dbradby.net

How to run further

Get lost. That's what I did today.

I went for what is becoming a regular run at lunchtime in the forest around work. I have run a few of the tracks before and decided to combine two of them so I could run a little further.

After about 40 minutes of running through the forest and onto some back roads, I was wondering why I hadn't arrived back at the compound (work) yet. I started running up a hill and came across a state trooper. He wound down the window and I said I was lost. He told me he was lost too. He had a laptop and a GPS so he found out where we were and how I should get back. He pointed me up towards the hill and I head off again.

After I got to the top I hear the trooper pull up behind me and he let me know that he had actually put me in the wrong direction and I had been running in the wrong direction the whole time. Great. So I head back down the hill, still lost and not wanting to ask for any more directions from this confused but well equipped (sp?) trooper.

I asked a couple of other people for directions, and by combining all the vague instructions I managed to get back to work. I had been running for 1 hour and 33 mins with a few mins stopping to talk to people. This is a great start for me as I am planning to race in the Boston Half Marathon. Although I'm quite sore now and probably will be even more over the next few days, I will try to keep this up but of course with a GPS this time.

Why Petrol is so Expensive

Took my bike and camera into work today and had a great ride around the tracks compound. It has been raining a lot lately so the ground was very wet and slippery and the mud was extremely soft in spots. I lost half of my front wheel into some mud and it sent me flying. Thank goodness there are some good showers there.

Anyway I was driving home and saw this on the highway. A stretch assualt vehicle. Not sure if it's really needed to get too and from work.

More photos of the bike path and other Bwaston adventures HERE

Geronimoooooo!!

While half the J2EE community squawks about licences and how bad / good JBoss is, I jumped in (not very funny pun intended) and gave this new release of Apache Geronimo milestone build M1 (Apr 28, 2004).

First step with J2EE servers is to see how fast you can get something up and running. So I easily found the binary release (very improtant to be easy to find the correct file to download) and downloaded the zip. I found a good download speed even though everyone else is downloading it. Maybe cached within my service provider or maybe some good bandwidth at their end. Either way it's a good sign. I unzipped the the file and went straight for the README. A great short readme with command line examples that I can immediately copy and paste. So I start the server and search the debugging output for a port I can hit. The log output is not bad for a command line I suppose, so I waded through the line wraps and found that Jetty (from a good Aussie Company) had started on port 8080.

Ok http://localhost:8080 (don't you hate having to enter http:// into IE because you aren't using port 80. Is there a way to make http the default in IE?) and away we go. Right so nothing is found, fair enough, but a nice suggestion about a know context already configured on the server. Hmmm /debug-tool isn't working either. In fact if I go into my console I can see a stack-trace-spew and the server has stopped. I guess to be fair there was something on that first page about Virtual Hosts. I'll soldier on.

Ok so I used a wizard in WSAD to create a web project, added a jsp and a servlet, and then exported the war. Using the next line I easily find in README I see how to deploy an app. Great! Well not really. I get another stack trace. This time in both the client and server windows. At least the server is still running I suppose.

I guess this sounds familiar for a lot of people trying out Open Source projects. I think this sort of 10 minute test is a great thing to do on your own project to evaluate your customer's initial experience with your product. Just because it's free doesn't mean it isn't a product, and one that your customers shouldn't expect good quality from. This is also part of Why Hibernate is Successful. Geronimo has been released as a 1.0 milestone 1. it is a step up from the eternal 0.1, 0.11 and 0.9999 releases. But because the way Eclipse also releases milestones, I think we have come to expect a lot more from major releases such as these.

Anyway I should get along and ... *cough* .... take a look in my own backyard. I hope to dig deeper with Geronimo as an exercise in ... well I'm not really sure. But stay tuned anway.

JSF and WSAD 5.1.2 at WBUG

Last night was the monthly Boston Websphere Users Group (strangely called WBUG) and we were lucky enough to hear from Beverly DeWitt who is one of the product managers for the Websphere Studio product. Most people seemed to be there to hear about JSF and also get a sneak peak at the latest from Websphere studio.

It was great to get a bit of a look into how Websphere Studio is developed. Management seems to come mainly out of the Rational Office in (near?) Boston and development done worlwide (EU?). The build Beverly was using was fresh off the press from Sunday. It was strangely comforting to know that even a project as major was WSAD doesn't have perfect builds, but there was nothing major. The release we were looking at was WSAD 5.1.2. A release that seems to be still being prepared and hasn't officially been announced yet. I asked one question during the night, "What Eclipse build is it based on?". Sadly still Eclipse 2.1, but I guess that is to be expected seeing as Eclipse 3 have only just stabalised their public APIs (no more excuses for Subclipse not to implement a Sync view)

The focus began on the latest RAD tooling aspects of WSAD. We saw a demonstration of a web page being created from a template , the a data set being connected up to form a displayable table. The best bit was the drag and drop pagination component which many different styles for navigation and list size thresholds. This was all very fancy, but someone said what we all were thinking, "Can we see the code please?". I guess that must be a bit dissapointing for a product manager of RAD tooling, but I've really never seen RAD tooling to be very effective past developing a quick prototype. So after a room full of WSAD users fumbling about trying to get the font big enough to read (someone pulled out the ol "how many programmers does it take to change a font" joke), the code looked ok.

Not knowing much about JSF (but I now want to know more), we were shown how buttons and links were driving Java code using this event driven "code behind" idea. There were promises of JSF handling all your session state management problems with less manual coding that usual (I'd like to believe that, but I need to try it myself). We also saw some rich client (ie. crazy Javascript which does apparently support a good range of browsers, except Safari which made me VERY happy indeed) JSF components such as rich text editors and tree structures that interacted with client side data.

This release also contains some of the 4GL language aspects that usually come with the WSED offering, but these don't really interest my anyway. Sorry.

We didn't really get into any technical aspects of JSF, but it was good to see IBM behind it and I will definitely be "checking out the code" very soon.