Gadget Time

My Palm V has finally become unusable - the internal rechargable battery seems to have a life of less than a day, so I’ve been hunting for a replacement. After a lot of research I’ve ended up getting a Sharp Zaurus 5500 along with a Socket low power CF card.

I spent a long time lusting after the Sony/Ericsson P800 but the lack of any 802.11b card or flat rate affordable GPRS bundles in the uk finally put me off. Sharp are releasing an improved version of the Zaurus (5600) in the Asian and US market at the end of March so I decided to pick up the current version at a bargin price.

[Lian Li PC60 Aluminium Case] I finally get around to updating the PC my wife and daughter use in the office this week. After a lot of deliberation I picked up a cheap (�125) bundle of motherboard/fan/Athlon 2100+ from Maplin Electronics along with a Lian-Li PC-60 aluminum case.

I’m really impressed by the case, it has 4 built in fans but I’ve only needed to connect two of them to keep the temperature stable. The fans are thermostatically controlled and it means the PC is almost silent. To put this into perspective the fan on the graphics card in the PC I work on is louder than the entire system, and I’ve had to press the eject button on the cd-drive to see if the system is even powered up.

Well it turns out that the latka integration with cruise control wasn’t so straightforward after all. Whilst everything runs fine from a commandline version of ant life is not so straightforward in the version of cruisecontrol we are using. The issue boils down to the fact that our current version of cruisecontrol is based upon ant 1.4, and the latka environment uses 1.5. I’ve tried installing ant 1.5 into cruise control, but then I fell fowl of some differences in logging which meant I got no output from cruisecontrol. looks like its time to upgrade to cruise-control 2.0.2 which is based upon ant 1.5.1 which should solve the issue.

All the development done on the projects I’m involved with at the moment run through the cruisecontrol system for continuos integration. I’ll provide more of the details on this at some point in the future, but put simply this system means that as soon as a developer commits a change into cvs, our ant build is automatically run on the changes. Our build consists of several phases including:-

• checking the source changes meet our rules via checkstyle
• the compilation/javadoc phase
• Junit tests on the undeployed code
• deployment of code
• more Junit tests on the deployed ejbs

We have also been performing adhoc tests on the running application with JMeter. The problem we have had up until now has been integratign these web functional tests into the build process.i.e. simulating a user walking through the site with some validation processes like page content, timings etc. The good news is that a colleague showed me latka, which is exactly what we needed. The tests are simply defined via an xml control file. The test file contruction is straightforward enough to hand off to a non-coder for existing stuff (the rule now is that a new servlet/jsp page created by a developer should have these tests as well). These tests run within the JUnit framework and therefore integrate into the build perfectly after deployment.

I got some useful feedback on the questions about seeing what is going on under the bonnet in JBoss. Apparently I’m not missing anything and the solution is to roll your own cache/pool implementation that provides some statistics. Sounds like this is my chance to put something back into the JBoss project. As an interim solution its also been suggested to me to add a simple static to the classes I want to monitor and then maintain/log a count through the ejbCreate,ejbRemove,ejbActivate,ejbPassivate methods.

I’ve recently moved an application over to JBoss as part of replacing a Corba application. Everything is going well and performing fine, but I’ve one nagging question. Other EJB servers I’ve used have provided some kind of interface into the container that tells you how many beans of a particular type are active, the usage levels of the database pools etc. I’m aware of the /jmx-console/ support for viewing the services through JMX, but I’ve not been able to find this information. If you know better then let me know.

I finally choose to post some content….and then suddenly half the root nameservers fall off the internet. Info at Slashdot, maybe someone is trying to tell me something.

I guess I should explain why I’ve finally decided to maintain a blog. To be honest I’ve always been a little sceptical about blogging, but recently I’ve started finding useful information in other peoples blogs. As an attempt to put something back I’ll try to write a few words on what I’ve been up to. If you find anything interesting contact me.