My brother is awesome and not only because he buys me the best geeky birthday present. For my birthday this year, he bought me a new DELL XPS desktop with the latest Intel Core i7 processor. The Core i7 is a quad-core processor with hyper-threading that appear as 8 separate processors to the operating system, giving the machine some serious processing horsepower.

My configuration is the Intel Core i7-920 processor(8MB L3 Cache 2.66GHz), 6GB of RAM (DDR3 SDRAM at 1067MHz), ATI RADEON HD4670 512MB video card and Serial ATA II RAID 0 With Dual640GB Hard Drives for a total of 1.2 TB onboard. The machine also came with combo Blu-Ray/DVD/CD reader and burner along with 64-bit Vista. Here are the complete tech specs for the geeks out there.

Here are some screenshots from the computer with more geeky goodness

My New Birthday Present

So I just installed SP2 of Windows Vista which is out in beta on my computer yesterday – so it’s been about 24 hours and my computer is stable and all of the applications I’ve used so far have worked just fine. The only bizarre issue that I’ve noticed so far is the uninstall of .NET framework 3.5 SP1. I can’t really explain it and I’m not even sure if this was the SP2 beta install but Paint.NET stopped working with an error message that it needed .NET Framework 3.5 SP1. Paint.NET was working before the SP2 beta install and so I just reinstalled .NET Framework 3.5 SP1 and everything worked. Not sure what happened there and as I said, could be completely unrelated but that’s the only strange thing that’s happened so far.

There is a list of new features and fixes at Microsoft and Mary-Jo’s blog. So far, the beta feels fairly solid and I hope this is a watershed release like Windows XP SP2 was for XP but I guess time will tell or Windows7 will be out and we won’t care about Vista. (Or we’ll be running Ubuntu or OS X and we won’t care about Windows – Hope spring eternal!)

Here are some screen shots of Windows update on my machine doing the update for SP2.

If you want to try the beta yourself, Microsoft has a page on how to enable the download via Windows Update.

Windows Vista SP2 Beta – Initial impressions

I have a couple of computers at home but my primary machine is a DELL desktop running Vista. This is a dual-core machine with 4 GB of RAM but it ran sloooooooooooowwwwww. So I just upgraded the machine with a new 500w power supply and a NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GT video card. The NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GT is an amazing video card that’s SLI ready with 112 stream processors and a 256-bit framebuffer interface running at 900MHz, DirectX 10, PCI Express 2.0 and the second generation NVIDIA PureVideo engine with full acceleration and post processing for HD DVD and Blu-ray movies.

Here are the screenshots of the Performance Information and Tools screen with the before and after Windows Experience Index number. Guess I need to upgrade the processor next.

The power supply I chose was the PC Power and Cooling PPCS500D Silencer.

Upgraded my computer – Love the NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GT card

• javagems – Gems for Java programmers; those code fragments copied again and again from one project to another – Java Gems are general purpose utilities for Java. Yes, Java Gems are those simple code snippets copied again and again from one project to another, often from your private project to several work projects, those small things you cannot find in java.util and its subpackages, but you cannot live without them.
• PHP implemented in 100% Java « PHP::Impact ( [str Blog] ) – Quercus allows developers to incorporate Java code into PHP web applications and gives both Java and PHP developers a fast, safe, and powerful alternative to the standard PHP interpreter.
• Electronista | Vista security gutted by new web exploit – IBM Information Security Systems' Mark Dowd and VMware's Alexander Sotirov have found a method that uses scripting systems such as Java and elements of the .NET framework in Windows-based web browsers to arbitrarily run code on Vista systems. Internet Explorer is particularly vulnerable due to its use of ActiveX.
• The Deep End | Paul Venezia | InfoWorld | Some advice for Microsoft: Dump Windows | August 8, 2008 12:15 PM | Paul Venezia – In light of the new Windows flaws announced yesterday, I think it's time to reiterate a point I made a long time ago: It's time for Microsoft to dump Windows.
• Apache News Online: 18 July 2008 – Apache POI 3.5.1 beta Now Available – The Apache POI team is pleased to announce the availability of Apache POI 3.5.1 beta 1, our first release including OOXML (Office Open XML) support. Apache POI is well-known in the Java field as a library for reading and writing OLE2 office file formats, such as Excel, PowerPoint, Visio and Word. With POI 3.5, it also support the new OOXML formats introduced in Office 2007.
• SpringSource Team Blog » Optimising and Tuning Apache Tomcat – On Wednesday I gave a webinar on Optimising and Tuning Apache Tomcat. A recording of the webinar and a copy of the slides can be obtained from the webinars section of the SpringSource website.
• Tech IPOs Return With Rackspace – GigaOM – After a long dry spell, technology initial public offerings took a small step towards a comeback as Rackspace Hosting, a San Antonio, Texas-based company, announced its IPO
• Alfresco opens up SharePoint to Java, Linux, Oracle, and more | The Open Road – The Business and Politics of Open Source by Matt Asay – CNET News.com – .Microsoft requires that you use SharePoint with a 100 percent Microsoft stack. Alfresco allows you to use SharePoint functionality on Java, MySQL, Oracle, BEA, Linux, etc. etc. etc.
• Artima Developer Spotlight Forum – JetBrains Releases First Beta of IDEA 8 – IntelliJ's IDEA has been steadily adding support for working with languages other than Java. The latest release, a beta version of which was posted last week in the company's Early Access Program, is a result of a major refactoring of the IDE's internals
• Google pushing software to low-cost Linux PCs | InfoWorld | News | 2008-08-06 | By Agam Shah, IDG News Service – With an eye for larger adoption of Linux, Google is actively working with open-source developers to integrate its applications in the OS, a Linux developer said on Tuesday.

Daily del.icio.us for August 6th through August 11th

• Microsoft pledges love and money to open source | The Register – Microsoft is becoming a platinum member of the Apache Software Foundation (ASF), paying $100,000 annual membership. The move follows work between the two to support the Office Open XML file formats in Apache's POI project.
• Why India Will Beat China – An entrenched and vibrant democracy will ultimately drive India to outperform China socially and economically
• Rush Plays Rock Band Backstage at Colbert | Comedy Central Insider – The Comedy Blog for Comedy Fans – So, when Rush was backstage at The Colbert Report last week, they played "Tom Sawyer" on Rock Band and now there's video of it
• gxp -Google XML Pages – GXP is a templating system used to generate XML/SGML markup (most often HTML). Support for multiple languages – currently Java
• Ext JS – Ext GWT Grid, Grid Plugins, and EditableGrid – Ext GWT 1.1 development is moving along nicely and includes a new Grid component. Grid is based on the Ext JS Grid and will support the same features including grid plugins, grouping, totaling, and inline editing
• If your SSD sucks, blame Vista, says SSD vendor | Register Hardware – It's Windows Vista's fault that solid-state storage isn't performing as well as its proponents predicted. So said SanDisk CEO Eli Harari, but at least he didn't go as far as saying it's Microsoft's problem to fix.
• VMware to offer low-footprint ESX hypervisor free | InfoWorld | News | 2008-07-22 | By Elizabeth Montalbano, IDG News Service – VMware said Tuesday it will offer the small-footprint version of its ESX virtualization software free, responding to pressure from Microsoft and other companies that are threatening VMware's lead in the virtualization market.
• InfoQ: Christophe Coenraets Discusses Flex 3, AIR, and BlazeDS – In this interview from QCon London 2008, Christophe Coenraets discusses Flex 3, Flex Builder, AIR, BlazeDS, the move towards open source at Adobe, how to integrate Flex with existing applications, and the challenges of integrating Rich Internet Applicatio
• Copy your files faster with TeraCopy – TeraCopy is a compact program designed to copy and move files at the maximum possible speed. TeraCopy uses dynamically adjusted buffers to reduce seek times. Asynchronous copy speeds up file transfer between two physical hard drives.
• Java Performance Tuning: A Conversation With Java Champion Kirk Pepperdine – A Java Champion since September 2005, Kirk Pepperdine is a primary contributor to javaperformancetuning.com, which is widely regarded as the premier site for Java performance tuning information, and is the coauthor of Ant Developer's Handbook.

Daily del.icio.us for July 20th through July 25th

• vmcNetFlix – Official Site – vmcNetflix is an add-in for Microsoft Windows Vista Media Center which allows you to manage your NetFlix subscription, stream NetFlix "WatchNow" movies directly to the Media Center player, or download the movies for playback later from a "WatchLater" ga
• The LinkedIn Blog: LinkedIn is 99% Java but 100% Mac – The post is titled LinkedIn Is Written in 99% Java, so to complete the picture I responded to the community with a message about how LinkedIn is 99% Java but 100% Mac.
• Mercedes to Cut Petroleum Out of Lineup by 2015 | EcoGeek – In less than 7 years, Mercedes-Benz plans to ditch petroleum-powered vehicles from its lineup. Focusing on electric, fuel cell, and biofuels, the company is revving up research in alternative fuel sources and efficiency.
• Jericho HTML Parser – Jericho HTML Parser is a powerful java library allowing analysis and manipulation of parts of an HTML document, including server-side tags, while reproducing verbatim any unrecognised or invalid HTML. It also provides high-level HTML form manipulation fun
• Software Sensation Inc. – jWebApp Web Application Framework, Install&Update, MemSL – Memory Structures Library – jPersist is an extremely powerful object-relational persistence API that is based on the Active-Record and Data-Mapper patterns. jPersist wraps JDBC functionality and can work with any relational database, and any type of connection resource
• Java Entrepreneur: We screwed up on open source, says Sun Chief Open Source Officer – Open source developers have been much more skeptical of Sun; a lot of open source developers don't remember the fact that Sun was pretty much the first open source start-up in 1982. All they can remember is what happened in 2001/2002 when, to be quite fra
• InfoQ: Liferay Portal 5.0 Released, Sun Joins the Team – Last month at JavaOne, Liferay, Inc. announced the release of the 5.0 version of their Liferay Portal product. The Liferay press release highlights a handful of the key tools and uses in the portal product:
• How Hard Could it Be?: Glory Days – Bill Gates – working for Microsoft – Bill Gates was amazingly technical, and he knew more about the details of his company's software than most of the people who worked on those details day in and day out.
• Unit testing with JUnit and EasyMock - Michael Minella – I hope this gives you a more in depth view into JUnit and EasyMock. Unit testing is something that once you get used to it, makes you code better, provides you with a safety net for future refactoring and protects you from being burned by API changes
• Unit Testing With TestNG and JMockit | Javalobby – TestNG is a testing framework for unit test development. JMockit is a framework for mock objects that provides mock object functionality using the java.lang.instrument package of jdk 1.5. Together, these frameworks can provide the tools to create very rob

Daily del.icio.us for June 24th through June 27th

• A Look Inside JBoss Rules | Javalobby – JBoss Rules is the production release of the Drools project, an expert system for declarative programming based around the Rete algorithm. During this talk, Mark Proctor, the lead on JBoss Rules covered the Drools basics, as well as the new features in 4.
• The 100 Greatest Guitar Songs of All Time : Rolling Stone – This is what makes a great rock & roll guitar sound: an irresistible riff; a solo or jam that takes you higher every time you hear it; the final power chord that pins you to the wall and makes you hit "play" again and again.
• The Business Of IT: Gartner Reveals Top 10 Technologies – The good folks over at the Gartner Group have revealed the top 10 technologies that they believe will change the world over the next four years
• David Card – No Way to Build an Operating System – MSFT has worked on WinFS for more than a decade without success in making it fast, reliable, and easy-to-use enough for release. The Longhorn "reset" in 2004 was in large part the realization that WinFS was still not ready for primetime.
• My DebugBar | IETester / HomePage – IETester is a free WebBrowser that allows you to have the rendering and javascript engines of IE8 beta 1, IE7 IE 6 and IE5.5 on Vista and XP, as well as the installed IE in the same process.
• Oracle and BEA – Welcome, Dev2Dev and Arch2Arch Members – The Oracle Technology Network is happy to welcome members of the BEA Dev2Dev and Arch2Arch communities. The OTN team, which now includes some of the very same people behind those BEA communities, is hard at work merging the best of Dev2Dev and Arch2Arch
• Ozzie: Open source is greatest threat to Microsoft | Tech news blog – CNET News.com – Ozzie, speaking at Sanford C. Bernstein Strategic Decisions Conference in New York on Wednesday, said that while Google is a "tremendously strong competitor…open source was much more potentially disruptive" to Microsoft's business model.
• Ben Northrop – Does Programming to Interfaces Buy Us Anything? – In the end, I'm not saying that programming to interfaces and not implementations isn't a good thing, just that it's a good thing less often than we think – in other words, it can't just be dogmatically applied.
• O’Reilly Media | Harnessing Hibernate – More than a reference, Harnessing Hibernate starts with basic configuration before moving on to demonstrate how to use Hibernate to accomplish practical goals. "If you follow along with the examples–which is easy–you'll have a working Hibernate-based pr
• InfoQ: Top 5 Ways to Reduce Flex Application Startup Time – Jun Heider has an excellent piece on O’Reilly’s InsideRIA site discussing a number of the options for minimizing the startup time of Flex applications, in hopes of helping developers reduce the amount of time that users see the ugly "Loading" dialog.
• Akamai Releases State of the Internet Report | CenterNetworks – Akamai is out today with their first "State of the Internet" report. The report is well worth a read as it covers a variety of topics including: security, connection speeds, geography, network access, and Internet penetration.

Daily del.icio.us for May 29th through May 31st

• Visual SourceSafe to Subversion Migration – This migration script will take all live files in a VSS project and migrate them to Subversion. Additionally, for those live files, all file history will be preserved. Without this, it wouldn't be a migration, merely an import.
• VisualSVN Server – All-in-one installer for Subversion and Apache – VisualSVN Server is a package that contains everything you need to install, configure and manage Subversion server for your team on Windows platform. It includes Subversion, Apache and a management console.
• Coding Horror: Setting up Subversion on Windows – When it comes to readily available, free source control, I don't think you can do better than Subversion at the moment. Allow me to illustrate how straightforward it is to get a small Subversion server and client going on Windows. It'll take all of 30 min
• JRuby 1.1 is out! – The Empty Way – The long awaited JRuby 1.1 is finally out. Working on it was fun, much more fun than I expected — so much to do, so many interesting things, so little time! It is a perfect mixture of Java and Ruby
• Executive Pay: The Bottom Line for Those at the Top – The New York Times – Compensation and accumulated wealth of 200 chief executives for large public companies that filed proxies for last year by March 28.
• Build a quad-core, 8-gig server for $900 – Or maybe that's just what I tell myself when I only have $1,000 bucks to spend. Either way, multi-core CPUs made powerful computers far more affordable. You can build a fine quad-core, 8-gig server within that budget
• My Essential Twitter Tools – If you’re using Twitter for personal, corporate use, or to manage the brand of a client, you’ll need the right tools to find and engage the discussions.

  Here are the tools that I’m using to improve my Twitter experience

• Windows Vista source code – Windows Vista source code
• Forbes.com – Dial D for Disruption – With Asterisk loaded onto a computer, a decent-size company can rip out its traditional phone switch, even some of its newfangled Internet telephone gear, and say good-bye to 80% of its telecom equipment costs. Not good news for Cisco, Nortel or Avaya.
• dangertree techblog » Blog Archive » Groovy vs. Google Collections: Round #1 – In my last post, Dan Lewis responded with some counter-code from Google’s collections package. Instead of attempting to snap back with some witty technical retort, I challenged Dan to a code-off. Groovy collections vs. Google collections (in Java)
• Adam Bien’s Weblog : Huge discussion about JavaDoc …and no one cares about Fat Clients – I really wondered about the discussion about JavaDoc – but actually no one complained about this statement "Therefore, a fat client with a local embedded database, such as Java DB, is the simplest possible solution — everything else is a workaround.".
• IntelliJ IDEA Blog » Blog Archive » Migrating to EJB 3 with IntelliJ IDEA is Easy – IntelliJ IDEA has the full-blown support for Enterprise Java Beans (EJB). Supporting EJB specs from 1.x to 3.0 and leveraging it through all of its productivity-boosting features, from coding assistance to refactoring, IntelliJ IDEA stands for the weapon
• Gartner: Open source will quietly take over – ZDNet.co.uk – "By 2012, more than 90 percent of enterprises will use open source in direct or embedded forms," predicts a Gartner report, The State of Open Source 2008, which sees a "stealth" impact for the technology in embedded form:
• Ext.ux.PrinterFriendly – Ext JS Forums – I'm happy to announce the first release of my (first) Ext JS extension – Ext.ux.PrinterFriendly which allows you to easily build printer friendly layouts and grids for your Ext JS pages.

Daily del.icio.us for April 4th through April 6th

• reForm: CSS Form Design Template for Any Layout (Part 2) | CSS Zone – formReForm is a methodology to style HTML forms without a huge amount of markup (or [gasp] a Table-based layout). Taking it one step further, this article discusses how to use the formReForm javascript library to create usable, accessible and beautiful us
• Seifi.org » Blog Archive » Safari 3.1 Features Review – Apple claims that Safari 3.1 executes JavaScript up to 6 times faster than Internet Explorer 7 and up to 4 times faster than Firefox 2
• Google about to drop the other Enterprise shoe on Microsoft? « Scobleizer — Tech geek blogger – I’m hearing about a few things that Google is planning to do to newly compete with Microsoft’s enterprise offerings.
• The long awaited HTC Shift is now coming to you from Sprint, 140+ hands-on photos | The Mobile Gadgeteer | ZDNet.com – I’ve been using an HTC Shift from Sprint for over a week now and as you can see in over 140 photos and screenshots found in my extensive image gallery I have had a chance to try out most all aspects of the device
• Microsoft working with Eclipse on Vista, ID links – Yahoo! News – Microsoft's much-anticipated revelations about collaborations with the Eclipse Foundation did not include joining the open-source tools foundation. But the two are working together to enable use of Eclipse technology to build Java applications for Vista.
• James Ward – RIA Cowboy » Blog Archive » New Flex Screencast and VideoCoverFlow Component – For Flex 3 I recorded a new version of that screencast. In the new version I used Doug McCune’s CoverFlow component but extended it to easily support playing videos. Check out a demo of the VideoCoverFlow component .
• James Ward – RIA Cowboy » Video: Flex 3 / Adobe AIR 1.0 Pre-release Tour – In case you missed the Flex 3 / Adobe AIR 1.0 Pre-release Tour that went on around the world in January you can watch a recording of the session Serge Jespers and I did in Amsterdam
• Ajax World Conference – Day 1 « dambalah – Yakov believes that Flex is the better technology today, that Microsoft will catch up next year with Silverlight and that Sun still has some work to do before JavaFX becomes stable and competitive.
• The Atlassian Blog – Launching JIRA Studio – After a couple of months in Beta, today JIRA Studio launches into production! JIRA Studio integrates JIRA, Confluence, Fisheye, Crucible & Crowd, and then adds in Subversion, Streams, the JIRA Studio toolbar, and makes them all available as a hosted, on-d
• Web Developer 1.1.5 and User Agent Switcher 0.6.11 on Blog on chrispederick.com – New versions of the Web Developer and User Agent Switcher extensions have been released. These releases are mainly to add support for the upcoming Firefox 3, but also contain a few other bug fixes.
• Adam Bien’s Weblog : EJB 3 and Memory Consumption Myths or Is it worth to use POJOs instead of EJB 3 in terms of memory? – I'm often asked about the usage Stateless Session Beans (EJB 3) regarding memory consumption and comparing them to POJOs. The nice Markus Kohler's comment for my recent post made me curious – and I started some evaluation.
• Google Open Source Blog: “Look! Actual Code!” – We recently launched a new source code browsing tool as part of Google Code's project hosting feature. This new tool makes it easy to navigate through a project's SVN repository. Key features include: fast directory browsing tree, syntax highlighting, etc
• Internet Explorer 8 Readiness Toolkit – Welcome to the Windows Internet Explorer 8 Readiness Toolkit, the first place to look when you’re ready to optimize web sites and applications for Internet Explorer 8. Here is a message from Chris Wilson, IE Platform Architect:

Daily del.icio.us for March 16th through March 19th

• Zimbra’s new Desktop: Look ma, no browser! | The Open Road – The Business and Politics of Open Source by Matt Asay – CNET Blogs – It's very cool. You should give it a spin. This is the best e-mail "client" ever built…largely because of its successful marriage of the Web with the desktop. In the future, all applications will be like this–or should be.
• Ext Road Map – Our goals for 2008 are to continue improving the 2.x version line by adding new components and enhancing some of the existing areas of functionality in Ext as shown below. Looking ahead to 3.0, there are some big new areas that we'll be getting into. In a
• The Making of MarkMail: Announcing an Informal Partnership with Codehaus – We're happy to announce we've developed an informal partnership with Codehaus to load all their mail archives and receive automatic notification of new Codehaus lists as they get created.
• A Conversation with Matt Mullenweg (Yahoo! Developer Network blog) – A few weeks ago, Matt Mullenweg (creator of WordPress) came by Yahoo to talk to a bunch of Yahoo! bloggers about the current and future state of WordPress. After the meeting, I sat down with him for our Developer Spotlight series on YDN Theater to catch u
• Andres Almiray’s Weblog : Weblog – JSON-lib is a java library for transforming beans, maps and XML to JSON and back again to beans and DynaBeans. It is based on the work by Douglas Crockford in http://www.json.org/java.
• The State of BPM: Top-Five Trends | The Intelligent Enterprise Blog – The results show a number of interesting trends indicating that CIOs and business leaders are focused on improving their processes. Existing customers described how they expect to get their ROI from their BPM implementations, and most expect to see ROI ov
• Starbucks ditches T-Mobile for AT&T | Crave : The gadget blog – The new AT&T plan allows all customers 2 free hours per day, with a $3.99 fee for additional 2-hour chunks of time. Monthly subscriptions will cost $19.99 and will enable access to other AT&T hot-spot locations in addition to Starbucks.
• Anthony Park :: 100% Geek Content by Volume » New Vista Media Center Plugin – MyNetflix (beta) – I’ve kept this pretty quiet, but I’ve been working on a new Media Center plugin for a little while now. It is now ready for beta testing, and I’ve decided to run a public beta for this one. MyNetflix features * View your Netflix queue * Browse movie
• Humanized > Our Products > Enso Launcher – Enso Launcher is designed to give you instant access to your applications and windows. With a few easily remembered keystrokes, you can launch an application, switch to a window by name, and control the state of your windows.
• Martin Wolf : Advanced Java 5 Generics – Here's an article about a few of the more subtle aspects of Java 5 Generics. This is hardly the 1st article about this particular subject, but none of them explain it quite the way I would have wanted to see it when I was wrestling with this issue myself.
• Panopticon: The Power of Pre-Attentive Processing – Our visualization software is easy to use and is a great way to explore large datasets, identify outliers and find hidden patterns.

Daily del.icio.us for February 10th through February 14th

• Memcached 1.2.2 on RHEL/Centos using DAG rpms | MDLog:/sysadmin – This article will show how you can easily install memcached 1.2.2 and libevent 1.3b using DAG/rpmforge repository.
• Collaboration and Content Strategies Blog: Oracle and BEA: A Day of Reckoning for Portal Implementers – Despite Alfred Chuang’s statement during the analyst call that “our two businesses are a natural strategic fit”, I would say that their two businesses are instead natural competitors for much of what BEA offers.
• The GigaSpaces Blog » Blog Archives » An Open Letter to BEA WebLogic Customers – A single product that handles messaging, business logic and transactional data through an open-source, commonly used programming model, so your developers can focus on what they do best: quickly deliver new applications and functionality to your business
• Trial By Fire: Windows Vista: Past Its Due Date Already – You become so involved in the idea of the product that you forget about what it’s like to be a customer. You assume that it must be good because that’s what the market share tells you.
• Java Authentication and Authorization – Free JAAS Book – This site contains the book I wrote sometime back about the Java Authentication and Authorization Service, or JAAS.
• Alfresco Press Releases – Alfresco Selected as One of Linux Magazine?s Top 20 Companies to Watch in 2008 – Alfresco Software today announced it has been named one of Linux Magazine?s Top 20 Companies to Watch in 2008
• Coderspiel / The right tool for the slob – How is it that some fancy-pants framework is always the right tool for an abstract job and PHP is the right tool for a real job?
• Java Thoughts: A Year of Wicket – I’ve been working with Wicket for almost a year. We’ve just released our first product that uses Wicket for the user interface, and so it seems like a good time to take stock. Here’s the executive summary: Wicket rocks!
• Groovy not Enterprise-ready, you’re kidding? – [ Guillaume Laforge ] – Groovy has been very stable and mature for a long time already. It is being used by many high-profile companies and institutions throughout the world with great success.
• The Impact of Culture on Innovation « The Abstract Truth – BEA eventually built a portal product and acquired another one, and an early opportunity to build a suite of now-indispensable products on top of WebLogic evaporated.
• JBoss (and possibly TomCat) should never have happened. « The Abstract Truth – BEA made a lot of mistakes. Letting JBoss out of the box was probably its biggest. While BEA was looking ?up? at its biggest competitor IBM, JBoss was busily undercutting BEA at the bottom end
• JBoss Matrix – A BEA-utiful Week – JBoss launched an innovators dilemma attack against BEA, not with a revolutionary product, but with a revolutionary business model, one that BEA couldn?t hope to copy without cannibalizing its existing revenue stream. BEA fell right into the trap.
• LatencyTOP – Measuring and fixing Linux latency – LatencyTOP is a Linux* tool for software developers (both kernel and userspace), aimed at identifying where in the system latency is happening, and what kind of operation/action is causing the latency to happen so that the code can be changed to avoid the

Daily del.icio.us for January 19th through January 20th

I have or should say had been a Carbonite user for almost an year but issues after issues finally got to me and the lack of new features that were long promised but never delivered forced me to start looking at the automated online backup again and I am so glad I did, as I’ve found Mozy. I’ve had numerous problems with Carbonite and their customer service was crappy. So I decided to give up on Carbonite even though I had already pre-paid for 2 years – I guess it’s better to lose $80.00 than all your data.

Mozy is similar to Carbonite in some regards but has a much richer feature set that makes it a better offering. Like Carbonite, Mozy installs a small client on your Windows XP/Vista or OS X desktop that runs in the background and backs up files over the Internet using your broadband connection. But that’s where the similarities end. Carbonite is a fairly bare-bones offering which may be ok for most novice users but Mozy offers several configuration options like creation of backup sets, file versions, access to your files via the web and many other features.

One of the best and most important feature that set Mozy and Carbonite apart is the fact that you can actually get your backed files back. Wow! What a concept – I know I know. When I first installed Carbonite, I did several test restores and they worked fine but when I had been backing up for several months and really need to restore something, Carbonite let me down. Mozy on the other hand has never done that. Another awesome feature of Mozy is that fact they don’t really throttle your bandwidth after you’ve uploaded 50 GB. Carbonite seems to limit upload bandwidth to about 2 GB a day and then throttle it down after you reach 50 GB. Mozy doesn’t seem to play any of those games and allows uploads that are supported by your bandwidth. On an average day, I think I was uploading about 5+ GB.

Another recent event that makes Mozy even more attractive to me is the purchase of Berkeley Data Systems, providers of Mozy online backup by EMC Corporation. As you probably know, EMC is the leader is the storage market and owns Documentum, VMWare, and RSA among other technology companies.

So if you are looking for a great, reliable and affordable backup solution for your home computer, you should check out Mozy.

Goodbye Carbonite – Hello Mozy

These are my links for Feb 19, 2007:

• Census Mashups Using StrikeIron Web Services and Yahoo Maps in Flex 2 – Census Dashboard Mashup is a mashup using StrikeIron’s Zip Code Information Web Service, StrikeIron’s Population Demographics By ZIP Code Web Service and Yahoo Maps to give detailed information for a specific US zip code. I find it to actually be a really
• Sun Updates Java Mozilla HTML Parser 1.0.1 – O’Reilly ONJava Blog – Java Mozilla HTML Parser 1.0.1 is a package which allows parsing HTML pages into a Java Document object. Wonder how it stacks up against HtmlCleaner (http://htmlcleaner.sourceforge.net/)
• dmiessler.com | study | lsof – lsof is the Linux/Unix über-tool. I use it most for getting network connection related information from a system, but that’s just the beginning for this amazing and little-known application
• chalain: So Beautiful, So Disturbing – She gets out of bed and stretches, perfect curves sliding under silky lingerie and momentarily making me forget about breakfast, meatloaf, and whoever it was I was married to before last night.
• Massive Google hard drive survey turns up very interesting things – Engadget – When your server farm is in the hundreds of thousands and you’re using cheap, off-the-shelf hard drives as your primary means of storage, you’ve probably got a a pretty damned good data set for looking at the health and failure patterns of hard drives
• Raible Designs | Slick looking Confluence sites – Wicket and Cayenne have nice looking websites backed by Confluence. Wicket has a Writing documentation page that explains how it works.
• Upselling your architecture – The Pragmatic Architect – As an architect, you’ll probably need to present to different audiences at different levels. When you do, it’s worth thinking about whether you need to upsell your architecture or not.
• MyEclipse Delivers Tools to IntelliJ IDEA Users – Developers using IDEA are now able to utilize the MyEclipse Visual HTML Designer, XML Editor, Database Explorer and Image Editor SNAPs directly in their own environment.
• IntelliJ IDEA: Inspections by Sections … – Static code analysis doesn’t just improve your code quality, it can also teach you some cool ideas and best practices about programming
• Java Power Tools: Home – "Java Power Tools" is about software tools and techniques that can contribute to improving the SDLC which includes build tools such as Maven and Ant, CI tools, code quality tools, testing tools, collaborative tools, source version control, and more!
• Rod Johnson » Sun’s GlassFish Embracing Spring – I think part of what’s making Sun more relevant in the enterprise Java space is that they are now more plugged into what’s happening in the wider world, and are willing to take the input on board and act on it

Daily del.icio.us for Feb 19, 2007

These are my links for Feb 17, 2007 through Feb 19, 2007:

• Census Mashups Using StrikeIron Web Services and Yahoo Maps in Flex 2 – Census Dashboard Mashup is a mashup using StrikeIron’s Zip Code Information Web Service, StrikeIron’s Population Demographics By ZIP Code Web Service and Yahoo Maps to give detailed information for a specific US zip code. I find it to actually be a really
• Sun Updates Java Mozilla HTML Parser 1.0.1 – O’Reilly ONJava Blog – Java Mozilla HTML Parser 1.0.1 is a package which allows parsing HTML pages into a Java Document object. Wonder how it stacks up against HtmlCleaner (http://htmlcleaner.sourceforge.net/)
• dmiessler.com | study | lsof – lsof is the Linux/Unix über-tool. I use it most for getting network connection related information from a system, but that’s just the beginning for this amazing and little-known application
• chalain: So Beautiful, So Disturbing – She gets out of bed and stretches, perfect curves sliding under silky lingerie and momentarily making me forget about breakfast, meatloaf, and whoever it was I was married to before last night.
• Massive Google hard drive survey turns up very interesting things – Engadget – When your server farm is in the hundreds of thousands and you’re using cheap, off-the-shelf hard drives as your primary means of storage, you’ve probably got a a pretty damned good data set for looking at the health and failure patterns of hard drives
• Raible Designs | Slick looking Confluence sites – Wicket and Cayenne have nice looking websites backed by Confluence. Wicket has a Writing documentation page that explains how it works.
• Upselling your architecture – The Pragmatic Architect – As an architect, you’ll probably need to present to different audiences at different levels. When you do, it’s worth thinking about whether you need to upsell your architecture or not.
• MyEclipse Delivers Tools to IntelliJ IDEA Users – Developers using IDEA are now able to utilize the MyEclipse Visual HTML Designer, XML Editor, Database Explorer and Image Editor SNAPs directly in their own environment.
• IntelliJ IDEA: Inspections by Sections … – Static code analysis doesn’t just improve your code quality, it can also teach you some cool ideas and best practices about programming
• Java Power Tools: Home – "Java Power Tools" is about software tools and techniques that can contribute to improving the SDLC which includes build tools such as Maven and Ant, CI tools, code quality tools, testing tools, collaborative tools, source version control, and more!
• Rod Johnson » Sun’s GlassFish Embracing Spring – I think part of what’s making Sun more relevant in the enterprise Java space is that they are now more plugged into what’s happening in the wider world, and are willing to take the input on board and act on it
• Is Bruce Eckel Right? Maybe not. at Simon?s Blog – Bruce Eckel has written an interesting piece about Java and user interfaces. I?d recommend that you read it, as it?s pretty thought-provoking.
• The Fishbowl: Job Satisfaction – We spend a lot of time at work. If we?re not doing something that we?re passionate about, that gives us some kind of fulfillment, we?re wasting a big part of our lives.
• BuzzMachine » Blog Archive » A day at NPR – I’ve thoroughly enjoyed my day at NPR. Smart people, but then that?s obvious.
• Coding Horror: The cost of leaving your PC on – So leaving my server on is costing me $200 / year, or $16.68 per month. My home theater PC is a bit more frugal at 65 watts. Using the same formulas, that costs me $81 / year or $6.75 per month.
• The Future Won?t Be Statically Typed « Skunk Works – I’m more and more convinced that statically typed languages will come to an end, replaced by duck typing based languages

Daily del.icio.us for Feb 17, 2007 through Feb 19, 2007

• Amazon Web Services Blog: S3 Infinidisk for EC2
  The S3InfiDisk for EC2 takes the form of a mountable Linux file system, creating an infinite storage disk for EC2 instances. The file systems can be mounted on any running EC2 instance, with data cached in local RAM and on the instance’s hard disk
  (tags: amazon hosting s3 linux ec2 storage infinidisk WebServices)
• Enterprise 2.0: Ten Predictions for 2007 | Enterprise Web 2.0 | ZDNet.com
  Enterprise 2.0 platforms can provide highly general purpose, freeform, do-it-yourself (DIY) tools that have the potential to solve an entire group of related and overlapping problems in collaboration, knowledge management, SOA adoption, self-service IT, a
  (tags: Enterprise2.0 web2.0 predictions 2007 Enterprise Business internet trends)
• Toshiba’s high-end Vista tablet | Crave : The gadget blog
  Portege R400 is a beautifully crafted convertible tablet laptop with built-in EV-DO, and a small LED readout on the front edge that shows the time, battery level, and wireless signal strength. It can also alert you to new e-mail messages while the lid is
  (tags: toshiba laptop tablet+pc tabletpc vista gadgets)

Daily del.icio.us for Jan 08, 2007

As I’ve blogged before, the whole idea of User Account Control or UAC has been driving me crazy. Annoying dialog boxes that keep popping up asking for your permission before doing anything is NOT security. I’m sure Microsoft will certify and validate more applications and actions so that these annoying popup dialog boxes will soon go away but I’ve finally had enough and turned them off. This is exactly what I was afraid of – Annoy users with STUPID dialogs and they will disable the security features of your OS. Security should be transparent to the user and NOT in your face, asking users questions that they are not likely to understand.

To disable UAC, navigate to Start -> Control Panel -> User Accounts and Family Safety -> Users Accounts and then select ‘Turn User Account Control on or off’. I’ve turned mine OFF – You should make your own choice.

How to survive Vista – Kiss UAC goodbye

My brother was visiting this past weekend and so instead of us spending quality time together, I decided to upgrade my computer from Windows XP to Windows Vista. Here are some of my initial thoughts that I’ll try to break down in the good, the bad and the ugly. And boy there is still some ugliness that I hope Microsoft (and partners) solves soon. (Full disclosure – My brother works for Microsoft). Going back to my brother for a second, we are both true geeks at heart and so quality time for us is being locked up in my office with lots of coffee, 4 computers and 8 USB external drives humming away.

The install of Windows Vista RTM was on my new DELL dual-core 3.2 GHz PC with 2 GB of RAM and 256MB PCI Express ATI Radeon X600 video card. (Full specs on the hardware). Instead of choosing a clean and fresh install, I decided to opt for the ‘in place upgrade’ which replaces the Windows XP system/core files while retaining your existing applications, personal files and settings. I should also note that I installed the Ultimate version of Windows Vista.

The Good

There are a lot of really good things about Vista – The first and most striking difference between XP and Vista is Aero and the translucent effect of Aero Glass. Aero Glass is the eye-candy in Vista that fades in/out windows with smooth animation and does create a really nice visual effect. I’m sure the Mac OSX folks will jump in and say that OSX does this already and I think OSX does do this today and has done this for many years already. My brother is very impressed with the sidebar that allows you to drop in widgets or gadgets in Microsoft speak on your desktop. Having used Yahoo Widgets for a while now, this is nothing new to me and didn’t get me excited. I like the idea that Windows will now have a widget engine and this will hopefully allow people to create some interesting applications. I see a huge potential for this on the Enterprise side where a widget or gadget sitting on a user’s desktop could ping out and get the latest news, updates, prices, promotions, alerts, etc.

The other thing that’s worth mentioning is that installation process. With the exception of McAfee virus scan which I’ll describe in detail in the ‘bad’ section, the installation was very smooth. Once the install was off and running, it churned for about 80-90 minutes to get Vista installed and this included a couple of reboots.

I should also mention that the application that I really cared about worked just fine. It will probably take me days to make sure all or most of my applications are working correctly under Vista but the apps I use the most are Firefox, IntelliJ IDEA, FeedDemon, Putty, Java, WebLogic, Tomcat, Glassfish and UltraEdit and they all worked. The only app that I’ve had major problems with is iTunes and more on that later.

Another cool and I think innovate feature of Vista is the idea of ReadyBoost. ReadyBoost helps make your PCs more responsive by using flash memory devices (like USB thumb drives or CF/SD cards) to boost performance instead of swapping to disk. Hopefully new PC will start shipping with the new hybrid hard disks that have integrated flash memory to help improve performance, reliability, and battery-life in case of an laptop. The idea of using flash memory instead of swapping to disk is really cool and I hope other OS’s take this feature from Windows and implement it themselves.

The last item on the good-list is the Windows Media Center application. The Windows XP Media Center was slow and ugly but did the job and the new Media Center app is significantly faster than the old XP version and seems to perform a lot better. It’s still interesting to see how CPU intensive Media Center still is where the dual-core as at 70-80% utilization pretty much all the time while I am watching Live TV.

The Bad

While it’s only been about 2 days since I’ve had the RTM version of Vista on my computer, there are quite a few things I don’t like about Vista. I know Joel talked about the shutdown button and so I won’t bother with that but there are a lot of really annoying things about Vista. I know – A lot of you are probably shaking your heads thinking I’m probably one of those guys that doesn’t like change. Quite the contrary – I love change, but only if it’s for the better. For example, the latest version of Office will have the new ‘ribbon’ interface and I absolutely love that interface. It took me a couple of hours to feel comfortable with the ribbon and find the things that I actually needed to do but I commend Microsoft for taking this bold move and creating a really sensible and usable user interface. There are a lot of things that I wouldn’t have changed with Vista and maybe I’ll learn to love them with time but I just hate the new start menu. While it’s nice that I can search for ‘word’ to have it bring up Microsoft Word, I would like to be able to just see the menu and sort/arrange in a way that makes sense to me.

Another thing that I also completely hate is the new Windows Explorer and the Navigation Pane. What happened to My Documents and My Pictures and My Videos? I don’t know what genius made this decision but instead of storing user profile information under ‘C:\Documents and Settings\’, Microsoft decided to move that to C:\Users. Why the hell would you do that? What about applications that are using the ‘C:\Documents and Settings\’ structure and now that whole directory is gone and now applications that rely on that or use hard coded paths will certainly break. Case in point – iTunes. I have about 50 GB of music under iTunes with a majority of it being music that I’ve personally ripped as MP3 over the last many years and probably 300-400 songs that I’ve purchased from iTunes. I had all my music under ‘C:\Documents and settings\login\My Documents\My Music’ and so the iTunes database had that path internally. Hopefully applications would use the registry and so the soft reference to ‘My Music’ would travel to the new location but apparently iTunes doesn’t do that and all of my purchased music wouldn’t play. So I reauthorized my computer and it still wouldn’t work. I’ve been playing with it for a couple of hours and I’ve made the problem worse as I’ve managed to create 2 copies of every song in my library. Thank god for backups.

The Ugly

I guess I am careful when it comes to my computer and so I have the McAfee suite of products and I typically only use the VirusScan and Firewall features of the suite. But the Vista installer wouldn’t run till I uninstalled McAfee. Now I’ve been reading a lot of new kernel security in Vista and the new PatchGuard technology built into 64-bit Vista that will not allow any third-party tool from making Windows API calls in order to modify their behavior or do something malicious. So I had to uninstall McAfee to even install Vista and that doesn’t give me a good feeling. I don’t like running with a memory resident virus scan program running at all times – Having a good virus scan gives me the license to download any piece of crap I see on the Internet and installing it. The installer didn’t give me any help by pointing out a list of other supported virus scan programs that are approved to work with Vista. After the install, I was able to go to McAfee’s site and download a new version of the software that worked under Vista.

I have a major problem with the idea of User Account Control and the false sense of security people are going to get from consenting to actions that require additional access. In the first two hours, I had 15 of these popup asking me things like can the firewall run and block something and unblock something. I paid attention for a while but then was tempted to turn off the feature or just click ok. So how is someone like my dad who loves his computer he is not computer savvy enough to understand the question he is being asked or the function he is consenting to by clicking ok. I know this is a tough problem to solve instead of just locking out the user while allowing them to install software, control the computer but other OS’s have this figured out.

The last item that fell in the ugly-section was Vista Office. After Vista was installed and working. I decided to install the latest version of Office. Much to my disappointment, the Office installer was not able to upgrade my copy of Office 2003 because of some file permission issue. I re-ran the installer a few times to no avail – I know uninstall/reinstall is cleaner and better than upgrade but upgrade should work and I could not get Office to install of my Vista PC. Go figure.

In conclusion, Vista does have quite a few compelling features that will make this a required upgrade for pretty much everyone. But I wonder if Microsoft would have been better by taking the BSD or Linux core and adding their UI on top of a working UNIX kernel? Mac’s have certainly gotten that to work and Microsoft could have done that instead of writing the whole OS from scratch or borrowing some of the XP code, which came from Windows 2000, which probably came from NT which probably came from Dave Culter and Digital. Yikes

Microsoft Vista: The Good, Bad and Ugly

You know the old routine – You get a new machine and then you spend weeks looking for and installing all the applications, tools, utilities, etc that you had on your old computer that made you so productive. There is always that utility that you use once in a while but you just can’t seem to find it.

I recently bought a new computer and decided to make a list of all the software I installed on the new computer so that I’m ready to do this again for my next machine. I wish I had discovered Belarc Advisor before I rebuilt my old desktop as a Linux (Ubuntu) desktop. So here is a fairly complete list of what’s installed on my machine and if you see something that I should have, please leave me a comment:
The Essentials

• Windows XP Media Center
• Microsoft Office Professional Edition 2003
• McAfee VirusScan & Personal Firewall

Development

• Java 1.4.x and 1.5.x SDK
• IntelliJ IDEA
• BEA WebLogic Server 8.1 and 9.2
• Apache Webserver
• Apache Tomcat 5.5
• Glassfish
• WebLogic Workshop Studio (NitroX M7 based on Eclipse 3.2)
• NetBeans 5.5 Beta
• MySQL 5.0 database server
• MySQL Administrator, MySQL QueryBrowser and MySQL Workbench
• DbVisualizer
• XAMPP (LAMP for Windows – PHP, Perl, Apache, MySQL)
• Aptana – HTML, CSS IDE based on Eclipse
• Microsoft Visual Studio 2005
• Ruby for Windows

Audio, Video & Graphics

• Nero 7 Ultra Edition
• Google Picassa
• Paint.NET – Photo manipulation software
• PIXELA ImageMixer for the Sony DVD HandyCam
• iTunes
• RealPlayer
• Microsoft Media Player 10

Browsers & Extensions

• Internet Explorer
  • TamperIE Web Security Tool
  • Fiddler – HTTP Debugger
  • Google Toolbar
• Firefox (List of extensions below)
  • Adblock Filterset.G Updater 0.3.0.4
  • Adblock Plus 0.7.1.2
  • All-In-One Sidebar 0.6.4
  • Compact Library Extension Organizer (CLEO) 1.0
  • Copy All Urls 0.6.2
  • del.icio.us 1.1
  • DOM Inspector 1.8.0.7
  • Download Statusbar 0.9.4.1
  • FireBug 0.4
  • Firefox Extension Backup Extension (FEBE) 3.0
  • Firefox Showcase 0.8.0.2
  • Gmail Skins 0.9.6
  • Google Browser Sync 1.2.20060911.3
  • Google Send to Phone 0.4
  • Google Toolbar for Firefox 2.1.20060807W
  • IE View Lite 1.2.5
  • Image Zoom 0.2.7
  • InfoLister 0.9e
  • Live HTTP Headers 0.12
  • PDF Download 0.7.5
  • Professor X 0.4
  • ScrapBook 1.2.0.4
  • Tab Mix Plus 0.3.0.5
  • Tabbrowser Preferences 1.2.8.9
  • Tails 0.3.4
  • Talkback 1.5.0.7
  • TinyUrl Creator 1.0.1
  • Update Notifier 0.1.4
  • Web Developer 1.0.2
  • X-Ray 0.8
• Opera

Utilities

• Ultraedit (I know there are quality free editors out there but I’m just too used to UltraEdit)
• FeedDemon – The BEST RSS reader for Windows
• 7-Zip
• Cygwin – UNIX shell and more for Windows
• Sysinternals (DiskMon, FileMon, Process Explorer, RegMon & pretty much every other utility on that site)
• Putty – SSH client for windows
• WinSCP
• Microsoft Money
• Avvenu – Remote access to your computer
• QuickResNT
• KeePass Password Safe
• Free Download Manager
• Google Earth
• Google Talk
• Yahoo Messenger
• MSN Messenger
• Jungle Disk
• Lavasoft Ad-Aware
• Flickr Uploadr
• CCleaner
• VNC Server & Client
• Microsoft Virtual PC
• TortoiseSVN – Subversion for Windows
• Auslogics Disk Defrag
• TaskSwitchXP – ALT-TAB manager for Windows
• Windows Live Writer
• Adobe Acrobat Reader
• Yahoo Widgets
• Skype

Essential Software for Windows

• Anil John – Ah, Governance …. – Blog
  How do you convince people “Governance is good for you” rather than “Governance is a roadblock”?
  (tags: it soa security governance article)
• Charles Miller’s analyis of the death of WinFS
  Did Microsoft forget everything Scoble was supposed to be teaching them, so quickly?
  (tags: microsoft winfs windows scoble blog osx spotlight vista)

Daily del.icio.us for Jun 25, 2006

It’s great to see all the coverage of Scoble leaving Microsoft – For the uninitiated, Robert Scoble is a very popular blogger that works for Microsoft and Robert achieved what millions and millions of dollars could not do. Through his blog, Scoble humanized Microsoft and offered some much needed transparency that led a lot of people to rethink their assessment of Microsoft as an evil company (Disclaimer: my brother works for Microsoft). By opening up Microsoft via channel 9 and getting other people (3000 by latest count) within Microsoft to blog, Scoble enabled people access directly into Microsoft and peeled away all of the facade to show Microsoft as a company of people where product decisions get made by developers and managers coming to some consensus and now via some master evil plan. For the record,Scoble is leaving Microsoft to join a startup in San Francisco named PodTech.net where he will serve as vice president of content media and help PodTech.net and get them a ton of exposure. Congratulations to the PodTech.net team as they are getting a great person on their team and the added bonus is all this publicity is a huge plus – You can’t buy publicity like this.

I knew this story would be great fodder for the blogosphere but it’s great to see ‘real’ news organizations like AP, Reuters and BBC News covering his departure. Who would have guess just a year ago that a bloggers departure from a company would generate this much attention from the media? I guess this just reaffirms the power of the blog and how important blog will continue to be as companies move forward to get their message out and market their brand. I can see a future where bloggers will be like free-agents in sports, blogging for the highest bidder. For the record, I am willing to leave my current employment for a seven figure salary and I’ll bring my 500 blog readers with me.

I wonder what Microsoft will do to replace Scoble. I do hope they replace him with another blogger as companies need a public face and I think it’s crucial to have that one blog that’s the face of the company.For Microsoft, Scoble has been that just like Jonathan Schwartz is for Sun and countless other examples. I guess the one positive for Microsoft is that people will now finally believe Scoble that Vista does indeed rock.

The impact of Scoble