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).