Archive for March 2007

A couple of nice pages describing useful web stuff

The first is a great discussion about CSS, very handy, both score a 10 or 15 depending on your scale.

 http://blog.jm3.net/2007/03/16/the-only-ten-things-to-know-about-css/

The second is about handy javascript snipits:

http://www.igglo.co.uk/6/15-javascript-snippets-you-cant-live-without/

Both are via the DZone.

Mesh Meet-up

Handy On-line SQLFromatter

This is a pretty handy SQL reformatter.

http://www.wangz.net/cgi-bin/pp/gsqlparser/sqlpp/sqlformat.tpl

I could have used this on more than one occasion in the past.

Defn: Rim Zombies

Rim Zombie:

A person using their rim so intently they wander into traffic, walk into people and bumb into inanimate objects. Also called Rim Jobs and Rombies.

Turn off JBOSS Persistent Timer Service

I couldn't find this on the the JBoss wiki although it's supposed to be there, somewhere, not that I looked really hard, but then again I shouldn't have to.

In your JBoss deployment directory usually $JBOSS_HOME/server/default/deploy edit the ejb-timer-service.xml file.

Find the Noop line and uncomment it, and comment out the lines after it that describe the DatabasePersistentcePlugin. This is pretty handy for development, but not recommended for production.

<mbean code="org.jboss.ejb.txtimer.NoopPersistencePolicy"

name="jboss.ejb:service=EJBTimerService,persistencePolicy=noop"/>

You should be able to do this without having to restart the server. Finally you can check via the jmx console to verify that everything is good to go. under jboss.ejb – the persistence policy should read: persistencePolicy=noop,service=EJBTimerService 

Finally I should add the JBoss team needs to develop a nice programmatic way for querying and purging timer requests, as it stands now it looks almost impossible outside of building a custom mbean, which is probably what I'm going to have to do for the stuff I'm working on to go into production. It shouldn't be this hard.

Sneaker Net is alive and well

Who new Google would be carrying the Sneaker Net torch.

 The principle behind Google's program is that the bandwidth of a shipping crate full of hard drives should not be underestimated. DiBona said that Google has developed a combination of drive arrays (in a small form factor case) and packaging that can be sent to the source of the data: "We bought some hard-sided foam packing cases, not unlike the roadie cases you'd see at a concert, and ship the arrays in them. We've gone through a couple of different models and have settled on a model that can ship about three terabytes of data in a case," DiBona said.

Also Jonathan Schwartz of Sun seems to be jumping on the bandwagon maybe.

From Moving a Petabyte of Data: I made a speech last week at which I asserted it was faster to send a petabyte of data from San Francisco to Hong Kong by sailboat, than by the internet.

Of course this isn't your fathers sneaker net, but one that's all grow'd up and on steroids.