A very helpful article

It’s so gratifying to get these comments like “WOAH! I would *never* have thought of that. Thank you thank you thank you thank you 😀 I was just about to take the iSight back to the store.” (a recent comment)

I just was going through my blog-software system, and I noticed just how many comments had been generated by my earlier article (really, just a blog post) “iChat/iSight and Postgres Memory Bug“. When I’d discovered the solution to that problem I had been amazed how there had been no articles in any “Google searches” that addressed that particular problem; so I figured I would jot down a quick blog entry (apologizing to my non-technical audience) so that eventually Google searches would direct people here for the answer.
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Microsoft’s Best Next Play, Intel’s Vaporware

Fool me once (Itanium/Merced) shame on me…

Microsoft and Intel are in the same troubled boat as far as I’m concerned. Both megalithic companies have been complete yawners for the past five years or so. Now Microsoft is trying to dig up some enthusiasm for Windows Vista (formerly code-named Longhorn) and as far as I can tell, people couldn’t care less. I think I have the idea that could save them.
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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.