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Well the DTD to XSD site at HiTSoftware proved valuable today and for what we were doing I think the Apache XMLBeans Schema Tools may have proved useful as well so I have added both of them to the Links -> Software page under the Web Development heading. I may move it under a different heading later since I am a bit uncomfortable with listing it under the same heading as Apache, WAMP, etc.

Not much to say, just cleaned up a few broken links and archived some pages that seem to no longer be available or have moved.

I like Tomcat quite a bit, but I have to say that using JNDI with Tomcat is a real pain. You would think the Administration Tool would allow you to make anything you assign to the default context or to the Resources section global, that is you could look it up in any context loaded on that particular Tomcat. But so far I have only been able to assign it via resource-links in the particular context that I need it in. The problem I have with that is if you need to remove and reinstall the application regularly then you have to add the resource links back in Tomcat relatively frequently as well. It just seems to me they could have made it an option to say that this resource is avalaible globally instead of via resource-links.

I am not likely to put a lot of these up but I am experimenting a bit and this standup by John Pinette is very funny.

I keep reading about how slow Vista is, how buggy it is, how much less popular it is. I offer these items as food for thought. I am not going to say that everything is rosy. I doubt the ****heads at Epson will ever officially release a Vista driver for my $400 2450 scanner. Some of my old games will not run properly on Vista, like Civilization II, Imperium Galactica II, Starcraft, or Age of Empires, but I am not a huge gamer so that is not a complete loss in my book. I do miss the old defragmenter in the XP Computer Management console
On the plus side the new Media Center in Vista Ultimate is pretty sweet when coupled with my new WinTV-PVR-USB2 MCE-Kit. The Reliability and Performance in the Computer Management console is nice. I happen to like the new audio driver architecture that lets you manipulate volume for each application vice each device type. I like IE7 for Vista. And finally, I like the application recovery in Vista better. In XP applications could still cause lockups and blue screens, since going to Vista the only things that I have had cause blue screen errors are drivers, and with the new audio driver architecture there is one less driver to troubleshoot as the cause of blue screens. I am sure all the Creative fans out there don't like it much since they lost some of their hardware acceleration, but I am satisfied with the built in audio on my motherboard so it doesn't really matter to me.

I found a site that provides DTD to schema conversions for free. It is at HiTSoftware hitsw.com [direct link to the xml/xsl/dtd utilities]. At some point, if it works for what I need, I may add it to the Software or Information page but for now it's just here as a reference.

It would seem I was a bit too quick to judge copSSH before. The maintainer has updated copSSH to work with Vista [even 64 bit Vista], it is still in pre-release stage, but it appears to be working and the authentication/authorization mechanism looks to be pretty good as well. I would still argue that there was a LOT of time PRIOR to Vista's release that the software could have been modified and tested to work with Vista by Vista's release date but even so I am happy to have a free version of SSH server available for whatever use I need it for without having to worry about whether or not I am violating some license agreeent by moving files to or from work.

Funny thing happenned. I was writing about how "reliable" my new machine was and the stupid thing BSOD'd on me [3 times!!!]. How's that for irony?

I realize this hardly makes me an expert what with just over 3 years of experience in the java development profession but I just thought I would point out how stupid I believe it is to develop applications that use persistence objects. They not only add to your maintenance burden, which believe me is burdensome enough, but they nearly always produce a larger memory footprint and retrieve more data than is needed, thus increasing network traffic and reducing the applications responsiveness. Having served in the military, I hate to wait, in the military you wait for everything now that I'm no longer in the military I'm sick of waiting. When I click on a link or a button, I want the page to be up before I take my finger off the mouse button. If your persistence object is populating a list of objects that have 200 fields each and you are only using 5 each that's a lot of time waiting for the DB to find the data, marshal the data, pass the data over the network, unmarshal the data, create the objects, populate the objects, then finally render the objects. And all that assumes all you are doing is looking at the data not actually performing any business logic on it. And all that time is spent waiting for data that you are only going to see 2.5% of. There has been a lot of discussion at the places I have worked/work about using persistence objects and I just thought I would make my opinion known in no uncertain terms.

While I am on the topic of job related concepts I REALLY don't like. I think I'll briefly comment on WebServices. WebServices are awesome, they let your application retrieve data from a DB or application you would not normally have direct access to. It lets your .NET application get data from a Java application running in another domain. It solves a lot of problems, BUT it engenders a philosophy that says that EVERYTHING should be a WebService and that is a complete phalacy. For an application to be extensible you have to minimize overhead in every location you can to squeeze the most productivity out of you capital investments that you can especially your network infrastructure. A WebService by design encloses all traffic with HTTP wrappers that would not be present otherwise. All applications can access databases and file system resources MUCH more efficiently using JDBC/ODBC and direct connections than they can using HTTP and indirect connections. While I admit it can simplify maintenance slightly, corporate policy can have the same or similar effect without the physical constraint(s) that a network architecture has. All I am saying is choose to apply technologies in the right places and you will get the maximum benefits. Apply the technology in the wrong place or inappropriately and you are guaranteed to have to come back to it at some point and correct it thus costing you more man-hours and resources than you would have needed had you applied the technology correctly in the first place.

If you are a regular visitor you may notice the horizontal menus did not look right [if you've upgraded to IE7 and or Vista]. The behavior seemed to have changed a little with IE7. Since IE7 is the future and I TRY to keep up I have corrected the CSS for the menu so that it renders correctly in IE7 and Firefox 2.0 on Windows Vista. IE6 and previous versions will not be as readily supported anymore due to my development machine being Vista 64 bit and not playing nicely with the standalone versions of the previous IE 32 bit versions.

I also went through all of the archived Articles I am serving and converted them all to XHTML using Notepad++'s HTML Tidy tool. I cannot stress enough how great Notepad++ is for developing and just general text editing. You REALLY should check it out if you aren't already using it. And it is COMPLETELY FREE not "Free for personal use" or a "trial version" like TextPad [which is $30 to use the program LEGALLY].

Nothing visible on the screen but I tweaked the home page a little more and improved the flexibility slightly by rewriting some of my XPath expressions and moving the default year to the config file vice hard-coding it after reading this tutorial on the XML Tag Library.

Playing around trying to get SSH working on the server revealed some unpleasantness in regards to Vista 64, it does not play nice with cygrunsrv if you are trying to use an installed service. I don't know if it is a coding issue on the part of the cygwin developers or a quirk of my installation but it simply would not start the SSHd daemon on my machine. I am running a trial version of WinSSHd now BUT I am not entirely sure I want to pay for something most folks can get for free. Granted, WinSSHd is MUCH nicer from a configuration standpoint than OpenSSH on cygwin, copSSH [which gave me a "not a valid windows application" error] or OpenSSH for Windows (all three of which run on top of the cygwin dll). freeSSH wasn't much better. The service installed, the first time I tried it, but I could never connect to it using FileZilla. It's configuration is slightly better than the cygwin variants but not by much. At least with WinSSHd, they SAY they support Windows Vista 64 and so far they seem to be telling the truth, the setup took all of 2 minutes, and it worked from the minute I started the service. If only it was a bit cheaper for personal use.

I have been considering moving these entries to a simple xml file that is parsed and rendered on request similar to how the title is handled on this and some of the other pages. The thing is, anytime I want to add an entry currently I have to rebuild the war file and redeploy. If I offload the rendering to a compiled class and make the entries in a "semi" static file then I can make new entries without having to open the project and rebuild the war file. I am still contemplating this, but I think in the long run it will be a good idea and I may be able to extend the idea to a few other pages as well. I'll keep you posted on this.

Well that went far more smoothly than I anticipated. This entire home page and all the archives are now in XML format and are being parsed and rendered by the java JSTL standard taglibs core and xml. That means I can edit the page in Notepad++ anytime I like and the changes will be reflected immediately on the website. No more repackaging the application and redeploying it. At some point I would like to move some of the lists to a similar format, but for now this is pretty freakin' sweet!!!

Well after waiting for quite a while I finally installed Windows Vista Ultimate on my primary machine (which is also this server). It was quite a large undertaking given how much junk is on the machine. Here is a brief synopsis of how it went.

I received 1 500GB WD5000KS drive for Christmas then a few weeks ago the same drive was on sale at Best Buy so I bought two more. They sat outside of the machine in preparation for the arrival of Windows Vista Ultimate, which I had ordered previously. Having run the beta for 100+ straight days without having to perform a single restart had convinced me that like XP was a vast stability improvement over ME, Vista is an impovement over XP. And contrary to the industry writer's opinions, I DO NOT believe User Access Control, UAC, is all that onerous. It does make running command line actions a little trickier, in that you may have to start them as an administrator [just right click on command in the Accessories menu and choose run as administrator] and you may have to click a few Are you sure? prompts but otherwise I don't find it all THAT bad.

Getting back to the install, Friday night I wrote a small java program to record the Program Files directory and a few others so that I could verfiy, after the install, that I had reinstalled all the applications I was using before.

Saturday morning I backed up my email server, hamailserver, and my website as well as a few other essential data items then powered down the machine. At this point I had 2x120GB, 1x160GB, and 2x250GB drives in the machine using an Antec Neo Power 480. The plan was to install the 3 new 500GB SATA II drives in a RAID 5 array replacing at least 1 of the 120GB drives, which was hosting Windows XP Professional x64 Edition. In essence I would be adding at most 2 additional drives. However, after I got into the machine I decided that I didn't really have all that much critical data on the second 120GB drive so I decided to remove that as well. This left me with 3x500GB, 2x250GB, and 1x160GB drives in the machine, only 1 more drive total.

Having made this change and finagling the 480W power supply to feed one more drive, I went and emailed Gigabyte, the motherboard is a Gigabyte GA-K8NXP-SLI, to see if they had any F6 drivers for RAID 5 on Vista. They promptly passed the buck saying

There are no drivers currently for this motherboard under Vista. Nvidia has still yet to release drivers for it.

Yeah, that was helpful. So I looked at the forums to see if anyone else had any experience with a similar setup and found a few people saying they had problems but no real solutions. The RAID 5 on this board comes from the fact that there is a Silicon Image 3114 chipset on it so my first instinct was to try the OLD driver from Gigabyte. But I am getting ahead of the story. I installed the three drives attached them to the appropriate power and SATA ports on the motherboard and proceeded to the powering it up stage. Apparently, that one more drive was the straw that broke the camel's back. At this point the machine's lights would blink when I hit the power button but that was it. Thinking I may have a loose connection or a short somewhere, I rechecked all the power connections. No luck. Then I started thinking that maybe I had just attached too much to the power supply so I disconnected 1 drive and tried it then 2, eventually getting to the point that I had disconnected all of them. When I had gotten to the point that I had disconnected every twelve volt drive with a molex connector the machine FINALLY came up [after some unpleasant hesitation in the fan noise department] into POST. I am sure you can see as I did that the Antec power supply was toast.

Well, things seldom go as smoothly as we would like. I had actually anticipated that something like this MIGHT happen but I had hoped it would not. So off to CompUSA to get a new power supply. I considered getting a 650-750W power supply but then figured I do not want to go through this again any time soon, the Antec was the 3rd or 4th power supply I have been through over the years. So this time I figured I would leave PLENTY of headroom and got the BFG 1000W [that right 1kW] power supply. The BFG also has a lifetime warranty, whatever that means, where as the MOST any of the others offered was 3 years.

Well back home I installed the new power supply and guess what. It worked perfectly, I hit the power button and it came right up. What a novel idea. Well now the fun begins. As I said previously, I had the F6 driver from Gigabyte for XP x64, which comes in some idiotic self extracting exe file that checks some OS component vice a zip file. I promptly worked around that extracting the files with 7-zip and loading them on a CD. The BIOS recognized the drives and I configured them for RADI 5 in the Silicon Image BIOS then proceeded to the Vista installation attempt (#1). Vista got up to the point that it wanted me to select the drive to install to. I didn't see my 961GB partition [damn drive manufacturer's and their idiotic byte counting, excuse me 1KB = 1024 bytes NOT 1000 bytes]. So this is where I did my F6 thing (interestingly you don't actually hit F6 in a Vista install) when the menu came back up the 961GB drive was there, I selected it and Vista proceeded to install. Well sort of. The files extracted fine and Vista got to the first reboot then hacked up a driver signature could not be verified. EXCUSE ME!! Why did you continue for 30 minutes after "accepting" the driver if you couldn't verify!!! UHHGGG!!!! Anyway this was not altogether surprising so I tried again using the latest F6 drivers from Silicon Image, SI. SI's site indicated that you should flash the BIOS first but I am a risk taker so I figured I would try it without flashing the BIOS to the latest version [Lord only knows what would happen if I mixed SI's BIOS with American Megatrends motherboard BIOS, would probably have ended up with a $200+ motherboard wall art hanging].

Well believe it or not after reinstalling again it actually worked fine. I booted into Windows and everything came up peachy. So now I was ready to perform the real install. I connected ALL of my peripherals went into the BIOS and readjusted my memory settings, confirmed the boot priority and began the REAL installation. ~45 minutes later I am up and running in Vista Ultimate. All that remained at this point was to reinstall all the applications I depend on.

So what did all of this cost me. First 24+ hours of preparation and installation [hardware and software]. Months of waiting to get all the components. A very REAL aggravation with Gigabyte for being so UNHELPFUL, I think my next motherboard will be an ASUS. ~$300 for the hard drives, remember one of them was a gift, ~$380 for Windows Vista Ultimate, and ~$300 for the new power supply. Grand total: $980 and a lot of grief.

What did I get. Actually, I have a pretty snappy machine that is already performing better than XP x64 did [XP x64 is the unwanted stepchild of Microsoft, at least that has been my experience with it]. The snappiness of it can at least in part be attributed to the faster hard drives, of course. More importantly the OS is now housed on drives that are redundant, which means should one fail I should not have to go through this long process again. Reinstalling, is a real pain in the rear. Overall, the Vista part of the experience has been pretty good, minus the problem with the first F6 driver I tried. I would not rate the OS upgrade experience as a bad one [keep in mind this was a clean install, not a REAL upgrade]. If you are NOT installing on a RAID array, I imagine you would have had even fewer problems than I did. As for Vista as a whole, I reserve judgement. I have not REALLY used it in day-to-day activity yet and the new interface has some quirks to get used to, but if the stability of my primary machine is anywhere near what the stability of my experimental machine was, I think, in the long run, I will be very pleased with it.

Happy Groundhog Day
and
Joyous Candlemas

Well, I finally broke down and paid for my domain. I hope to have it a long time but for now I have only purchased it for a year. My domains are sol2charon.org and sol2charon.net thus if you are looking to reach my site you can now get to it without using no-ip's domain, that is you may use http://sol2charon.net, http://www.sol2charon.net, http://sol2charon.org, or http://www.sol2charon.org. And if you got here the old way, http://sol2charon.no-ip.org, that obviously still works as well. It's not really anything visible but I felt it was worth noting anyway.

Happy New Year