Molitor

2010-06-05T04:54:00.001-05:00

Must maintain a 6 month blogging average...

2009-10-25T08:46:00.001-05:00

Wine + Steam = Good

This thread summarizes why I prefer to purchase and use games via Steam on my Mac and Linux boxes. Not only do you avoid shady patches and other questionable (legal and moral) practices, you also are providing a more predictable experience. In general Steam locks the version and patches that everyone uses forcing the application to become a constant. This means testers A, B, and C are testing the same application version on variable distributions and hardware. Furthermore, users A, B, and C will likely end up using the exact application that was tested significantly increasing the possibility of a similar experience.

Without Steam, or some other forcing function that locks application versions, testing becomes far more complex and it is harder to guarantee an acceptable user experience. In the PC (a Mac is still a PC) world and the world of Wine there are already far to many variable frames, fixing even one of them is a godsend. I would even go so far as advocating that Codeweavers focus their testing and support on the versions of games available on Steam over other variable sources. (In theory those variable sources can patch their versions to the same versions distributed via Steam...)

My £0.02

2009-06-20T10:38:00.003-05:00

Quick plans for creating a USB to barrel plug power adapter.

While you can buy a cheap solution for this problem I'd encourage you to recycle some of your spare parts and make your own.

You can easily make your own USB power cable using a 2.1mm barrel connector and a USB Type A host cable.

The center of the barrel plug is DC_5V and the sleeve is GND. This matches quite nicely with the USB Pin 1 (DC_5V) and USB Pin 4 (GND). I will create a simple diagram and post it later today.

2009-01-24T07:16:00.001-06:00

Wait, where did 2008 go? Oh, thats right, Facebook...

2007-07-22T14:57:00.001-05:00

Damn, my hairline is receding. That really sucks.

2007-06-04T01:44:00.000-05:00

Whale Watching

Lauren and I went whale watching this past weekend and it was amazing. Have a few pictures of flippers, fins, and faces. Not great pictures as most of the time I just stood amazed completely forgetting about the camera.

The previous weekend we headed to the Seattle Film Festival and watched King of Kong an absolutely wonderful documentary. It was picked up for a nationwide release and should be showing at your local theater later this year. Expect to hear a lot about this movie in the coming months.

2006-11-05T14:50:00.000-06:00

Carbonado

Amazon persistence opensource carbonado.sf.net

2006-11-05T14:48:00.000-06:00

Started migrating molitor.org, overcr.org, and the tuxbot.com sites. Slow progress but at least the new host is a much better box with better bandwidth.

2006-11-05T14:46:00.000-06:00

Struts 2 History

Don Brown recently typed up a blog entry summarizing the trials, failures, and eventual outcome of trying to merge the leading open source Java web development frameworks. Sadly corporate brand ownership had a significant impact and probably has lead to the frameworks being more fractured than they need to be. The eventual outcome however (Struts 2) has the backing of Google, BEA, IBM and Apache. Interface 21 (of Spring and SpringMVC fame) while leaving the merger table is still supporting Struts 2.

Project Clarity ultimately failed but all parties continue to support one another and have united on several JSR's that might have a much larger impact to Java development as a whole. I dont think we'll see any revolutions on the Java web development front, but the evolution continues.

JSR-299 Web Beans
JSR-295 Bean Binding
JSR-303 Bean Validation

OreillyNet: Struts 2 History

2006-07-13T14:37:00.000-05:00

Change is coming, and much faster than I expected.

2006-05-30T06:44:00.000-05:00

I've started backporting stuff for the WebWork 2.2.3 release you can find patches here. For more information see the WebWork developer forums.

Picasa for Linux is out and you can download it here. I used a copy to post the image below. "But wait, that was published in April before Picasa for linux was out!" a mystery indeed.

2006-04-06T11:38:00.000-05:00

2006-04-02T14:18:00.000-05:00

Started digging into the Struts Action Framework and WebWork merger a little bit this weekend. Primarily I've been playing with XML interfaces to actions. For fun take a look at the proof of concept WebWork2/Action2 MailReader that Ted Husted has been working on.

Inintially I was a bit tenative as to what this merger would mean but things have been going well. There is still an open question as to where, who, and how XWork will live within this merger. This is of some concern to me as a lot of my robotic stuff is now implemented with a DSL that is parsed and translated into XWork.

Making final arrangements to convert all of the robot sites over to being completely opensource and moving everything to Contegix. Matthew Porter and the fine folks over at Contegix have been supporting Webwork, OpenSymphony, and other opensource projects for years. Go, spend money, and be happy.

2006-03-22T12:45:00.000-06:00

Kudos to Sun for not only acknowledging the issue quickly but addressing it as well. I'm more than happy to eat my own words.

2006-03-12T11:04:00.000-06:00

Well I've been causing trouble again. Its not really my trouble but it seems to have uncovered some bad network programming with the SUN JDK. And probably more importantly it appears that Java's remote debugging network protocal sucks. Kudo's to IDEA and SUSE for being good sports and helping track these issues down.

Here are the relevent threads.
http://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=6177
and
http://www.spinics.net/lists/netdev/threads.html#00823

Sun has yet to respond to the bug report. I'm not holding my breath.

2006-01-15T10:18:00.000-06:00

So WebWork 2.2 is out. Its loaded with quite a bit of goodness but also a few small issues. If you are a java developer and want to know the future of MVC based web development and you're not already using WebWork you should really take a look. Of all the frameworks that I've used (Struts, RAILS, Tapestry, JSF, RIFE, WebWork and SpringMVC) WebWork is still architectural the cleanest design. And with WebWork 2.2 a significant effort has been made at making development easier. Expect this to continue as WebWork becomes an Apache project and replaces Struts.

2005-12-31T18:44:00.000-06:00

Rails, PHP, and Resin

I'm in love. I finally bit the bullet and upgraded my own server a few weeks ago to Resin. (On the advice of Matthew Porter a fine WebWork developer...) What can I say, I'm in love. Its not just Resin I'm in love with its what Resin allows me to do. Not only am I running WebWork based java code, I'm using Resins PHP support to run a few older PHP apps. The PHP support is beta level but still good enough to run the few simple apps I need. But it doesn't stop there. I'm using Resins FastCGI support to connect to a RAILS app. And get this, it matches Lighttpd's performance.

So there it is, my favorite stack. Resin + Postgres + RAILS. (Actually its also running MySQL as my little ROR app doesn't want to deploy on Postgres because of some weird Postgres ruby problem.)

2005-11-26T01:29:00.000-06:00

I'm helping organize BarCamp Dallas. BarCamp Dallas Come meet some of the smartest people in Dallas and Learn something.

2005-11-26T01:24:00.000-06:00

As WebWork 2.2 has embraced Spring I've been modifying everything to do what I want it to do. Its amazing to me that with all the wonderful things Spring has it doesn't support Session Scope Beans. The solution is to use a thread local to propagate the session deeper into the app. Makes me wonder if Ruby has thread local variables. Here is someone who has taken the idea and developed a good implementation. JA-SIG I'll post a webworkified version later.

2005-10-15T10:43:00.000-05:00

Alex Muse has blogged about open source support startups.

2005-10-14T19:51:00.000-05:00

Downloaded the latest build of JDK 6.0 this week and played around a bit. Interesting stuff and the 64 bit support seems to be getting even better. Download, play, enjoy!

2005-10-05T23:45:00.000-05:00

I spent a bit of time and finally update tuxbot should be adding more content and eventually moving all my robotics and opensource work over there.

2005-10-01T11:41:00.000-05:00

Had a discussion with Alex Muse about various things and Ruby on Rails came up. They've successfully replaced PHP app that took months to develop with one that was created in about a week. I'm an avid fan of Rails and a rabid fan of the concept. But after hearing some performance woes I started running through some load tests. Surprisingly ROR is quite fast but probably not as fast as it could be. I'm reminded of coding Perl web-apps under FastCGI and converting them to run under mod_perl. (I've yet to explore SCGI)Its been a long time since I've integrated Tomcat with Apache as the standalone Tomcat server is more than fast enough especially when weighed against the overhead of managing the integration long term. The future of Rails is on WebBrick or something like it. There is no reason that a RUBY webserver cannot be as fast as Tomcat 5.5.

(Somebody needs to get Cameron Purdy slinging Ruby...)

I'll definitely post more information about this, including some raw numbers (specifically thread/process overhead of the initial request and then DB connection latencies) but I'll say this again. ROR is fast enough, this exploration is about understanding how ROR performs and how to tune it.

I've spent that last week tuning garbage collection with Bruce Snyder with some interesting positive results. You'll probably see a case studio about the work at some point. As well as a bit more about the work here...

2005-09-22T08:52:00.000-05:00

If only we could harness the power of spam and use it to divert hurricanes. Well here at pollution central we're at 102 in September with enough ozone in the air that I'm debating about starting an Oxygen utility. My allergies are now one of the seven wonders of the world. (I've voted off the library at Alexandria since most people just watch TV now. As books on tape become more popular and book readership declines I wonder if we'll end up with books on TV. Not TV movies, but the "For Whom the Bell Tools" as read by Keanu Reeves in his "Point Break" character. Doooomed!)

Java is fun, Java is Neat, but making Java work with USB is impossible. The Robot and Drag Race light tree controller now has a stubbed DLL that is hooked via JNI to work in Java. I'm a failure.

2005-07-27T12:49:00.000-05:00

AC broke on Monday and was able to get a repair man out to fix it, only to have it break again on Tuesday. Its hot as balls in my house today and it sucks. I just hope they honor the warranty! (Compressor must be replaced...)

2005-07-26T10:30:00.000-05:00

Wow, its been awhile.... Llammacom went out of business so had to rush around and get a new ISP. OverCR and the port of OpenNMS to Tomcat 5 can be found at http://www.tuxbot.com which should be getting a facelift (and a return of the robots link soon!)

Cheers,
Eric

2005-03-16T15:13:00.000-06:00

The power of stupidity is immeasurable.

2005-02-26T14:15:00.000-06:00

Well its getting near Birthday season for the Molitor family so we're busy getting plans ready. In the technical world I'm working on a few new projects.

Linux Wireless support. Playing around with the madwifi drivers and their cobbled together WPA support led me to a few emails about the lack of newer encryption support in the Linux Wireless Extensions. Been a long time since I grocked kernel code. Oye!

Also working on what to do with the SWARC website (http://www.swarc.org) we had a little internal strife but that seems to have sorted itself out. Now its time for a long overdue update.

In Java land I've been looking at a better way to convert tiffs to jpegs. My current reference is JAI 1.1.1_01 code so looking at the newer JAI and JAI Image IO support in JDK 1.4.2+.

2005-02-21T13:51:00.000-06:00

Just went and saw Lewis Black in Dallas, TX. Was interesting watching the drunk rednecks scream back at the stage. Some people shouted when he made fun of Bush, others shouted when he made fun of Kerry. I really like him so I guess it makes me a cynical bastard.

In a land of fools I'm happy to work with the few smart people.

2004-12-24T10:19:00.000-06:00

Happy Holidays everyone. Work continues on my "holiday probject" have a self installing service that monitors blocking processes with SQL Server 2000. .net is great for windows developers, however its error handling sucks. Blew up the VM several times and had the joy of wading through the endless list of know defects.

2004-12-12T10:54:00.000-06:00

Porting OpenNMS to Tomcat5/Tomcat 5.5 has been interesting. I'm still walking through the code and looking at the structure. However I did create a sloppy quick port to make it run under Tomcat 5. OpenNMS for Tomcat I plan to develop a proper patch and work to get it integrated with the sourceline shortly. However what I really want to do is get away from OpenNMS having a custom realm at all. I'd love to migrate the Authentication to the RDBMS and use tomcats native DB authentication. This will require a bit of work however assuming it can be made abstract enough it should facilitate porting to just about any AA system. (A Jetty port would be nice) After that it's time to look at the PM code and consider Hibernate. And finally I want to look at the collector interface to see if I cant cook up a JMX Client Monitor so that appservers and Java 1.5 apps can be monitored and finally write a SQL Server 2000 Monitor. (Blocking procs, etc.)

Three calls from work on Friday and one on Saturday. Hoping this trend continues. Happy Hanukkah.

2004-12-10T09:32:00.000-06:00

So whats going on in Molitorland lately? Well I'm trying to liquidate the rest of my vacation (minus the one week I can role over). Its not going so well, average three calls a day right now. However I'm filling in the gaps by playing with SUSE on s390 hardware. I have to say SUSE is pretty well put together. I've only found a few problems with their RPMS (and SRPMS). I still think Debian has a better packaging system, however over the past few years it seems distro's have gotten much better about this.

Having problems building gnome-libs on Suse? I had to edit the SPEC file and added --enable-prefer-db1 in the configure options block to get it happy. Not sure if this is an error on my part or theirs, however works great for me!

2004-11-25T16:09:00.000-06:00

Ahh the joys of scm. Been diving into subversion lately, specifically mod_svn with various mod_auth (from ldap to pgsql). To be really lazy I'd like to integrate SVN's authentication with OSUsers. So creating a developer in jira allows them to access the repository.

Happy Thanksgiving!

2004-10-27T10:25:00.000-05:00

I've discovered that I'm not a big fan of capers. Horrible little things.

2004-10-17T18:15:00.000-05:00

Wow, over a month since my last post....

What you wanted more? Well it'll have to wait until after the elections.

2004-08-20T09:57:00.000-05:00

Been a while since I've posted. Happily my primary development environment now is 100% Linux. Sadly roughly a few days after I completed the switch my laptop's DC-DC power supply has failed in a strange and mysterious way. (When plugged in the battery fails to charge and I sense a bit of Glade Plugin Electric Burning Scent.) Dells 24 hour business support team will be here in 72 hours to look at it... *SIGH*

2004-08-11T10:59:00.000-05:00

Most people in this world are stupid, unfortunately most of us are also conceited. Therefore you're probably dumb but will never admit it.

2004-07-27T08:55:00.000-05:00

Comments are enabled so talk amungst uwes-elves.

2004-07-27T08:50:00.000-05:00

There's a funny thing about egos. In some people they take precedence over rational decision making. Unfortunately at the end of the day its not the people with the egos whom pay the price.

2004-07-21T09:29:00.000-05:00

Oh ye mysterious lump how you mock me. Why cant a sonigram be anything like a candygram? And dear god man, buy these people gel heaters. Nothing livens up a doctors visit like cold gel slapped on your nether regions. Had a discussion with a urologist yesterday (yay, no more oncologists... for now) where he decided that my lump was not 5 meters, but only 3 meters. Yup, you read right, according to him the lesion is larger than my body as a whole. After pointing this out he laughed and said "Yes, milimeters then." Lovely, not as bad as NASA's mistakes but remember this man may end up removing my testicles. I'd rather NASA crash a spaceship into mars, than hear my doctor (in the voice of the doc in a box on The Simpsons) say "Okey dokey, sorry we took off all of it." Hrrmph, not much privacy left.

PS: Go check you testes! (If you've got 'em)

2004-07-07T17:14:00.000-05:00

Welcome everyone from work! (Shit, now I have to watch what I say.) I work for the most wonderful company in the world where everything is perfect. Doves and butterflies flutter about our office as we join hands in a giant circle around the servers and sing hymns to profitability and efficiency. March on corporate warriors, our time has come... pfffft, eew stinky.

2004-06-30T12:09:00.000-05:00

Congradumalations the pAper chAse on your new rekid deal with KILL ROCKSTARS. Dont get big heads, we've all seen you in skirts!

2004-06-30T11:51:00.000-05:00

Thank you IntelliJ, you keep developing in Java fun, I only wish you were built on top of eclipse. All you JavaOne'rs out there grab your free copy and be happy. (Ooooh, shining happy people just came on the radio. Dirk-duh Dirk-duh Dir Dir)

2004-06-30T11:45:00.000-05:00

Sometimes I wish everyone I worked with was like me, then I think about that and I'm horrified by the reality of what that would truly be like. Thank god for diversity! Part of life is cleaning up other peoples messes, but understanding that doesn't make it any better. Not to harp too much on myself but I love my wife. No matter how bad a day, week, month, or year can be she's always there, and always makes me happy. I can only hope to do as much for her. To life, music, art, development; in otherwords everything.

2004-06-27T13:24:00.000-05:00

I keep thinking, blogger.com/blogspot really needs some kind of stats. Spent most of this week babysitting a dog and pondering the effects of concurrency. Speaking of concurrence, I love you Doug Lea. You're my hero of the week.

Finally best .net book ever, Essential .Net volume 1, worth its weight in shredded, refined, bleached, and processed trees.

2004-06-18T09:54:00.000-05:00

Discovered that people actually read this, and in surprisingly large number?! If you've read any posts on here (especially Sunday, June 06, 2004) you now know that I have neither tact, nor spelling ability, nor apparently any knowledge of proper grammar.

2004-06-18T09:43:00.000-05:00

ISCAlert go grab this. Akamai's DNS DOS is still showing its effects even after the DOS stopped. *Sigh* time to prod some pointy hairs and make sure I get a refund... isc.sans.org is your friend

Which is better, Berkeley DB Java Edition, Concurrent HashMap, or PERST. Game on!

2004-06-06T16:55:00.000-05:00

So I'm in Alpharetta GA this weekend attempting to make my body as sore as possible. Haven't heard from either my office or the people watching my house. These are good things. Its a nice feeling when your not working 36 hours a day trying to put out fires. Not much on the opensource front lately, I promise to post some information soon about what I'm currently working on. I will give you the name, Storm***** in memory of the storms that knocked out power and caused general havoc for a week in Big D little a, little l, little l, little a, and little s. Sometimes I wish Dallas had to s's. Dallass seems more appropriate depending on what mood I'm in...

2004-05-24T15:07:00.000-05:00

Wow, slogging through another day. Seems like every time I get 1/2 way into closing defects somebody blows up, a server catches fire, or a plane crashes into my house. But there's always a silver lining, I had an awesome poop today.

2004-05-13T23:17:00.000-05:00

By the way if your compiling libgdiplus and its not finding cairo (assuming your building in /usr/local)...

cp /usr/local/lib/pkgconfig/cairo.pc /usr/local/lib/pkgconfig/cairo-0.1.17.pc

might help.

2004-05-13T21:39:00.000-05:00

I love Java. Its important to start that this conversation that way. I'm also dedicated to developing in any language depending on what my end goal is. When mono was announced I downloaded it and played around with it and even wrote some code to fix a few CLI problems. But then I lost interest. So I decided to download the 1.0 beta and build it on my RedHat EL 3.0 box. (basically just downloaded the source and did a ./configure --with-nptl=yes). So far I've been impressed, I'd dare say that any gui apps I write on linux will probably be in .net running on mono. I've already knocked out a few .net apps using M$'s implementation. Where will all this go, dunno but right about now I'm wanting a spell checker in blogger. So maybe thats what I'll write a mono app to post to blogger. Cheers!

2004-05-11T16:33:00.000-05:00

A post is a post of post of post unless that post is a blogging post and then of post that post is post a posty posty post.

2004-04-25T15:57:00.000-05:00

Life Art Music Computers Java Programming Everything. Its what I am and what I love.