I did a Roo application once after reading a refcard and it was easy but this tutorial from SpringSource showed me a few more commands that makes Roo a lot more powerful. I need to go back to my previous application and test a few things. It is simple enough that you can create a quick web app without typing any Java code. I like this command line interface for creating application. Probably too much.

I will cut the suspense right away: not working very well.

Actually all my Linux VMs on the Mac have not worked well with VirtualBox. I have tried many version of VirtualBox and there is not one that worked better for me.

I searched on the community forums on the virtualbox.org site but did not find much help.

The experience of installing RHEL 6.1 in VirtualBox was not easy at first because I was allocating the maximum memory it would allow me. I have plenty of available RAM on my iMac so that was not the issue. I was monitoring with the Activity monitor app and we were not hitting any limits from what I could see. In the middle of the installation VirtualBox would give me an error about the host being low on memory and would pause the installing VM. Only when I dropped the memory allocation from 3500 Mb to 2048 Mb did the installation work to the end.

The VirtualBox tools installed no problem but since I did not use the VM enough before installing the tools I am not sure if it was stable in the first place. If I start Firefox and Eclipse it freezes and I have to force a shutdown of the VM.

VirtualBox works great on my Windows 7 laptop and I have no problem running many apps in it. It is actually a very good development environment for what I do.

On the Mac I am afraid that I will have to find another solution and that is too bad because the iMac is a much better machine than the laptop to test RHEL 6.1.

If I wanted the least amount of trouble I would probably use OpenShift on a Fedora laptop or a RHEL6 server.

Since I always give myself a challenge, I decided to use MacOSX to work with OpenShift. Not that it is a bad idea but it gives additional challenges I did not expect. There is always something positive about these challenges. When the basic things don’t work you have to learn about them and how everything is setup. It is always the best setup to learn. Certainly a quick success on that aspect.

Installing the rhc tools to create a domain and app on openshift requires that you have XCode installed. Only $5 to get the app from the Mac App Store but I did not know that it was installing an installer. Once I learned that I needed to install from the installation I was golden to get something done. So I had a relatively empty application from the WSGI template setup on my MacBook Air.

It is great to code on the laptop but sometimes I prefer to use the iMac with the bigger screen and more comfortable setup. I tried to simply do a git pull to get the repo but it would always fail on me. After getting some help from the OpenShift Express Forums I learned that I needed to copy the files from .ssh that were created with the rhc tools. The config and libra_* files were copied and my git pull worked as it should.

Basic things but it is great when it works and that you have learned where things are.

Now I have this great idea that I should try to put Spring Python in OpenShift Express. Looking for more learning, I guess.

I was not suppose to go this year because it was the turn for a co-worker but since that person left us for greener pastures I was lucky to be the next in line.

I was quite happy to be going.

I did not really remember why I wanted to be there until I was there for a few hours. Yes I wanted to go to many of the technical sessions and my agenda was made before the event started. I am always impressed that the presenters are the people doing the code or in charge of the technical team responsible for what is being presented. The presenter can answer many of the questions and if they can’t most of the time the rest of their team are in the audience. The quality of these presentations are great because of this involvement.

But as much as the technical sessions are great it was Jeremy from trendhunter.com that reminded me why I loved the Summit so much. It is about the culture.

The culture at the Summit and at Red Hat is very different than what I see where I work. The collaboration with everyone is the norm in the open source communities and Red Hat certainly makes it a point to always act in collaboration.

That different mentality is good shock and certainly allowed me to see others thinking differently but also to wake me up. When you are challenged in how you execute your job you can better evaluate the reasons you do it that way. You can also see what you can change.

In my case it is a little more than that. I am uncomfortable in how we approach our execution of what we need to do. I am a lot more interested in the collaboration model that I have seen during the Summit. In that regard I think that I need to challenge a lot more than just myself. Is it just the greener pasture syndrome, I don’t know. I think that I will have to wait a month and re-evaluate what I have seen and how I feel about it.

I think that the most important sentence from this Summit will be “culture over strategy”.