I had to setup a forwarding DNS servers today and since I had never done it before I was looking for a quick way.

I installed the bind rpm package that comes with RHEL5 and was puzzled since it did not create the /etc/named.conf. So I created one with this content:

options {
directory “/var/named”;
forwarders {10.1.1.1; 10.1.1.2;};
forward only;
};

That was not an obvious one. Under KUbuntu I typically use the KPackageKit application to install and update applications.  It did not work well. I tried to install the sun-java-jdk package many times and every time it would list the dependencies and do the install but the “java -version” would tell me that I was still using the OpenJDK.

After reading a few different posts in forums I tested the idea to use the synaptic package manager. The installation worked much better.

To finalize the install I ran a few commands at the cli:

sudo update-java-alternatives -l

This listed the fact that I now have the OpenJDK and Sun Java installed on my workstation.

sudo update-alternatives –config java

This allowed me to specify to use the Sun Java as my default JVM.

java -version

This now reports the Sun Java JRE as my JVM.

I can now use Maven to compile some test projects.

I guess there are still a few issues with the OpenJDK to be fully compatible (might just be some configuration that I am not aware of).

There is a new year coming very soon…

Magical number to it so more motivation to create and learn, or so I hope. It is easy to have grand plan for the new year since it is a new start. Everyone loves a new start.

I certainly hope to create more with new technologies that are out there and report more on them here than I have done before.

I should commit to numbers so I can measure my success but that is always a scary idea. It means you have the potential to fail and everyone prefer success stories.

Groovy, Scala, AJAX, more web app coding… There is plenty to learn more about.

I was reading some newsletter and they recommended some online courses so out of curiosity I looked at this one:

http://www.javapassion.com/j2ee/

I decided to register and we will see if I can follow it all the way through. Certainly looks like the course material is quite exhaustive so I should certainly learn a few things from this.

Until today I was not even aware we were using this IP geolocation service in some of our systems. I guess that you need an outage to get to know what you have.

We do queries to country.netop.org to quickly know which country an IP is from. I am not sure of all the details but it seems quite simple to use. The only catch is that netop.org mentions that they have a single server answering the queries and that it can’t take big loads.

So why do we depend on it?

Someone decided that it was simpler to use this service to add the requested feature. It was probably not highlighted in the dependencies of the system or someone did not understand the full value of the dependencies.

I am not blaming anyone because I am ready to bet that we have many more dependencies like that, some that I have put in place, that we can’t fully value until an outage hits us.

The ITIL CMDB is a useful idea to try to catch these but it is one thing to know a system to help identify these dependencies and an other to make it work in real life.

This is not the first time I do this and it is on the edge of embarrassing except this time I knew I had tools to get me out: lose the source code to a java application.

I have this application that was done a year ago and I guess that in the rush to get it to production I forgot to import the code in SVN.

A year later we have changed a few things and now I have to change a few lines in the code and add a method to it.

I remembered using a command line tool under Linux to decompile but since I could not remember the name of it I had to search for it. In the first few results of my google search for “java decompiler” came this site:

http://java.decompiler.free.fr/

I tried to install the JD-Eclipse but I don’t see how to use it so I simply downloaded and used the JD-Gui for Linux and it works beautifully. I can see my source code in the .class file in 2 seconds and now I can easily change it. This is so convenient.

Saw this article from a twit and I am unsure how I can do all these:

http://codemonkeyism.com/generation-java-programming-style/

Interesting and if I do any code with this I will post an other entry to let you know how it went.

I spent days trying to get the NVidia drivers to work on different 64 bits Linux distributions without success. Initially I was blaming Kubuntu 9.04 for these issues but I tried with Slamd64 and downloading the drivers from NVidia and had the same issues. I also tried with openSUSE 11.1 64 bits and it did not work.

Some desperate time passed…

I tried Kubuntu 9.04 32 bits and it worked on the first try.

I am quite puzzled about this. The Slamd64 site specifically mention that they have done testing to make sure that binaries like the NVidia Drivers would work. They work to install and compile but the X server does not start properly.

Not only that issue is bothering me but I can’t have one monitor turned 90 degrees and the other in normal mode. These limitations are not pleasant.

I must be missing something since it should work.

I have to read a bit more on the subject but this article was interesting since it shows how to do in Java what Apple Cacao does with the MVC model. I find this twist to be easier to understand.

http://java.sun.com/developer/technicalArticles/javase/mvc/

http://odi.ch/prog/design/newbies.php

This explains a few things that should be done differently if you want your application to perform well. Very interesting!