Jeannot's Weblog

JBoss web server - logging

2007-10-02T10:51:00.000Z

By default, the Tomcat request logging seems to be switched off. To turn it on, do the following.
JBoss 4 has Tomcat deployed as a service inside Tomcat, called jbossweb-tomcat55.sar. This can be found in the server/default/deploy directory.
In the root of jbossweb-tomcat55.sar is a server.xml file: you need to activate (uncomment) the valve which does the access logging in order to see the HTTP requests in the appropriate .log file in the log directory.
The relevant valve in server.xml looks something like:


<Valve className="org.apache.catalina.valves.FastCommonAccessLogValve"
    prefix="localhost_access_log." suffix=".log"
    pattern="common" directory="${jboss.server.home.dir}/log" 
    resolveHosts="false" />

Tour de France

2007-06-04T06:41:00.000Z

(Haven't done any blogging for a while as I've been in the process of moving to France, and I haven't had the time.)
Guillaume Prébois, a journalist with Le Monde, is planning to cycle the entire Tour de France route, as part of a controlled experiment to see if someone can really maintain the hours and distance demanded of the riders in the real Tour, without recourse to "certain substances". He will be doing the route (I have read - but not confirmed!) one day before the real stage goes through, and his blood etc. will be constantly monitored and the results published. He says that he really expects to find himself utterly exhausted, contrasting with other Tour riders who apparently can still do a coherent media interview immediately after a feat of extreme endurance such as a stage of the tour should be. He says that there used to be "exhaustion", but not so much any more - why?
I noticed a piece about this on Le Journal de la Santé on France 5, but other information seems a bit thin on the ground (doesn't he have a website for this adventure??). I found a bit of second-hand info here, but not much else.
So for any Tunbridge Wells-based readers out there, Guillaume Prébois will presumably be coming through your neck of the woods on Saturday 7 July - and I wish him lots of luck since the roads will not have been cleared for him, so he'll be running the gauntlet of 4x4s and chav-mobiles that normally plague the town.
Are there any journalists out there who could take this up and perhaps interview him en route through Kent? I don't know where he's planning to stop... or if no journalists, at least somebody could chalk encouraging words for him on the road somewhere. Chapeau!

Write Dumb Code

2007-03-02T12:17:00.000Z

I really enjoyed this article by Brian Goetz of Sun Microsystems, in which amongst other things he exhorts developers to "write dumb code" - in the sense of code which is straightforward, clean and follows obvious principles. I wholeheartedly agree with this.
There are two main reasons why code gets overcomplicated. The first is that in a way it's "easier" to code up a solution for a specific case, and then try to widen the solution to fit other conditions. What tends to happen here is that you end up building in lots of options and special code to cater for different things, which complicates and clouds the original aim. This is where refactoring is important. Refactoring is not a luxury - time needs to be allowed to do it properly.
The second reason is the programmer kudos that comes from complex solutions. I'm looking at a problem at the moment where there are layers of object caching and refreshing options in a situation where it's probably not even needed: the database does its own caching, so why reinvent the wheel?

This guy should've been promoted, not fired!

2007-02-23T11:13:00.001Z

But perhaps he wouldn't have wanted to be. This is a great video though. If only all sales support telephone people were like this, the world would be a lot more interesting place...

PC vs Mac

2007-02-16T10:15:00.000Z

Have you seen these Apple ads featuring Mitchell and Webb of radio and TV fame? Quite funny ads but somehow for me they end up backfiring - in the sense that they make me prefer the PC. They are supposed to make you think that Macs are just cool, relaxed and very competent, whereas the PC is nerdy and riddled with conflicts and problems. But I must admit I end up preferring the PC. The Mac just seems smug, but the PC, for all its problems, is somehow lovable. The ad is based on a wrong idea anyway: that the Mac is somehow for the home (ignoring all the offices - especially in media/creative businesses) which are full of Macs (I think people who consider themselves creative like to insist on one to prove their credentials!), and the PC is for the office - ignoring most computer-equipped homes which have Windows PCs.
So I was sort of thinking about changing to a Mac (I like the idea of running Unix under a beautifully slick user interface), so headed over to the Apple UK site - but then these ads put me off. Sorry Apple! This whole problem is brilliantly discussed by Charlie Brooker in this Guardian article.
Also check out the US versions of the same ads (same premise, different actors), they are quite funny too. The PC character looks a little bit more, shall we say, Gates-like...

Politics Schmolitics

2007-02-15T14:59:00.000Z

I tried the Politics test at OKCupid - and here are my results. In their graphic mockup, it puts me right on top of Hilary Clinton, which is actually somewhere I wouldn't mind being...

You are a
Social Liberal
(65% permissive)

and an...
Economic Liberal
(23% permissive)

You are best described as a:

Democrat

Link: The Politics Test on Ok Cupid
Also: The OkCupid Dating Persona Test

So Long Longplayer

2007-02-11T16:51:00.000Z

So Longplayer, the old record shop in Grosvenor Road, Tunbridge Wells, has finally gone. A victim, presumably, of the gradual decline in high street record sales in favour of internet retailers and downloads. In its place is the scaffolding that Anke mentions in his blog post. With its neighbour, Camden Classics, it used to be a nice place to escape from the standard-issue high street shops all around it. Longplayer with a great range of music and some surprising obscurities to be found, Camden Classics to get a range of classical music, some of it pretty cheaply...
I used to go in both of them quite a lot, for a browse - although less and less over the years. Partly due to generally buying stuff from Amazon/iTunes, but mainly due to buying less and less music as I get older. I think my last purchase there was Daft Punk - Musique 1993-2005, the CD+DVD, which I was surprised to find there, but then the place is, or was, full of surprises.

My heavy music-buying phase at Longplayer was I suppose the early nineties. We didn't live in Tunbridge Wells then, but visited people who do, and I used to buy stuff like The Orb, Aphex Twin, and other weird electronic stuff, which I still listen to, not to mention a whole load of utter crap that I no longer listen to!

Do other people out there have fond memories of music purchased there? I know Bluebear does...

memcached

2007-02-01T14:51:00.000Z

memcached seems well worth using for highly-dynamic webapps which do a lot of database access. There's a brilliant Ajax-based travel portal called Kayak which uses it, for one. Also it looks like a good fit for things implemented using JavaSpaces...?

Even wife doesn't read blog

2007-01-31T11:44:00.000Z

The blogging habits of Tunbridge Wells resident Paul Milner were at the centre of a family argument last weekend. It transpired that not even his wife was familiar with Mr. Milner's recent blog posts.
"I was gobsmacked" said Mr Milner. "You might have thought that a blog would at least be read by the writer's spouse. But no."
The revelation came about due to a chance discussion on Sunday. An opinion held by Mr Milner and discussed on his blog was met with some surprise by his spouse. Amongst protestations of ignorance, the unsettling facts came to light: despite over 15 years of marriage, Mr Milner's blog had never actually been perused by his wife.
"Isn't it part of the sacred vows of marriage to read your partner's weblog?" commented Mr Milner. "Well if not it should be. How else am I supposed to drop subtle hints about my birthday?" he added.
Mr Milner plans to make a five foot high enlarged and laminated copy of future blog posts and affix them in front of his wife's mirror, where she is sure to see them almost immediately.

Charles Web Debugger

2007-01-30T09:25:00.000Z

This is very useful... lets you see what's going on between your web client and server - handy enough for investigating traditional HTTP request/response-type interactions, even better for AJAX where you've got data flitting back and forth the whole time...

Boden catalogue

2007-01-19T12:04:00.001Z

Y'know, something worries me about this photo on page 102 of the Boden Spring 2007 catalogue. Can't quite figure out what it is...

Tour de France

2007-01-17T11:19:00.000Z

The Tour de France route for Sunday 8th July is now available. The riders will go through Southborough and Tunbridge Wells, then out towards Pembury. Should be interesting to see - perhaps a good vantage point would be just north of Soutborough Common, and watch them coming up that bastard of a hill from Tonbridge...

Cultural Learnings

2006-12-05T16:12:00.000Z

Spent last week in Erding, Bavaria - where we used to live. Thanks Chris, Emily, Katina and Ellie for putting us up / putting up with us! Key cultural learnings are as follows:

1. When making a Chinese stir-fry, the tofu and vegetables should be cut into sharp shapes, i.e. triangles. The peppers should be cut on the slant to give a wedge-shape, rather than the squared-off lumps that I tend to do. This is presumably important for the overall feng shui of the meal... Tofu is also better fried in plenty of oil for plenty of time: I have been chronically undercooking it. Must get some of that Teriyaki sauce as well, which when mixed up with garlic, ginger, etc. makes a much better flavour than just dousing it with soy sauce.

2. If you find yourself tempted to have a drink at the pool bar at Therme Erding, don't order a half litre of Weissbier. Stick to something that combines better with swimming.

3. The restaurant in the Schöner Turm is very nice, and they do an interesting mixture of Bavarian and Thai food (if you can imagine that), but they do have a tendency to close the kitchen early if you take 4 excitable young ladies who rampage through about 6 plates of bread, steal further supplies from surrounding tables, and pretend to be aliens by balancing knives on their foreheads.

4. Gluehwein at the local Christmas market is now served in a cup shaped like a little boot. Not sure if this is progress or not. I tend to think not. But I definitely prefer the little Erding market to the enormously crowded one in Munich itself.

5. If you pack your suitcase full of Lebkuchen, Weihnachtsschokolade and other goodies for the trip home, and then entrust it to the tender mercies of British Airways baggage handlers, don't expect them to remain uncrushed.

6. Don't waste time vaguely pondering how nice it would be to get the hell out of South-East England for another few years in this pleasant corner of Europe...

Probably Poppy...

2006-11-17T19:39:00.000Z

by Judy

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud

2006-11-16T21:51:00.000Z

Having signed up for an account a while back, I finally got around to trying Amazon EC2. It's pretty cool. Once you've signed up for the service, you can create server instances which you can use for whatever you want - you create a server configuration or use a predefined one. The idea being you can quickly get and configure a Linux instance, with Apache, MySQL, whatever you want on it, and if you need more capacity, just start more instances of your server. The process of setting it up, as described in the Getting Started Guide is quite intricate, but you control the whole thing yourself rather than having to have a back'n'forth with a hosting company. It involves:
1. setting up an Amazon AWS account and signing up for Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service) and the Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)
2. Downloading the command line tools to work with server instances
3. install the tools, set some environment variables, and set up some security keys/certificates
4. Choose a server image (AMI - Amazon Machine Image) - there is a "Getting Started" image which is basically Fedora Core 4 Linux with some basic software on it e.g. Apache
5. Set up an RSA key to use with your image, and a few other bits of config e.g. to open the SSH and HTTP ports to the world
6. Configure PuTTY to use the key if you're going to be SSHing to the image with PuTTY. This allows you to log into the machine as root with a key instead of a password.
7. Start the image - it takes a few mins to start and then you can login as root and do what you like with it. There is a web page you can hit as well to check that Apache is up and running.
8. Leave the server up or shut it down. Don't forget to shut it down though because your account is being charged for the time it's up.

So there you go. Might be handy, if I ever get round to doing my proposed Amazon books/Google Maps mashup, provisionally entitled "Read The World"... So anyway, I created a server, fiddled around with it for a bit, maybe half an hour, and brought it back down again. Didn't do anything really - no database, no website traffic to speak of. Checked my Amazon AWS account afterwards, and I had clocked up a bill of $0.13. Hmm - could get expensive??

Costs:It's 10 cents per hour (or part hour) anyway to have an instance, plus 20 cents per GB of data transfer, plus VAT. So $2.40 to have a server up for a day, say $70 per month, plus your data transfer, plus tax. I suppose it's good for people who want to be able to very quickly increase/decrease their capacity...

Weblogic notes

2006-11-16T08:57:00.000Z

Notes to self! Here are some learnings from a recent project. When upgrading Weblogic, ensure that the following issues are all covered in order to avoid performance and/or compatibility problems. Next time, it would be a good idea to put all these items in a project plan checklist to make sure they are all ticked off... I would put the following in a list in big letters and ensure they are all covered:

JDK - check versions in use for compile/deploy. Upgrade to latest.

Startup params - verify your settings if migrating, they may be deprecated

Clustering - run your test systems clustered to avoid surprises!

Security - beware of changed transaction handling

Domain trust - set domain trust between your tiers

IIOP - switch it off if you don't actually need it

SerialVersionUID - in case you are sharing objects between tiers running different WLS versions

Weblogic Console - is very different

Everything else...

1. JDK: Which JDK is Weblogic using, and which JDK are your applications compiled against? We ran into problems with JDK5 release 4, related to garbage collection, which were apparently fixed in release 9 (see this bug report). Several versions were knocking around: I had jdk1.5.0_06 on my PC, my Weblogic installation had jdk1.5.0_04. It is apparently recommended to upgrade to jdk1.5.0_09 (currently) because of memory management issues in earlier version. So: check which versions are in use on the build machine and the deployment machine(s). There is also a note to include a startup parameter to avoid serialVersionUID problems: JAVA_OPTIONS=
-Dcom.sun.xml.namespace.QName.useCompatibleSerialVersionUID=1.0

2. Startup parameters: These have changed between WLS 6.1 and 9.1 - in some cases quite radically, e.g. certain memory settings have been removed/replaced. Make sure that you check which settings are in your startup script and replace them with the new settings if necessary. We found that we were using some out of date settings but didn't realize, because they were just ignored.

3. Clustering: if you're running a test system, it's a good idea to run that as a cluster. This way you can eliminate any clustering-related issues on your test system before you migrate it to production. We had initially tested on a non-clustered environment, which caused some last-minute WTF?-moments when we deployed on Production

4. Security: Weblogic 9.1 has a different security model for handling database transactions and so on. So take careful note of the database drivers you are using (XA or non-XA, etc.) and use the appropriate settings. By default, in JDBC settings, "support global transactions" is on, but you may not need this, so check! For example, our web application is largely read-only: any database updates are done via adapters to external/legacy systems, so we don't really need to support transactions except in specific cases. So switch it off if you don't need it, or you will see a lot of scary console messages about "transaction downgraded to anonymous" or something like that, I can't remember the details.

5. Set up server trust relationship: don't forget to set server trust between servers in your domain, otherwise any transactions etc. that you do try to run across tiers may fail. To do this, you need to set the domain trust credential/password to be the same across servers in the domain. See this page for discussion.

6. IIOP: IIOP is enabled (by default?) but if you're not using CORBA etc. directly from your Java applications you can possibly switch this off. We thought we were using IIOP but it turned out that our CMS (Broadvision) was putting some IIOP-related messages in our Weblogic console output but we didn't actually need to have the Weblogic IIOP support switched on, because Broadvision was handling it itself.

7. serialVersionUID: early on in the project, we realized we would still have to run certain applications in a Weblogic 8.1 environment, but that they shared some objects and RMI/EJB calls with the new Weblogic 9.1 environment. So we had to disable the version checking in various objects (mainly Transfer/Value objects, Exceptions) which might be serialized across the wire between these environments, by manually setting the serialVersionUID to 1. Which is fine normally but means you lose visibility if things really are incompatible...

8. Weblogic Console: this has changed radically from 6.1 and even from 8.1. Best to familiarize - also we found that under Weblogic 9.1, especially in a clustered environment, the console can be very, very slow. I heard a rumour that this is improved in WLS 9.2 but don't know for sure. Definitely worthwhile scripting changes via the new scripting tool (WLST) if you don't want to be waiting for the web console pages to load...

9. Everything else! The following items also came up and may be worth bearing in mind:
- Weblogic 9.1 has by default an "auto-tuning" feature which is supposed to optimize thread use. This may not be ideal for your application profile: you can switch it off and go with manual thread settings, which is what you had to do in previous versions anyway. It's worth checking this sort of thing before you implement rather than being surprised by it!
- Deployment descriptors: there is a tool to upgrade them to the correct version
- JDBC drivers: we migrated from a Type 2 to a Type 4 driver...
- JSPs: There is a utility/Ant task to precompile JSPs for the new version - worth running to check for compilation errors etc in advance of deployment
- Tiles: if you are using Struts Tiles, some tags had to change e.g. adding a "flush" attribute here and there, and using getAsString methods instead of just gets...

Poppies

2006-11-10T16:09:00.000Z

That's our cat Poppy (whose birthday is November 11th), with a poppy.
One of my great-grandfathers was killed in World War One, so, Private Ernest Hellewell, 335445, of the Royal Scots, this is for you.

Groovy Grails

2006-10-26T08:11:00.000Z

See the Dev2Dev article mentioned below. My thinking at the moment is that if you already have quite an investment in the Java platform, it would be easier to bring in use of Groovy/Grails than to migrate to Ruby on Rails. Personally, this is a happier compromise than plumping hook, line and sinker for Ruby, which risks throwing out the baby with the bathwater. Sorry about the mixed metaphors. Why am I apologizing? Who the hell's going to be reading this other than myself?

An Introduction to Groovy and Grails by Harshad Oak -- Groovy is a scripting language that runs on Java VMs and Grails a Web development framework. Learn about Grails on Groovy and decide whether it is a compelling alternative to Ruby on Rails.

Java DocWeb

2006-10-24T14:24:00.000Z

Found this post on Developpez.com - concerning James Gosling's initiative to allow online viewing and editing of the Java 6 (and 5) javadocs. Seems like a good idea: multilingual javadocs at your fingertips, with some community-edited content.
Here's a translation of that post:

"James Gosling recently announced a new project called DOCWEB.
This project will permit anyone to create online translations of the javadoc for Java SE6 and also Java EE 5.
Personally I think this is an excellent idea.
But it's a shame Sun didn't allow this 10 years ago.
How to get involved?
Go to this page:
http://doc.java.sun.com/DocWeb/
and choose a class of some sort.
Check that the language is set to English, and choose Login.
Enter a userid, password, and click on Need to register?
Repeat your password, enter your email address and a confirmation number.
You're now registered.
Next, choose the class you'd like to translate, and choose the language (French) and then "Translate". This allows you to edit the class's javadoc online.
Want an example of what this gives you? See the javadoc for ZipEntry. It has been partially translated. You can even vote for the translation, or propose a better one.
Note that this is only a test:
"This is just an experiment,
expect the database to get trashed"
Also note that James Gosling has made the source code for this project available to you under a GPL licence at:
http://doc.java.sun.com/DocWeb/
Vincent"

Conversion experience

2006-10-22T13:00:00.000Z

I've never been much of a religious person until now. I tried to be a Christian but it somehow just didn't hang together for me. Tendencies towards atheism kept reasserting themselves - until recently. Fortunately for my eternal soul I have now been enlightened by The Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster. This wonderful organization has helped me clearly to see the truth. Verily I have been touched by His Noodly Appendage. Anyone reading this blog, I hope it helps you on your path to enlightenment and true understanding.

Scaffolding isn't for Production

2006-09-29T13:45:00.000Z

Rails is all very well, and you can build a CRUD application over a database in No Time Flat using the templating that Scaffolding gives you, but as this post points out:

Scaffolding isn't for production. Overcome your addiction. It shouldn't be modified to be more customizable. Developers should instead learn to write Rails code.

Which sounds like the Voice of Experience. But it leads me in an unexpected direction: I have no great desire to learn how to write proper Rails code. Using Rails make me just want to cobble things that seem to work and say Wow! that was quick! No. I want to write proper Java code. And if that's the case, I may as well write things from scratch in Java, which gives me much more flexibility with plugging in functionality, scalability, etc. And is in general a language of great beauty and expressiveness - unlike Ruby source code which to be frank looks like the bastard offspring of a BASH script and a CASE tool...
Let's face it, it's no great problem to write things properly in Java these days, there's so many things to help you do it, frameworks, IDEs, components... I think I'm going to have to take that "I ♥ Ruby on Rails" item off my blog menu - I've just fallen out of ♥ with it. I'm a Java bigot and I'm just gonna have to live with it.

JMX Clients

2006-09-25T12:29:00.000Z

I needed a JMX client this morning (I want to create a Hibernate SessionFactory using JMX rather than coding another singleton), so I started having a look to see what's out there, as I haven't looked at these sort of instrumentation interfaces for Weblogic at all - apart from the main Weblogic admin console, and just scratching the surface of the weblogic.Admin command-line tool. So what is out there?

jManage: Initially I found jManage: I tried to install the webapp under Weblogic9.1 but couldn't get it to work for me - there is a command-line tool with it but haven't tried it yet.

EJTools JMX Browser: To avoid having to load a webapp into a container, with all the grief that can go with it, I tried to find a Swing-based JMX client that I could just run as a standalone app - found the EJTools JMX Browser which looked promising but I see it hasn't been updated since 2003 and although it says it works with Weblogic 7, and although it seemed to get tantalisingly close, I can't get it to work with Weblogic 9.1.

Sun tools: Sun appear to have some JMX tools - including a plugin for NetBeans, but since my fave environment is Eclipse, I am going to try EJAM which I found via some Eclipse plugin portals. Downloaded it to my Eclipse directory, restarted Eclipse and you get a new perspective called "JMX Console. Open this, you see a JMX Server Tree, to which you can add servers. I have tried, but I get some sort of screwy error suggesting it can't add the libraries I specified. Back to the drawing board.

XtremeJ: Next up, XtremeJ, which is not open-source or free, but it is an Eclipse plugin, so will give it a go.
You have to go thru a register to evaluate process, then added the downloaded ZIP to my Eclipse plugins directory (this was a guess).
This gives you a new "Java Management" perspective, and the first thing you have to do is enter the serial number that XtremeJ sends you.
Which I did. And it didn't work. Meh.

So in effect I haven't got anything working. Closest I've got so far is using the following JSR-77 parameters:
Factory=weblogic.jndi.WLInitialContextFactory
Packages=weblogic.jndi (dunno what this is for though...)
URL=service:jmx:t3://localhost:7001/jndi/
Context=weblogic.management.mbeanservers.domainruntime
Principal/Credential=same as weblogic administrator account
Need to copy wljmxclient.jar and copy weblogic.jar to where the program can see them...
That's as far as I've got.

Maybe the best hope is to use the built-in command-line tool (weblogic.Admin) which should allow me to CREATE managed beans, INVOKE methods on them, SET properties on them... etc... Try java weblogic.Admin -username uuuu -password pppp weblogic help. Except, that the command line tool is deprecated as of WLS9 - you are now supposed to use the Weblogic Scripting tool...

Wikimapia

2006-09-10T09:22:00.000Z

Wikimapia looks like an interesting project... sample map below

Self-referential...

2006-09-08T16:22:00.000Z

In true po-mo tradition, I am taking this opportunity to write a blog post on the subject of a news article which refers to this blog! Robert Leslie of BBC Kent wrote this feature on blogging, in which he refers to various blogs from round the area - including your very own Jeannot's Weblog...

Kids, eh?

2006-08-07T10:41:00.000Z

Well here we are back at home for a few days with the girls still down in Dorset visiting their Nana and Poppa. And what a change it makes to our relaxation levels! Observe the difference. The first picture (click here for the full size image) is a recent one of our life with the children around: the background soundtrack that you can't hear consists of the frenzied clanging of crockery and the bustle of neverending chores, overlaid with "More pizza!!!" "Have you ironed my skirt yet??" "I want a fiver to go to Costcutters with!!" etc.

The second picture (full size image here) is one taken today, as we sip a cocktail whilst nestled on soft cushions, reading books and pondering which 5-star restaurant to go to for lunch.... Aaaah!!