I code Java for food

My dearest friend

2010-04-11T22:42:00.001+02:00

Milou, 17 Nov 1997 - 30 March 2010

JFokus 2010 day One

2010-01-26T22:28:00.001+01:00

This is the first time I visit the JFokus Java developer conference which takes place at the Filmstaden Sergel cinema in Stockholm. It is arranged by the Javaforum Java User Group (JUG).

The first day, the tutorial day, is over and for me it ment learning about the Kanban agile method presented by Henrik Kniberg from Crisp. Hat off for Henrik and his presentation skills. Having experienced Scrum first hand for a couple of years now, I know it is not easy to implement. Kanban brings principles that could aid where I have experienced problems implementing Scrum in the passed. Time will tell if I will get to experience Kanban first hand or not.

The other thing I learned today was Enterprise Integration Patterns (EIP) using Apache Camel and Spring Integration. Initially this spot would contain Bruce Snyder but since he could not make it Torbjörn Stavenek took his spot. So I guess I learned less about Apache Camel and more about Spring Integration than I would have if Bruce had been there.

Wading through a river of enterprise integration patterns is quite boring which I guess is why I heard snoring in the middle of the presentation. Maybe the presenter should have scheduled more breaks during the heavy portions of the presentation to fight off the sleepiness of the attenders. Once again, hat off for Henrik Kniberg who scheduled Pomodoro breaks during the whole Kanban presentation to fight sleepiness. Despite this I had some close calls.

The most interesting thing in the EIP presentation was not the demos Torbjörn showed us but the real world example that he had been involved in developing and the experiences he had from that.

Tomorrow is the conference day and it will be a full one.

Continuous Integration made easy

2009-08-04T20:51:00.001+02:00

Today I had the opportunity to try out JetBrains continuous integration engine TeamCity 4.5.4, something I have been curious about for some time now. So I have this big project in a Perforce repository which I wanted to set up.

Getting TeamCity to run as a standalone application under Ubuntu in a VirtualBox was easy, all it needed was to have a JAVA_HOME set up before starting it up using the runAll command. Configuring was also quite straight forward and I could map up a Perforce client specification in the web application directly. The project to build uses an Ant script which also was straight forward to set up.

When I tried to build the project I thought something was wrong because it seemed to freeze when trying to sync out the repository. I soon realized that TeamCity uses the Perforce p4 command in a different way than I am used to which takes considerably longer time to sync than I am used to. Having realized that, I let it go about doing its thing and it built right away.

Well, not entirely true. However, I can not blame JetBrains for the poorly designed build scripts with environmental dependecies I fed to TeamCity. When I finally got the build script to build it worked like a charm.

I am not the kind of guy that is easily impressed by user interfaces but TeamCity really rocks. Their usage if Ajax makes the application interact in a way that almost gives the feeling of a desktop application. A soon as you have made a change in some configuration, a save button pops up at the bottom of the browser window informing you that you have unsaved changes. Another thing that really makes it rock is the feedback you get during a build. Not only can you see how long it has been working and how long it is left (estimated of course), but you can also see what it is currently doing. Apparently it parses the output from the build script and presents it in an easily digestible format so you can actually see what it is currently doing Ant target wise.

The thing that makes TeamCity especially interesting for me right now is that it doesn't only support Ant and Maven2 and whatever Java thing you want to give it. It also supports building .Net projects using the normal .Net build tools which is interesting since we have some of that as well. I haven't tried the .Net stuff though.

If you want to try it out for yourself you can download the professional version which is free and supports up to 20 user accounts. That is quite generous. For a more permanent installation, it can be deployed to an application server of your choice with a database of your choice, within reason of course.

So if you need a continuous integration engine, don't hesitate to try JetBrains TeamCity. I doubt you will be disappointed.

My first JavOne experience

2009-06-24T21:43:00.001+02:00

This is an attempt to sum up my experiences from JavaOne. A lot of information went into my brain during the first week of June 2009 but for some reason it doesn't easily come out. I have spent some time to review the session schedule and my notes taken to pull out the knowledge stuffed in there, because it is a lot of knowledge stuffing going on in a week like that. Let's start from the beginning.

I arrived on Saturday evening to have Sunday and Monday to get in shape. With 9 hours time difference you have quite some adjustment to do to get in phase with the clock. Trying to watch a musical (Spamalot) on Sunday evening might not be the smartest thing to do if you want to get value for your money since the jet lag plays tricks with you.

The JavaOne conference started on Tuesday but there was another event overlapping the main event called CommunityOne. This is a freebie where the Monday was technical sessions like JavaOne and the following two days were more hands on sessions. Maybe it is kind of a dress rehearsal for the real thing. I found Community one to be a good warm up for the main event. They even had a better band at the cloud computing party, in my opinion, the Spazmatics only playing hits from the 80's.

Also the pavilion opened on Monday, which is kind of a trade show with a lot of interesting booths. From a JavaOne alumni I heard that the pavilion was considerably smaller that previous years which also was the case for the whole conference. The economic crisis takes its toll on this event too and maybe the pig flu also has some effect on the number of participants.

The week continued with one or two general sessions a day which was mostly a way for the sponsors of the conference to show off. I agree that an OSGi based modular JDK like Apache Harmony is a cool thing but it isn't really that spectacular on stage, really. I didn't really think that the announcements this year was that spectacular. JDK 7... milestone 3. JavaFX 1.2... beta. Java EE 6... also a milestone. The Java Store... also beta, only for US. But you always had the excitement of the T-shirt launching at the general sessions where some contained a gift certificate for an Amazon Kindle or a JavaFX phone or something.

At one of the sessions a T-shirt came flying straight at me and suddenly I saw a forest of hands above me and I knew it was lost. When I looked at people to the left of me I saw they were searching for something and I realized that the t-shirt was still at large so I looked down and saw something under the chair in front of me so I reached down and there it was. Talk about poetic justice. Well it was only a long sleved t-shirt that could have been a size or two bigger, like me, but it was nice to actually win something.

When not doing general sessions there were a lot of interesting technical sessions which they of course scheduled simultaneously. The quality of the speakers varied a lot. You think that the big names making presentations would be good at it, but don't be fooled by their names. Some of the better presenters I saw was Joshua Bloch, Romain Guy, Chet Haase and Sweden's own Jonas Bonér. I actually saw Jonas presention twice, the second time some weeks later at Javaforum and this time in Swedish. You can learn a lot about holding presentations by attending such a conference, at least I did.

On Thursday the pavilion closed and it felt kind of like the count down started. I was feeling quite full from all information stuffed in my brain already. Of course I went to the After Dark Bash which is the official party for the conference but I left early to see what you can do with Java, some home brewed electronics and a Wiimote. Check out James Gosling's Toy Show to see some of the fun you can have if you have the right working place. Let's see if Larry Ellison likes it too.

On Friday I hit the low water mark in presentations, no names to protect the innocent, and the last presentation went by. The feeling that the conference was coming to an end I already had the day before but now it was a fact. I had a very nice dinner with my colleagues in a restaurant in The Castro called Catch. That was really a perfect end for this intense week in San Francisco and if I get a chance to go there again, I will not hesitate to do it.

The end of JavaOne 2009

2009-06-05T23:31:00.001+02:00

Last day of JavaOne, only a couple of slots a left before it closes down. I realize that I haven't blogged as much as I had planned to but then I didn't know what intense and tiring experience a developer conference like JavaOne is. There's not a day that I have left the conference area before 21.30 (9.30 pm) and sessions all the days. When it is really ment for you to eat?

Well, I will sum up my experiences from JavaOne in at least one blog entry, possibly more. There should really be a newcombers guide to JavaOne. I still have a lot to learn.

Off to next session.

Hi tech aircrafts

2009-05-31T17:37:00.001+02:00

Yesterday I took the quite long journey from Stockholm to San Francisco for JavaOne and the first stop was Chicago O'Hare airport. On the plane over they had entertainment systems built into the seats where you could select movies, games, flight information and such.

One cool feature was the ability to see outside the plane through mounted cameras facing forward and down so you could actually see what you were flying over and even see the runway during landing.

Of course I tried the games but this is where it really got tricky. I couldn't get it going without having the flight attendants reset my device. When it finally got going, I started my career as a backgammon player but it was not very long since my entertainment system suddenly froze.

After having tried to resolve the problem myself I again turned to the flight attendants for assistance. I showed the flight attendant the problem and I showed her that nothing happened when I pressed the buttons. Almost in panic she says these memorable words.

- Oh, no! Don't press the buttons like that. It is like a computer, if you press the buttons too much it will hang.

I just smiled.

JavaOne and Twitter

2009-05-28T21:29:00.001+02:00

I am going to JavaOne on Saturday and it's about time I'd say. Let's just hope it will be a good one even though we have the economic crisis and that the virus lurks around the corner. You know which one I mean. Well, I don't mind if the place is not crowded.

I just started to see if Twitter is something for me. The link is http://twitter.com/RogerWesterlund and I don't know the lingo yet. I'll try to update it while over there, we'll see about that.

Software Craftsmanship

2009-04-01T22:11:00.001+02:00

I signed the Software Craftsmanship Manifesto the other day. It felt like the right thing to do since I have for a long time felt like I am a craftsman doing the software development craft. What really made me realize this was the keynote speech Robert C. Martin (Uncle Bob) gave at the Øredev conference in November 2008. He really put words on some of the feelings I have had for a long time.

I believe every software developer is unique and just not an interchangeable resource with which we can staff up any project. Some developers are brilliant and some need more guidance to say it in a diplomatic way. I will even go out on a limb here and say that the success of a software project relies on the ability to staff a project with the right developers.

We need those brilliant developers that can be the inspiration of the other developers. We need the developers aspiring to become brilliant developers. We need the developers starting out with the potential of becoming a brilliant developer. We need the developers that does not implement what the customer asks for but what the customers really need. We need developers that really gets it. We need software craftsmen.

This is why I signed the Manifesto for Software Craftsmanship.

Come fly with me

2008-12-05T23:56:00.004+01:00

I bought a laptop a year ago and it was my first real contact with Windows Vista. I must say I am not overly enthusiastic about Vista (understatement) and I have never been quite satisfied with the laptop. It is painfully slow to use and I dread the hard drive light to be turned on because that is a bad signal.

For that reason I have for a long time been curious about Ubuntu GNU/Linux but the overhead of backing up, repartitioning has stopped me from installing Ubuntu. I have been running Ubuntu under vmware but that was also a painful experience. Then I found Wubi.

Wubi is Windows installer that installs Ubuntu without doing any changes to partitions and it is a dual boot thing. Yeah, right I thought when I read about it but I felt I had to give it a try.

The Wubi installer is a small installation program, it is about 1 MB, but of course it needs a bit more than this. When you start it you just specify some parameters and start the installation. It will download a lot of stuff, like 500 MB or something, and after rebooting the machine it will install ubuntu in a folder named ubuntu on the windows disk you specified. The actual disk for ubuntu will be a file so you will not have top performance but it is really a good way to try out Ubuntu and it really lowers the threshold for trying it out.

I know that all things does not work very well with Linux so I thought the WLan and the Bluetooth would give me a hard time. Well, I was wrong. When booted up I was informed that there were some proprietary drivers for my wlan and my graphics chips which I installed. The wlan was up and running after configuring without any problems. Bluetooth worked like a charm.

My only worry now was the mobile networking dongle I have, although I have read that there is good support for the Huawei E220. Well, this morning I got it working so now there is nothing really stopping me from migrating to Ubuntu all together, and I will.

For me it has been a revolution. My laptop is flying with Ubuntu.

It has never been as fast as it is today and it feels like the usability factor has increased even though I go from Windows Vista to Linux. That feels strange but I think that Linux has come a long way when it comes to being usable for ordinary people.

So if you are curious about Ubuntu and you are stuck on a Windows machine, try Wubi. If you decide that Ubuntu is nothing for you, just boot up Windows and uninstall Wubi like any other Windows program. No worries.

Simple scheduling in Windows

2008-09-15T18:54:00.003+02:00

I have tried to become friends with the scheduling service in Windows but I guess it just does not like me. It was as simple as running a little command file that would make a backup of a wiki I have set up locally. I struggled over a period of several months to get it working but it was always something with the accounts and privileges that made it fail. When I finally got it to work I had to changed my password on the system and the backup stopped working, silently of course. I finally gave in and started to look for some other solution.

What I found was cron which a really simple freeware program that just does the job. It is a clone of the Unix cron so it uses a similar configuration file and it also has a log file which logs every attempt to start a job and the result. I just dropped a shortcut in the Windows Startup folder for it to start at boot time and it worked from day one. I could forget that it even had it running, which I actually did until the day I got a new computer and had to migrate my environment.

I made a mistake and put the backup command file in another location on the new machine and forgot to update the crontab file. When I did my usual check if the backup was working, which the Windows scheduler had taught me was a good idea, I realised my mistake and corrected it. I also had a look at the log file which showed that the backup has been running flawlessly since the day I set it up with cron, well until the system was migrated over which I also could see in the log. Now it works flawlessly again.

This is a good example of less is more. Simplicity rules.

So it got a little wet yesterday

2008-08-22T16:36:00.005+02:00

Bye, bye, RealPlayer

2008-08-19T13:33:00.003+02:00

I have been using RealPlayer for some years now just for listening to Internet radio. I know a lot of people dislike RealPlayer but I found a way to fiddle with the settings and get something that gave a look and functionality that worked for me.

I recently installed it on a new computer, the latest version of the free player. Well, I have to join the crowd that dislikes RealPlayer because the version I installed is not possible to customise to make it usable for me. So...

Bye, bye, RealPlayer and hello WinAmp.

Phone amnesia

2008-08-11T08:53:00.003+02:00

It has probably happened to you too. The mobile phone is turned off and you suddenly need to know your PIN code to get it going again. It happened to me the other day.

The first time you enter the incorrect code you think, I must have pressed the wrong button somewhere. You enter the code again and really try to be aware of what you are doing. Normally this is where the phone open its arms and welcomes you. But not for me.

That is when the confusion really hits you and you start to go through your mind troubleshooting what you just have experienced. You can only come to one conclusion.

My phone has forgotten my PIN code.

That is what happened to me. I never tried a third time but I left the phone running so my pocket had a go at it with no success. When I eventually found that PUK code I managed to convince the phone what PIN code it has. Let us hope it sticks this time.

The hammer for RIA

2008-08-07T18:30:00.003+02:00

I listened to the lively debate regarding Rich Internet Applications (RIA) on The Java Posse podcast, episode 198, and I really have to agree that it is a really bad name for it. A RIA is no more than a more beefy web application.

Having had my primary focus outside of the web application sphere for a long time I have noticed the hammer and the nail mentality inside the sphere. You know, if the only thing you have is a hammer (web application) everything looks like a nail (application ideas).

I have seen this myself some years back where a company wanted a web application which should show graphs where you would be able to interact with the graph like zooming and dragging and such. Of course, one of the requirements was also that the application should not need any additional software to be installed and this was before the AJAX acronym was publicly known. I saw no way of making a good solution within a browser since what they really wanted was a rich internet application so my recommendation had to be that a desktop application should be deployed.

No deal that time.

It is some sort of perverted idea that every application user interface could be realised in a web browser. I don't really think that is the case and even if it was true, the browser is not the ideal environment for all productivity tools. Imagine having your development IDE in a browser window.

I think you should use the tools that fits the requirements instead of trying to fit the square pieces in the round holes. I am working with rich internet applications today but I Swing my hammer.

Security without trust

2008-06-11T18:46:00.001+02:00

Can we really have security without trusting someone or something?

I came to think about that the other day when trying to improve a server backed desktop application authenticating itself through a third party by popping upp a web browser showing the third party login form. As there are no really good web browser components for Java that you can use without too much hassle I was thinking about doing a Swing form which would post the information to a web page over SSL.

The suggestion was considered insecure and was rejected. When I thought about it I came to the conclusion that this was a matter of trust or should I say distrust. Why was such a solution less secure than popping up a web browser transmitting the same sensitive information? For some reason the third party felt more secure if the information was handled by a random web component from any developer than from a Swing solution by me.

It is all a matter of trust and to have security you must trust someone. When you go to a secure web page you must trust Thawte or Verisign, or whatever certificate authority has issued their security certificate, has done a good job validating the certificate owners identity. Whenever you register on a web page you trust that the site will keep your information secure.

Security is a matter of trust. Who do you trust?

I am not an early adopter

2008-06-11T16:44:00.007+02:00

This is the first time I write a blog entry so you can definitely say that I am no early adopter when it comes to this weblog thing.

The same goes with Java. I did some pathetic attempts back in the 90ies but not until beginning of this century I really got into it and got really hooked.

But I guess it's a good thing that I am a late adopter. It is better to learn from other peoples misstakes. Life is too short to make them yourself.

This it for you, mom.