Spent a lot of the weekend in bed fighting off a virus that made me really tired. Glad I take supplements, one of the guys at work was off for a week and came back coughing like a 50 a day smoker. I think I got off lightly
Recast the first 50 pages of Archive Fragments, looking good and tight now. I’m about a fifth of the way through the Rails book as a work book and about half just reading it.
Finished Absolution Gap – cracker of a book, really enjoyed it. It’s always interesting to read stories that make you think about what might happen if people could live for 500 years – what their perspectives would be and so on. Love the idea of the brain being enhanced to run more quickly and go into the quantum.
Work is sort of fun because it’s new.
<java tech speak>
We’ve been chasing an irritating bug with the framework we use to build our app. In essence the guys wrote their own IPC using sockets and if a random packet touches one of the sockets they are using it causes an out of memory error which kills sessions and randomly breaks things. A simple config change to use RMI instead, and up the memory to a better aribitrary value from the 100MB default. Bug’s been there for ever but we only just hit it. It took 6 weeks of effort to find an issue our framework supplier knew about already. Sigh.
Did some interesting reading around eden memory and so on, plus Java 1.5 has some sort of elective memory management which is in fact disabled in the app we use. Student’s T test, statistics, rah! Nearly 20 years since I did any of that stuff.
One really annoying thing about the app we are using is that in it’s “raw” state you have to rebuild the whole thing and then redeploy it every time, which takes around 10 minutes. Reminds me of the old days when I was writing COBOL – but I wo’t bore you with that. They also compile all of the JSP’s using Jasper in the build.xml before the deploy. Finding anything that might need to be changed is a total pain. Struts and tiles – really not sure what they give you about from even more XML files and indirection. Ruby on Rails looks better all the time. To be fair I suspect my dislike of S&T is at least partially because I have to keep rebuilding everything and they are’t visible in the eclipse environment because they deploy as part of the framework. Ugh.
If you want EL for all of the attributes of a given map in your JSP:
<ul>
<c:forEach var=”k” items=”${props}”>
<li><c:out value=‘${k}’/> = <c:out value=‘${props[k]}’/></li>
</c:forEach>
</ul>
Anything else? Oh yes, I love eclipse but for not being able to make the background black across the whole tool. I read somewhere it’s much better for your eyes and have tried it with emacs and gvim and agree.
JAD
Java decompiler. Excellent tool that there is an Eclipse plug in for. Very useful.
</java tech speak>
Need some kip now … oh yes. Big weekend in Bradford ahead – Rosie’s mum’s birthday and a conference. Love complication.