two other packages. Image_Color and Image_Somethingelse (can't remember as of this writing what it was).

I'm the kind of guy who likes to take quick peeks of sample code and then bookmark a reference page (such as PHP.NET) and then GO! So it took me a little while to figure out the = and the =& in PHP, but it's pretty evident after playing for a day that one is a copy and one is a reference! I did find myself in loops (foreach, while, etc) where I was passing references into another method, however at the end of the loop the method's underlying object only had several of the same references? I had to change the loop to actually pass a reference to the underlying object (it was in an array, so something like &$someNamedArray[$someName]. Instead of passing a reference like &$someNamedArrayValue which was actually declared by: $someNamedArrayValue =& $someNamedArray[$someName]. Strange, huh?

The end result of a day: I think my PHP knowledge helps me understand the reasoning for PHP existance I think I could have done pretty much the same thing in Perl, much quicker (understandedly because I already know a little Perl), but the OO and simplistic nature of PHP was cool. I do have a PHP script to show for myself! This script basically reads in a data file and plots a graph, yay! I'll upload it to this article when I get a chance (it's on another machine right now).

If anyone can give me a little insight into my reference array issue above, please feel free to email/contact me.