Summer holiday

We'll spend the next two weeks in Bella Italia. Classic family vacation with camping on the Adriatic coast at Eraclea Mare. Too bad that the Euro 2008 final won't be Italy - Germany.

Trip to Heidelberg

As Heidelberg, the "romantic city" is just 50 km away and Saturday promised beautiful weather we decided to make a spontaneous trip to one of Germany's top travel destinations (just as announced on Carlos Blog last year).



As it is early travel season (or so we thought) we didn't expect a crowded city but after cruising through the streets for quite some time we were finally lucky to find an parking garage with available space. The walk through the Fußgängerzone made it clear that as least as many people were here for shopping as for sightseeing (as you can see on the picture below).



It made us also feel like being on holiday with all these tourists from all over the world asking for things like "typical German Ice-Cream" and the restaurants offering food like Weißwürste or Schweinshaxe (not exactly typical for the Kurpfalz area). The way up to the castle wasn't that baby buggy friendly but the nice view down to the city with the old bridge and the Neckar was a good compensation. I'm sure we will return soon (including a visit to the Märchenparadies for the girls) because in the evening we were just too lazy to walk up the Philosophenweg which should provide a wonderful view across the old town and the castle.



More pictures at my Picasa Web Album

Tonight at JUG-Karlsruhe: OSGi

The topic of todays meeting of the Java User Group Karlsruhe (JUG-KA) is OSGi Frameworks. It'll take place (as usual) at the Universität Karlsruhe at 19:15.
Looks like a good opportunity for me to finally have a look at OSGi so I hope I'll make it to the talk.

Off to Austria

In a few hours we'll leaving for Kühtai/Tyrol and spend the next week with skiing - there should be plenty of snow as it is known as Austria's highest ski resort.

Will be offline most of the time (don't know if there is internet access available at all ;-)

Christmas season

It's an unmistakable sign that the christmas season has started when Silke is decorating our home with candles, fairy lights, stars and all that stuff. The good thing about this season are of course the christmas cookies.


My favourite cookies are Hildabrötchen (as shown on the picture) - I even help with the "production", namely putting the sugar icing on the top.

Of course music is an important part of this season (and that's alone an safe indicator if Last Christmas and Do They Know It's Christmas? is played all over on the radio) and as big surprise to me Silke has voluntarily put my favourite christmas music, Wir warten auf’s Christkind from Die Toten Hosen into the CD player.

Apache FOP user survey

As just announced on the XML Graphics users lists, we (or rather Jeremias who has done the work) just started a user survey to get feedback on the usage of the different Java versions (especially Java 1.3).

So if you are a FOP user (or plan to use FOP) please take the time (just a few minutes) and participate in the survey

I'm curious on the results.

Back from OpenExpo

Yes, OpenExpo is already over since some days but I didn't find the time yet to blog about it.

I luckily found a small hotel near the exhibition hall so it was just a quick ride with the tram (or a 15 minute walk the other day). The booth (or rather the table, see the picture) was quickly set up on Wednesday morning except for a small problem with the power plug adapter - the one I brought with me didn't fit into those %$§!& swiss sockets (so much for the need for multiple standards). No big deal though, I just walked over to the COOP warehouse and bought one for CHF 6.95.



Overall the OpenExpo had more than 500 visitors on the two days. I did give around 20 OFBiz presentation and lot more flyers were taken. Amongst the interested parties were a publishing house (question: does OFBiz handle 3 million products?), a food retailer, a machine manufacturer and quite a few ERP consultants/service providers.
Most of the visitors actually had never heard of Apache OFBiz and someone even told me that he was looking for an Open Source Ecommerce solution for some time and didn't stumble over OFBiz (lot's of work to do for the marketing department :-).
Quite a few asked for the accounting part which is (still) rather basic and especially for a swiss payment procedure called BESR/VESR. And someone promised me (and did it already) to send a swiss chart of accounts (called KAEFER and KMU).
It was also nice to meet David Kuenzler, an OFBiz Developer from Zürich, who started a OFBiz related project called ofbizmyhome at SourceForge.

The talks were well attended - I didn't see any but they should be available somewhere as streams. On Wednesday evening the OpenMeet, a social event with OpenBeer (which was also free, free as in .. ;-) and FreeFood sponsored by Google, some lightning talks and music took place.

You want to see pictures? I only brought our old Canon A75 with me which showed the notorious E18 error most of the time and if it was working most pictures came out blurred - a few are available on Flickr. Next time I'll bring the DSLR with me for sure. More pictures are available on the OpenExpo website.

All in all, it was a really nice event. Big thanks to the organizers (Hannes Gassert, Matthias Günter, Matthias Stuermer and everybody else involved). I hope I'll be at the next OpenExpo in March in Bern.

OpenExpo in Zurich on 19th/20th September

Next week (19th and 20th of September) I'll be at the OpenExpo in Zurich, Switzerland. I'm in a booth (or rather a table ;-) together with .LRN and ]project-open[ (never heard of those open source projects but I'm sure this will change). OpenExpo is a part of topsoft, a swiss trade fair for ERP-/Business-Software - exactly the right place for presenting Apache OFBiz ;-) So if you interested in Open Source ERP, this is your chance to learn more about Apache OFBiz (free entrance!).

As always I'm late with the accommodation - has anybody a tip for a hotel in/near Zurich-Oerlikon?

Java 1.3 on Ubuntu

As we (still) provide Java 1.3 binaries for Apache FOP (for rumored AIX users who are still stuck there ;-) I was going to need a JDK 1.3 for my Ubuntu (Edgy Edge) system to do some testing.

So I went to Blackdown (remember that Sun didn't provide Java for Linux in the early days...) and downloaded the "latest" JDK 1.3, which is Java2 SDK 1.3.1-02b-FCS.

After the installation it threw the following error on the first run:

/home/chrisg/j2sdk1.3.1/bin/i386/native_threads/java: relocation error:
/home/chrisg/j2sdk1.3.1/jre/lib/i386/libjava.so: symbol __libc_waitpid,
version GLIBC_2.0 not defined in file libc.so.6 with link time reference

Some googling turned up that SUN used a private interface from glibc. Well, no easy fix for this...

A closer look at java.sun.com lead to the Java Download Archive (albeit Sun makes it bit hard to find) where I found J2SE 1.3.1.
After the installation the following commands are needed:

sudo apt-get install libstdc++6
sudo ln -s /usr/lib/libstdc++-libc6.2-2.so.3 /usr/lib/libstdc++-libc6.1-1.so.2

and then you should have a working JDK1.3.

The testing (of FOP) revealed some strange errors but that's another story...

JUG-KA - Java User Group Karlsruhe

Via Xing I discovered a meeting of the Java User Group Karlsruhe which took place yesterday at the Universität Karlsruhe. The JUG-KA is quite young actually - it was just the second meeting held ever. As it's just a 10 minute drive I decided to attend it (and it was quite a strange feeling to sit in a lecture room at my old University ;-)

There were about 50 people attending and the first presentation was an overview of the Spring Framework held by Oliver Schlicht from Synyx. The second presentation was done by Dr. Stefan Schneider from SUN and was about Java Hotspot VM garbage collection and memory pool sizing techniques, including demos with visualgc and JCconsole. The bottom line was that with Java 6 the VM settings are good enough most of the time and the only thing left to configure is the maximum heap size. Nevertheless it's a good idea for every developer to have a look a the memory usage of an application with the mentioned tools.

The next meeting is scheduled for sometime in October (IIRC one topic will be again Spring), but I think it would be nice to also have a more informal Stammtisch.

The best web development platform is...

... well, as always: it depends. But there has been an interesting contest called Plat_forms back in January with different teams using Java, PHP and Perl to solve a given task in 30 hours. (And if you asking why there were no teams using RoR/Python/.NET the organizer told that there wasn't a sufficient number of sufficiently qualified applications). The detailed report has just been published - go and read it for yourself.

For some fun there's a quiz to guess the technology used by a team just from pictures of the developers.

Picasa for Linux

Just found out via Google Operating System that there is a Linux version of Picasa. Looks like it is available for quite some time now (since 2006) but isn't mentioned at all on the Picasa website.

Installation was simple - Picasa is available as .deb - and just after the download I learned from the FAQ that there's even an apt-repository.

First impression: looks exactly like the Windows version (no wonder as Wine, together with Mozilla, is mentioned as used open source project - and Google contributed quite some patches to it)

Picasa is now importing our ~38000 pictures from the hard disk...

Pictures from Tannheimer Tal

See the whole set on Flickr for more (Of course the goods ones were taken by my wife Silke).

Vacation

We'll spent the next five days in the Tannheimer Tal in Austria. I don't think we can do much hiking with the kids and relaxing just as well (but there's a little hope as my parents will be there too :-). I intend to be offline all the time (maybe except for sending some holiday greetings).

What, an atlas?

My wife was looking at the (good old school) atlas this evening and it occurred to me that it's probably been years since I used an atlas made of dead trees. These days when I'm interested in geographic information my first visits are Wikipedia and Google Maps.

The Web really changed a lot (as trite as it sounds..)

French keyboard

Today I was sitting for the first time in front of a French keyboard. Not only that there are some letters in different positions (AZERTY instead of QWERTZ), you even have to enter numbers with the shift key.

The real fun starts when you have to enter a password (of course a secure one with special characters and numbers).

Strange Google search result

While searching for "trends" on Google I got the following result with advertisements in the middle of the search results (and not really recognizable as ads for me).

I've never seen this or even heard about it, is it a test for a new way of advertising at Google (which would be bad), an error (can't believe this) or what?

No ApacheCon EU for me

The (short term) plan I had in mind for ApacheCon EU was to travel from Karlsruhe to Amsterdam by train arriving there at Tuesday morning, stay one night and then back home on Wednesday evening.

But after a visit at www.bahn.de it turned out that the price for a return ticket from Karlsruhe to Amsterdam is about 200 €. Adding the fee for the hackathon and a single day pass and accommodation for one night (there might have been a cheap opportunity) it gets way over my budget.

Anyway, hope you all have a lot of fun and see you next time.

High bitrates are bad

Last night I wanted to record Lohn der Angst (great movie btw) with my DVB-S card. This works normally great with Kaffeine but as I wanted to cut the movie and burn it onto a DVD I noticed that the disk was full. The length of the MPEG-2 transport stream is 8 GB and the end is missing :-( Okay, the movie has a runtime of 145 minutes but come on it's black and white and from 1953 so there is absolutely no reason to use a average bitrate of more than 7000 kbps...

Hope it will be broadcasted again soon.

MySQL for AS/400

I just found at golem.de (German it news site) that MySQL will be available for AS/400 with DB2/400 as a backend (yes, I still call it AS/400 whatever IBM marketing will come up with: iSeries, i5, System i or what it is called now).
My first thought was that this got to be a late april's fools day joke - why would anyone want to use MySQL on a AS/400 as DB2/400 is an integral part of the operating system.
Ok, after looking at the announcements from IBM and MySQL it seems this was mostly done to make thousands of open source MySQL and PHP applications run on AS/400. Oh well ... database abstraction anyone?