Easter

Easter is coming. Families will get together, talk, have fun and great food. :))) I like great food. :)
And I like easter eggs. This ones too.
And the best of all, i get to stay at home for three days. Yuupiii!

Digital books

I just read an article in a local computer magazine about why digital books, magazines, ... don't do well. As an example the author showed a case with Steven King when he tried to publish one of his books only in digital form and failed. He concludes that the problem is that each customer can get a digital form of the magazine easy and even not pay for it and he puts his hopes in an efficient methods to secure digital copyrighted work. Hmm... why do I smell DRM here ? I think that now more and more music record labels recognize that DRM is evil. :))
My opinion is that there are NO devices that would have properties of regular paper. I refuse to look at PDFs(for example) on LCDs or some other semi-appropriate device for reading them. I'd like to have a light device, that is nondestructable and easy to handle, like paper is. :)))
Maybe technologies like E-Ink, Digital ink and others will bring the ease of use.

New server

At my job, we are planning in developing a new version of our server application. More can be read at Javalobby. What I'd like to see in our new server:
- multiprotocol support: support for RMI, JMS, socket so the client can for example initiate a communication via RMI and server sends a reply via JMS. Server can also initiate a connection with a client.
- scalability: server would have to support hundreds, maybe even thousands of concurrent users
- support for file, ftp, mail monitors: sometime we have to import some data from a file that resides on ftp, mail, .... Now we are doing this by hand. I'd like a component that would monitor those things and notify me, maybe even call appropriate method based on where the file came from and it's name.
- transaction support on Object level: this is more a wish than a requirement. We can still use database transactions
- AOP support: this is also a wish, but in this way I'd only have to write my log statements once, maybe I could use it also for transaction support via database transactions.

I like Mule and ServiceMix. The problem is that I don't know how they will behave in real world, mission-critical application. What do you suggest?

NoMachine NX

Usually I use VNC to access my machine. But VNC is slow and it even doesn't transfer characters like {} and such. Maybe it's an issue with Ubuntu's VINO VNC server. I don't know. The fact is that VNC is slow.
Today I discovered that NoMachine provides free NXServer. It only supports 2 simultaneous connections, but it is enough since I'm the only one that accesses my computer remotely. The installation is easy (at least on Ubuntu 6.10):

sudo apt-get install openssh-server
sudo apt-get install libstdc++2.10-glibc2.2
sudo dpkg -i nxclient_2.1.0-17_i386.deb
sudo dpkg -i nxnode_2.1.0-15_i386.deb
sudo dpkg -i nxserver_2.1.0-18_i386.deb

I got nxclient_2.1.0-17_i386.deb, nxnode_2.1.0-15_i386.deb and nxserver_2.1.0-18_i386.deb
from NoMachine.
And that's it. Then you run nclient from a remote machine. :)))

New LCD monitor

I decided to buy a new LCD monitor. Today I'm using an old CRT Samsung 19" SyncMaster. It is a good monitor, but it does show it's age.
I'm a programmer so I need a good picture quality and a resolution at least 1280x1024. I'm thinking about an Samsung 971P. What do you think?

NetBeans Book

I can wait to get my hands on this book . :)))
It should clear up a lot of things regarding developing modules for NetBeans and also using NetBeans Platform.

Linux editor's macro support

At work I'm working a lot with text files (data that is comma delimited, ...) and usually I have to change something in the files, like adding comma at the end of every line, ... So I need an editor with macro support. Well, with macros that can be recorded.
My favourite text editor is vi, but I didn't find that functionality in it. You can write a map command for it, but it is time consuming and not exactly what I want.
Since I'm using GNOME I've tried gedit and no macro support there too. :((
Then I tried Emacs. You can record key strokes, but you cannot link them to a keyboars shourtcut. At least I don't know how. :)))
Since I program in Java a lot I thought maybe some Java editor will help me. I've tried NetBeans (my main development environmet) and Jedit, but they don't feel like text editor to me. :))
Then I though: "Google is your friend." and it was. :))) I've found nedit editor. There you can record a macro and link it to a keyboard shourtcut. I has an ugly GUI, but it does the job fast. I'm happy with it. For now at least. :)))
Are any other editors that know macorded macros out there?

SelfCheckout progress

My last post is old :))) 
This is because the work I've been doing. I had to do some catch up on the work I didn't do because of the "secret project"  :))).
Now I also have to so some work on the communication between our application and the government customs application. It appears that our government is pushing XML into their processes. Interesting... The problem is that the specifications they gave out on how the XML document should look like is not exactly the same as their system want to receive it. The second problem is that when you send an XMl document you don't always get an answer back what was wrong with it. Oh, well... In couple of weeks everything should be OK. :))

Secret project revealed :))

Some of you may remember me mentioning a "secret" I was working on.
Now this "secret" project was just revealed on the 31st of January 2007.
It's a SelfCheckout terminal at one of our biggest retailer!!! Woohooo!! :)) It's also the first in this part of the Europe and the first commercial installation of the new version of IBM's SelfCheckout in the world (at least I was told so :))) .
Here are some news, but sadly only in Slovenian language:
- Siol
- Finance
- Planet.si
- Dnevnik

First snow and my first Java bug

Today has started good. :)))
During the night we had our first snow, well only a couple of snowflakes, but nevertheless. :)))
When I came to work I found this in my Inbox:
We have determined that this report is a new bug and entered the bug into our internal bug tracking system under Bug Id: 6516858.

You can monitor this bug on the Java Bug Database at
http://bugs.sun.com/bugdatabase/view_bug.do?bug_id=6516858

Woohoo... My first Java but was accepted!!!! It is not yet visible to the external world, since it takes a day or two to propagate through the infrastructure, I guess. :)))

New Java update soon ?

Now you all know that Slovenia's currency is Euro. The problem is that this change is still not propagated into Java. Why? There is a bug reported, but is it closed as NOT A BUG. :))) It says that they will fix the problem as soon as ISO 4217 announced the change. I guess they still didn't do that. Why do standard bodies have to be so slow? It's a simple change!

Experiences with €

Slovenia is using € for 21 days now. The prices have gone up a bit (some even for 100,% 200 % :(( ) , my wallet is full of coins and I still don't have a right sence of the value of the currency. I'm sure with time I'll get the feeling. For example before you had to pay for a car couple of millions, but now "only" couple of tens of thousends, so it's a bit different.
The "secret" project I blogged about couple of weeks ago is comming to an end and more will be revealed by the end of the month. Stay tuned ! :))

Happy New Year 2007

I whish to you all a happy new year 2007, full of health, happiness and love. To my countryman I also wish welcome to euro-zone and may you see a lot of big euro notes. :))

EURO is coming !!!

On the 1st of January 2007 my country is going to use EURO as it's only valid currency. You can imagine that we have to update our software to be able to handle this new currency. It's crazy here. :))
Here you can see how our EURO coins are going to lok like. In my opinion there are true symbols of Slovenia. I just hope we will get used to them quickly, since the values (exchange rate is 1 EUR = 239,64 SIT) are more than 200 times smaller than we are used to now. This is not going to be my first currency change. In the former Yugoslavia we had huge inflation, so we changes the values on curreny a lot. Then we got our own money (after the independance we didn't used real money since it was not printed yet. We only used it for about a year) and now EURO.
I'm a bit sad too since we waited for couple of centuries to get our own money and after 15 years we'll be changeing it for EURO.

Dynamic working hours

Dynamic hours... Hmm...

Usually this means that you get to work at 7:00 in the morning and you leave at 16:00 and sometimes at 22:00 or even the next day. :)) 

Crazy Weather

It's unbelievable! It's December and we still have temperatures of 15˚C or more. I don't remember anything like this happening while I'm alive. :(((
This is also a good time to get flue, so be sure to drink a lot of fluids and get a lot of vitamins :))

DB2 IMPORT

It's been a long time since my last post. It has been a wild roller coaster at my job, as someone said.
During this time I also discovered something about DB2 IMPORT command. It doesn't work as the docs say. What does this mean? Sometimes you get "SQL0100W No row was found for FETCH, UPDATE or DELETE; or the result of a query is an empty table. SQLSTATE=02000" and the row is rejected.
Hmmm. How can this be since the docs say that UPDATE should be performed via primary key? So if there were no rows to UPDATE, why does IMPORT not perform an INSERT?
What I found out is that on my target table there was a UNIQUE key defined and removing the UNIQUE key solved the problem.
Does this mean there is a bug ? In the IMPORT command itself or in the docs ? Maybe this is right for a PMR.

Cold

Oh well.. I guess it's just that time in the year. I think I've got cold, termperature and my throat is a bit sore.
I'll have to start drinking tea with honey and lemon. And more vitamins too. :))
I just hope I don't get too sick.

DB2: Fast Delete Large Tables

Have you ever wanted to delete a table with millions of rows? Using
DELETE FROM TABLE1 SQL statement? Then you know this is very, very slow and it fills transaction logs. The fastest delete methond I've ever seen goes little like this:
1.) First you export 0 rows from the table:
EXPORT TO TABLE_NAME.IXF OF IXF SELECT * FROM TABLE_NAME WHERE 1 = 2
2.) Then you do a LOAD with REPLACE:
LOAD FROM TABLE_NAME.IXF OF IXF REPLACE INTO TABLE_NAME

I've been able to delete rows from tables with tens of millions of rows in a second.
I hope this little tip is usefull for a lot of DBA's out there.

New NetBeans modules

I'm sorry I didn't post any updated/new modules for NetBeans. The thing is that I'm busy at work and I don't have much free time. I promise I will update every module that can be found on my homepage to version 5.5. I also have some idea for new modules and I hope to get them done till 2007 :)))