XDoclet Hibernate “joined-subclass” tags don’t work.

I was attempting to create an implementation of “Joined Subclasses” via the @hibernate.joined-subclass command. Here’s the really brain-dead thing: from what I can tell, this XDoclet class tag simply does not work, and I’m not sure it ever did!

(A quick apology for any readers who have no idea what this posting is about. In my work I’ve come across a really annoying bug in some technology, and my “Googling” research didn’t come up with any good answers. It has taken me a few days to really get all of this right, so I’m hoping if some poor sod has the same problem, he or she will come across this blog posting in order to save a massive amount of time.)

I am working on an enterprise application using J2EE (JBoss) with Hibernate as the substitute for the brain-dead CMP 2.0 Entity Beans. Our development environment is Eclipse with XDoclet.

I was attempting to create an implementation of “Joined Subclasses” via the @hibernate.joined-subclass command. Here’s the really brain-dead thing: from what I can tell, this XDoclet class tag simply does not work, and I’m not sure it ever did! In my XDoclet book (and the Javadoc api page) there’s a @hibernate.joined-subclass-key which would be necessary to fully-define a joined subclass, but in the xdoclet module this tag doesn’t appear to exist. I’d found a web forum entry where someone claimed Eclipse’s autocompletion didn’t recognize it, but that you could manually type it in, but I wasn’t able to get it to work!
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Old server is down, maybe dead

It’s been a good computer. It has served many tens of thousands of web pages, working non-stop for years. I feel bad about its death, which is perhaps why I’m taking the time to write this little eulogy.

Well, after a LOT of work, I think I’ve got everything moved over from the old Dual Athlon-MP 1600 server that has been running in my living room for over 2 years. The need to move to a colocated server was pretty obvious, as this computer was showing those unmistakable signs of death.

For the past year the computer had been down only twice, and each time it took a minor miracle to get it to simply turn back on. Last night I pulled everything apart—every card and memory DIMM and cable and drive and even the motherboard—and cleanly and carefully put it all back together, hoping the awful noise that had started up and the restart problems would go away. I still haven’t managed to get it to power up.
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Server migration complete… I hope.

This morning I got up, went to Spanish class where I had my first test. (I did okay. There are only two things I think I got wrong, but there were also 5 bonus point questions, so with luck I’ll eek out an A.) Then I did some housekeeping for the Stonewall Young Democrats (database stuff) and then I did the final push to get everything migrated over to the new Colocated server.

Man O Man am I drained!

This morning I got up, went to Spanish class where I had my first test. (I did okay. There are only two things I think I got wrong, but there were also 5 bonus point questions, so with luck I’ll eek out an A.) Then I did some housekeeping for the Stonewall Young Democrats (database stuff) and then I did the final push to get everything migrated over to the new Colocated server.

And the last 10 hours were spent fighting with Postfix to get the e-mail all set up properly—and securely.

I’ve still got to keep in touch with my various hosting “clients” to make sure I haven’t forgotten anything. There’s always one or two subtle items I can’t remember. But I’ve got to say, I’m looking forward to retiring the “old” server that’s been running in my living room for the past 2 years. One of the fans (or maybe a bearing on a disk drive) was starting to vibrate badly. This machine has had a good life. It’s time to move on.

iChat/iSight and Postgres Memory Bug

Basically, an attempt to initiate a video chat would die with a cryptic—and misleading—message: Disconnected from Video Chat because: Can’t get video from the camera. The problem could only be solved by rebooting the computer.

I’m posting this on a blog entry, not because I think my loyal blog readers are going to be interested by it, but someone out there on the web might run into this issue, and some googling suggests that nobody has reported on it.

There were two strange software failures going on recently, both of them quite troublesome, and it took until today to realize they were directly related.

On the one hand, I noticed that three people (who now work distantly together) were having problems with iChat on their G5 computers. Basically, an attempt to initiate a video chat would die with a cryptic—and misleading—message: Disconnected from Video Chat because: Can’t get video from the camera. The problem could only be solved by rebooting the computer.
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Answering the Question: Which Computer to Buy?

Over the past year I’ve faced so many people asking the question of which computer they should buy, it’s been dizzying. A lot of people have been asking as they measure whether to jump over to the Mac platform, and others just need to pick up some sort of replacement.

Over the past year I’ve faced so many people asking the question of which computer they should buy, it’s been dizzying. A lot of people have been asking as they measure whether to jump over to the Mac platform, and others just need to pick up some sort of replacement.

Also this weekend I faced explaining to Mom that her beloved (and 10 year old) IBM Aptiva probably needed to get thrown away. It broke her heart to see it go and wanted me to see if there was any way to fix it up so that it could be inherited by some disadvantaged person or maybe someone’s toddlers.

I spent a few hours reformatting the hard drive and reinstalling OS/2 (the Operating System that had originally come with it) and I too felt pangs of nostalgia and wished more live could be breathed into the machine. But alas, it didn’t even have an ethernet port, it was filled with the maximum amount of supported RAM (24 Megs) and the most modern version of Windows that could fit on it was maybe Windows 98.

Mom ended up on the phone for about an hour seeing if there was any place she could donate the computer, or failing that any way to get the garbage men to pick it up. (Turns out they’ll do it for a $5 fee.)

So I’ve decided to write a short mini-article and—who knows—someone surfing the blogosphere may come to this entry pondering these issues. I think I’ve got a pretty easy-to-understand and concise couple of answers.
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