Category: Technology

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.
Continue reading “Answering the Question: Which Computer to Buy?”

Today has been spent madly trying to get more order into my life. Yesterday I got a white board installed in my room. I admit it: I’m a white-board whore. Give me 8 colored markers and a white board, and I’ll succumb to this compulsive need to always fill it with organizational stuff.

So I wrote down all the big “to-dos” in the (currently) major categories of my life. (If you’ve been reading my blog for over a year, you’ve seen me do this twice before.) One of the things I’d wanted to do was to publish more Web articles. They’re cool things; they give me more opportunity to “give back” to the Open Source geek community, and they also bring in new web traffic to my site. This is a good thing.

So among a dozen other things, I collected some preexisting notes I’d put together from some research & experimentation I’ve done earlier this month, and I’ve completed about 80% of a new web article on Building Your Own JBoss Configuration. Man, it feels good to write. I know whatever happens in my life, there’ll be a part of me that is writing!

Well, it turns out much of my problem was not getting some of the scripting done right in the “turing test” spam filter. (Repeating the funny numbers.) I haven’t had a bad spam post in about a week, so all is better. I’d still love to get my hands on these people, but as I think I reported earlier, it looks like they are in India.

Okay, I’m really pissed. Upgrade that earlier fantasy of me in a locked room with one of these bastards and a baseball bat. Now I’m actually visualizing splintered shards of skull-bone wedging into soft nerve tissue. I’m pissed.

Of course, a calm person would realize that any protective measure is just going to challenge them to create more clever ways to get past. Yes, you guessed it: I’m still cleaning up $#(%*&$%%$#W(*&! graffiti.

If you want to post a comment you’d better get out your glasses. The passcode has been updated to 9 digits AND it is now the exact same color as the grid of lines. You brain and eyeballs will be more challenged, but I’m going to hope that I have better luck keeping the crap off my website.

I have wanted to learn how to profile JBoss with Eclipse for a while now, but wasn’t able to find any good documentation on the web. I finally got the time to figure out all the pieces to the process, so here are my notes.

These notes will refer to the Eclipse profiler plugin known as “EclipseColorer” which is maintained at http://sourceforge.net/projects/eclipsecolorer/ . There are some other profiling modules in existence, but this one seems to be the most active and complete.

The first piece that was missing was any definitive evidence that it ran with a modern version of JBoss. The most recent documentation stated it had been confirmed to work with “jboss-3.0.6_tomcat-4.1.18”. So let me just state for the record: I have EclipseColorer version 0.5.31 (dated May 24, 2004) running with JBoss 4.0.0RC1 under Windows and Linux.
Continue reading “Profiling JBoss under Eclipse”