Green software

Long ago I wrote a blogpost where I was mentioning that for an always-on (wall-plugged) workstation, the latest (then) fad of lowering power consumption is not that essential since, as a developer, all you care about is overall machine speed to get the job done and the cost of power is negligible compared to the cost of on developer hour (and then rent, administrative overhead, etc.)

Well, that is one aspect. The other aspect is when power consumption is important. This is clearly a major factor for large datacenters where a big chunk of their cost is power (for the machines and cooling) so they keep a keen eye on performance per watt. The specifics of the business are different there: you don't have developers on top of each machine, but you have hundreds / thousands of machines providing some service to remote users. The cost of maintaining that datacenter determines the cost you sell your services to users and your overall competitiveness.

Another scenario I've personally noticed as of late (see my other article somehow related to this) is the importance of performance per watt when working on your laptop's battery !

Now, the overall system performance per watt is a given of the machine you happen to own. You can't actually tweak that very much, except some hardware upgrade here and there and operating system optimization.

So what you are left is the actual software you use everyday and its performance per watt. Let's call that productivity per watt. Lower performing sofware might exhibit different issues:

• Consuming too much CPU
  
• Hitting the disk too often. IDEs are notoriously culprits here when a normal clean build deletes and recreates hundreds of files on disk. Even some feature like compile on save doesn't save much since developers save often and all this disk writing might actually stop the disk from going to sleep (and thus consume less power).
  
• Hitting the network too often or too much. No point in checking for software updates when the user is on battery. No point downloading that 200MB "update" file -- updates should consist of binary diffs and be as small as possible (Google is looking into this as it becomes very important the more users you have). Also, laptops generally use WiFi is they are not plugged in and (I think) that consumes even more power than ethernet.
  

These are all optimization issues but the main culprit is not scaling down when on battery: this includes being smart about redundant tasks like re-indexing the Maven repository or checking of non-essential upgrades that could be deferred to a time when you're not on laptop battery .

What we seem to be missing is a new metric to evaluate applications: productivity per watt and teaching users to pick applications the same way they pick an A+ energy rating fridge.

Looking forward to see which IDE uses less power to refactor a class or just to stay idle.

Just released Romanian translation of the NetBeans Platform

Just released Romanian translation of the NetBeans Platform. See more on my company's website.

Article on dzone

See my article on dzone about VisualVM and btrace.

Busy bee

(Mail.app makes one smile once in a while..)

The most complex simple GUI: VirtualBox snapshot handling

It's amazing how the guys doing Virtual Box (purchased by Sun and now by Oracle) have managed to screw up so badly their snapshot mechanism and specifically their GUI allowing the user to handle it:

1. Let's start with the easy pickings: they support linear snapshots only. What did they select to display this? Obviously not a list, but a tree !

2. Their snapshot documentation is less than 1 page in the PDF help file. Out of this, half is spent explaining how to "take" a snapshot which is probably the easiest thing they support. A quarter of the page includes a scary note about possible data loss which references some VBoxManage interface which is some script that has nothing to do with the GUI.

Also, their documentation doesn't have a single screenshot or at least pictures of the buttons users are supposed to press.

In the remaining quarter of the documentation they briefly mention revert and discard snapshot.

At no point do they bother explaining how their mechanism works, you kinda have to read between the lines what the philosophy is.

3. When you press "Discard snapshot" it actually merges changes. So you're not losing data actually, you're just losing the little timestamp that the snapshot gave you. They couldn't have picked a more confusing wording and it's not what you would expect.

4. Next to the notion of "snapshot" they have a separate notion of "current state" or "state" which is somehow related but kinda different. I'm not entirely certain if "state" is something like a placeholder that I can fill with different snapshots or just the tip of the snapshots list. Their wording makes it sound one or the other.

Also, not only did they pick such a wrong wording and show such lack in clearly explaining what their application is supposed to do, but they don't even seem to find this important. A bug report on their website complaining about this very thing is marked as minor !

I guess this is a sign of some geek mentality. They assume that people must train using the uber-software and actually read and memorize the 250 page PDF (probably at some point it all makes sense). The sad thing is that the GUI is really simple and this minimalism should allow them to focus on the details, but a third of it is broken.

Obviously I'm not talking about their "Settings" GUI where you configure the machine, that's very complex.

I'm talking about the normal GUI the users gets to see every other time after the creation of the virtual machine which has 3 tabs: "Details", "Snapshots" and "Description". The only one the user will interact for the rest of the virtual machine's lifetime is "Snapshots" and this is the one they thought it's minor. Go figure.

Matrix thoughts

AI lemma (anti-Matrix):

We do not live in a simulation of a similar universe as a simulation will consume more energy than a real existence.

A corollary would be:

The universe simulating our existence might be so different that the above lemma doesn't apply.

iPhone Location Manager taking forever

On the iPhone, the Location manager that provides the GPS location is a nice API to use.

It does have some issues though: CLLocationManger doesn't work if it's called from another thread !

I first noticed something was really funny when my delegate wasn't being called at all.

Neither – locationManager:didUpdateToLocation:fromLocation: nor – locationManager:didFailWithError: was called and my application was just waiting there forever for some GPS information.

My first thought was that it was some issue with my memory management as I wasn't holding a reference to the location manager in any class, just in the method where it was created. But still, it didn't work.

Then, I though it was a problem about the threading model being used (I waited for the GPS location in another thread in order not to block the GUI). Sure enough, that seemed to be the problem, and at least another person complained about it. Not sure it is a matter of threading or a matter of memory pool being used.

But more to the point, always create your CLLocationManager instance in the main thread, and not in another thread. Having a singleton method there which is called from the main thread somewhere assures you that the location manager is created in the proper thread/pool.

Developer surprise on OSX

I had a strange bug in the OSX Address Book application: I had a rule that included all the address cards not present in any other rule.

This worked initially, but after an update, Address Book got confused and entered into an infinite cycle (it was probably trying to ignore the cards in the rule itself and then went on to resolve that recursively).

Anyhow, the good thing was the application crashed only if I scrolled on top of that particular rule. And since I had quite a lot, I was safe to open the application at least.

But, still, having a semi-buggy application isn't fun to use. So I went and looked at the Address Book file format which seemed to be some sqlite3 database, but I couldn't fix the problem from there.

To my surprise Apple has a public API for the Address Book !

So I wrote these short lines of code:

    ABAddressBook *AB = [ABAddressBook sharedAddressBook];
    
    NSArray * groups = [AB groups];
    
    for(int i=0;i<[groups count];i++){
        ABGroup * group = [groups objectAtIndex:i];
        NSString * name = [group valueForProperty: kABGroupNameProperty];
        
        if([@"BadBadRule" compare:name]==NSOrderedSame){
            [AB removeRecord:group];
            [AB save];
        }
    }

and that was it ! No more Address Book crashes ! Turns out OSX is really nice to tweak if you are willing to code a bit.

My Slicehost / VPS analysis

Fist time VPS user

---

Starting a few months back, I have a VPS from Slicehost. It's the cheapes one they've got, with only 256MB RAM.

I never worked on a VPS, I only had either dedicated physical servers in the company datacenter (at the previous job) or CPanel-based hosted accounts (for some other clients).

All in all, a VPS is just as one might expect: almost like a normal server only slower.

And the slowness is starting to bug me a bit, specifically the problem that I don't know how slow is it supposed to be.

The fixed technical details from Slicehost is that you'll have 256MB RAM, 10GB or disk storage and 100GB bandwidth.

Now there are 2 issues here. One which seems quite obvious and another one I'll introduce later.

CPU

---

OK, the 1st problem is that you don't know how much CPU cycles you are going to get. Being a VPS means it runs on some beefy server (Slicehost says it's a Quad core server with 16GB of RAM).

According to Slicehost's FAQ:

Each Slice is assigned a fixed weight based on the memory size (256, 512 and 1024 megabytes). So a 1024 has 4x the cycles as a 256 under load. However, if there are free cycles on a machine, all Slices can consume CPU time.

This basically means that under load, each slices gets CPU cycles depending on the RAM it has (ie. price you pay). A 256MB slice gets 1 cycle, the 512MB slice gets 2 cycles, 1GB slice gets 4 cycles and so on.

The problem here is of course, that one is not certain that they only have on the server a maximum amount of slices, but Slicehost is clearly overselling as top usually displays a "Steal time" of around 20%.

So, assuming a machine is filled 100% with slices and there is no multiplexing, it means that a 256MB slice gets 6.25% of a single CPU under load.

6.25 isn't much at all, but considering that the machine isn't always under load, the slice seems to get a decent amount of CPU nonetheless.

If we consider the overselling issue and that 20% is stolen by Xen to give to other VPS, we get to an even 5 %.

Now, this might not be as bad as it sounds CPU-wise as I've noticed Xen stealing time when my CPU-share is basically idle anyhow so maybe it doesn't affect my overall performance.

For example: ./pi_css5 1048576 takes about 10 seconds which is more than decent.

IO

---

The bigger problem with VPS seems the be the fact that hard drives aren't nearly as fast as RAM. And when you have a lot of processes competing for the same disk, it's bound to be slow.

What Slicehost doesn't mention is if the "fixed weight" sharing rule they use for CPU cycles applies to disk access too. My impression is that it is.

After trying to use my VPS as a build server I've noticed it grind to a halt.

top shows something like this:

Cpu(s):  0.0%us,  0.0%sy,  0.0%ni, 62.2%id, 20.9%wa,  0.0%hi,  0.0%si, 16.9%st

but the load average for a small build is something like

load average: 1.73, 2.06, 1.93

and it easily goes to 3, 4 and even 9! when I also try to do something else there.

So, looking at the information above, we can note that 62.2%, the CPU is just idle, while the actualy "working" tasks, ie. 20.9% are waiting for IO. The rest of 16.9% CPU time is stolen by Xen and given to other virtual machines, and I don't think it really matters given that the load is clearly IO-bound.

And here lies the problem: just how fast might Slicehosts' hard drives be ? And how many per slice ? Actually more like: how many slices per drive ?

From a simple test I made, a simple build that takes 30 seconds on my MacBook Pro (2.4Ghz/2GB ram/laptop hard drive-5400rpm) takes about 20 minutes on the slice. This means the VPS is 40 times slower when doing IO-bound tasks.

Another large build that takes around 40 minutes on my laptop took 28 hours on the server. Which respects the about 40 times slower rule.

Now considering the above number and a 20% steal time, I'd expect to have a 20% overselling of slices on a physical machine. Meaning, at 16GB per machine, roughly 76 slices of 256MB on one machines. Taking into account the 1:40 rule above for IO speed, this means that they have about 2 hard drives in a server.

Conclusions

---

It's certainly liberating to have complete control over a server. CPanel solution just don't cut it when you need to run various applications on strange ports. Of course, the downsize is that you also have to do all the administration tasks, secure it, etc.

The Slice host services are very decent price-wise, the "administrator" panel they have provides you with everything you need, even a virtual terminal that goes to tty1 of the machine (very handy if for some reason SSH doesn't work for example).

Even the smallest slice I'm using right now has enough space, RAM and bandwidth for small tasks. If you just use it sparingly during business hours, the "fixed weight" sharing rule gives you enough CPU / IO for most tasks.

But for heavy usage, I think the solution is either to get a more expensive slice or start building your own machine.

IO-bound tasks are almost impossible to run due to the 1:40 slowness noticed. This means that you need to get at least the 4GB slice to have it run decently. Of course, that's $250 compared to the $20 slice I have right now.

CPU doesn't seem to be a problem, at least for my kind of usage. It seems responsive enough during normal load and mostly idle under heavy load (so idle that Xen gives my CPU cycles to other virtual machines). Initially I was expecting this to be a major problem while moving my build server there, but boy, was I wrong. IO-limitations don't even compare with the CPU limitations.

Getting 5% or more of a fast CPU doesn't even compare to getting 2.5% of an even slower resource like that hard drive if you are compiling.

Further experiments

---

During the time I was considering the CPU to be my future bottleneck, I was thinking which option would be better: 2 x 256MB slices or a bigger 512MB slice.

According to their rules and offering, the two configurations are totally comparable. Even more, using their sharing rule, 2 x 256MB slices should get at least the same CPU cycles under load as the 512MB one. (Further emails from Slicehost's support led me to believe the rule might be oversimplified, but they didn't tell me in what way -- I think the weight of the smallest slices might be even smaller with the bigger slices getting even more of their share).

So, if under load they get the same CPU cycles, it means that when the machine has CPU cycles to spare, I have 2 candidate slices to get those spares.

So the question was: for a 5% price increase I would pay for 2 x 256 slices compared to 1 x 512 slice, will I get at least 5% more CPU cycles ?

I'm still not certain with the data I've computed that it might happen. Also, the new question now would be: will I get at least 5% more IO operations ?


Non-agression

---

The above post isn't a rant against Slicehost. I think they are providing a decent service for their price. It is interesting though to see which kind of usage can one put on a VPS and which are better to be run on the server in the basement.


512MB update

---

Well, isn't this interesting. A vertical upgrade to 512MB of RAM is another world entirely. Maybe the new VPS is on a less-loaded machine, but at first sight, it's looking way better: the previous 28 hours build (fresh) takes now only 40 minutes for a small update. I'll try a clean build later this week and see how fast it is.

So it seems it wasn't only a problem of slow IO, it was also a big problem of not enough RAM leading to swap file trashing.

I guess it has begun: the environment is at fault for everything

I'm always amazed at the amount of bullshit people are able to come up with, especially when explaining some corporate move.

Take for example my main bank BRD - Groupe Société Générale. Yes, it's the same Groupe Société Générale which showed at the end of 2007 a € 4.9 billion fraud. But it's OK since the Romanian branch is really profitable for them due to limited consumer education here and powerless consumer protection institutions.

I just noticed a new message from them on the Internet Banking site: due to increased environmental awareness from the Bank, they are encouraging people to get alternative bank account statements via online banking or by post. Otherwise you are entitled to one printed account statement per month from their offices.

The reason is, of course, to save the trees by printing less. Of course they are willing to print tons of the stuff if you are willing to pay -- which will go directly into their profit but that's another problem, no ?

Also add here that they also increased the tax for having an account by 20% for individuals and 50% for companies. That probably also had some environmental reasoning that's escaping me.

Anyhow, I'm looking forward to more price increases and consumer ripoffs that's going to be done in the name of the trees.

Too bad us people can't buy our own carbon credit so that companies won't be able to offset that extra cost in the name of the environment on us. But you know what ? I'm pretty sure some one will introduce carbon credit for the masses. After all, why not ? It's a nice way to bring some more money to the state budget.

And only then that old saying will come true: they'll tax you for the air you breath !

Well, technically for the air you exhale but we're close enough.

No new mail! Want to read updates from your favorite sites?

For a while now I've started using GMail's "Archive" button aggressively on my inbox. The end result has been that from thousands of emails, I now have 0 (zero) ! Everything is archived.

When I get a new email, it sits in the Inbox until it is resolved (ie. I reply or read it). Then it's instantly archived. Out of sight, out of mind.

I've found that this technique greatly reduces the information overload coming from emails. With a full inbox that was also showing snippets of the message (ie. small previews), every time I looked at my inbox I had some information to process. Like: oh, look, that one is starred, I wonder when they'll reply or hm, it's been quite some time since I've got an email from X as the name is on the bottom on the inbox, etc. etc.

Basically a full inbox sends you some information even when no unread emails exist. It's also quite a bad way to "search" for email. I used to manually look for some subject and/or sender in order to hit reply. Now I just use GMail's search.

I remember about some TED video where the host said something like our brain likes new information, we have an addiction for new stuff. Which is exactly what email feeds. It feeds our addiction for new things, even by just having a full list of previously received emails. I also assume that's why sites like Slashdot, Digg and Reddit are quite popular: they feed us new, easy to process, information. Imagine brain junk-food if you will or the Internet-equivalent of too much TV will rot your brain.

Related to this need to always get new stuff, I find it interesting the way Google handles this. When your inbox is empty, you get this message: No new mail! Want to read updates from your favorite sites? Try Google Reader (with a link to google reader).

So what Google is doing here is proving us what we have become used to. Not enough interruptions, not enough new stuff from email? Why gee, why don't you try this other source of new things: Google Reader. Come on, get a quick fix !

Oh, my, how the NetBeans community has grown !

For quite some time now I've noticed an interesting trend: I don't have the time to read the email in the NetBeans mailing lists. A lot of emails where I could have given some help just fly by me as they are just too many.

Just now openide@ has 2000 unread messages, the oldest unread being from 26 November 2006 about the Manifest File Syntax tutorial (boy, a lot have changed in the Editor APIs). nbdev@ also has about 1700 unread but that's ok as I rarely post / answer there.

Now, this trend seems to be caused by two reasons: me being busy (and lately I'm working full-time on getting the Editor APIs usable in a standalone way) and the community growing.

I do remember the time when I had zero! unread messages. Now I hardly notice when another hundred adds-up.

So, how do you guys handle the workload ?

Of course, the solution might be to be a little more methodical about it and dedicate some exact time (like 30 minutes / day) but it just doesn't seem to work with me. Must be the 100 Editor modules I have open right now in the IDE -- sigh...

I'm not sure I like Web 2.0

Remember when an URL linked to something static on the net ?

Sure, an URL could be actually a script behind that allows for a more dynamic page.

But when the script is used to discriminate users for a supposedly free site like YouTube, I'm getting kinda annoyed.

This video is not available in your country ?

Un-believable.

So Web 2.0, besides all the AJAX thingy, also brings a wide-spread encouragement to use a proxy to hide your identity ? Is this a social construct to teach us about security and privacy ? Or just a degeneration of what the Internet was supposed to be ?

I forgot what Alt + F4 does

I saw today an avatar on a forum which said "To view my display picture hold down Alt + F4".

Now, it was clearly some funny-man trick but then it occurred to me that I'm not certain what Alt+F4 does.

I've been using OSX for so long I had forgotten about Alt+F4 on Windows. I guess this is enough Microsoft-independence.

I never wanted to program on Windows or using anything Microsoft specific. This lead me to Java initially then Java on Linux and soon to Java on OSX...

Should the language shape the mind ?

I've read an interesting blurb from Lera Boroditsky (Cognitive Psychology & Cognitive Neuroscience, Stanford University) in Do our languages shape the nuts and bolts of perception, the very way we see the world?, where the basic answer is: yes, languages not only influence our way to interpret information, but also they way we perceive it.

There is an often quoted phrase in the programmers circles:

When the only tool you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail

,which basically states the same thing: the languages we programmers know and use influence the way we perceive reality.

That's a dangerous thing, because languages (programming languages) were only supposed to help up interpret information. Skewing our perception means we obviously don't even notice the wrong path we've taken.

Being multi-cultural -- that is, knowing multiple languages -- helps, as these may overlap and give you various perspectives on the information and thus make a better representation of the information. The end solution is also most likely to be better.

But I often wondered: shouldn't we at some point just stop trying to force our thoughts into some language and just start expression into another language altogether ? Into our language ?

Sure, learning a language might bring some "discipline" into minds; using it might help up programmers get along with each-other. But in the end a language should just give a programmer some new perspectives. The output should still be in our language.

I assume this is the reason most people think everybody else's code is shit: their internal interpretation doesn't map with the mapping inside the other programmer's brain. A younger you produced a lot of bad code by your current mapping.

Which basically means we are utterly unable to find a way to fully express our thoughts in a way other people would understand, agree and like. And by like I mean having a close mapping with the other (or just bring something totally fresh).

And this limitation doesn't just apply in relation with others but to ourselves.

Then, how should we function ? Each new problems brings into us a current solution with our present interpretation. Should we express this into something like a Domain Specific Language (DSL) ? Should each new problem be represented into a new Problem Specific Language ? (And sure, maybe PSLs at a given time might have something in common as they also represent us).

So what means that some code looks like shit then ? It means the chosen PSL is incomplete, somehow flawed or just not elegant enough compared with our current PSL. Rarely does code look like shit if we like the PSL and the solution is somewhat broken -- then it just has bugs or is incomplete, but we fix it while following the given PSL.

Won't this make cooperation really hard ? Well, not really as cooperation might change the PSL for the better. It will also force programmers to slow down a bit and try to first understand the PSL before understanding the solution. We do this anyway as even while using a common language there is always a meta-layer programmer-specific; only that this layer is sometimes obfuscated by the language used instead of being very prominent like in a PSL.

Maybe general purpose programming languages should stop existing and be replaced only by programming paradigms and concepts.

NetBeans Platform autoupdate via BitTorrent

Something I'm pursing nowadays is having my platform applications as decentralized as possible.

And the fist pet peewee I had is that fact that the Update Centers are such, big, centralized, monolithic blocks.

I always assumed that I would need to hack the AutoUpdate module from the NetBeans Platform quite hard in order to get what I wanted all along: BitTorrent downloads for new or updated modules.

So, the first thing we have to notice is that the AutoUpdate Catalog (see DTD) provides for each module in the Update Center a location called distribution. The distribution may be a relative path to the catalog location. That is usually something like ./com-example-mymodule.nbm or it can be a totally new URL.

Now we have a first step towards splitting traffic: we can put the actual NBM file on another URL altogether. Or, if we have the AutoUpdate Catalog location sit behind a servlet we could even try a bit of balancing and return a different distribution link depending on how loaded are the servers. That's a plus...

Ok, that's something but it isn't BitTorrent, you still download the whole file from a single place.

It's alive !

But what the Platform does offer is the possibility to register in the Lookup your own URLStreamHandlerFactory . So, I can register a new handler for the torent:// protocol and the AutoUpdate module will just use my stream handler.

And thus, a few hours later I have a working AutoUpdate infrastructure via BitTorrent. My StramHandler downloads behind the scenes with BitTorrent using Snark and provides a nice InputStream to the AutoUpdate module. It's still not polished but already useable. Install the module from this update center: http://emilianbold.ro/modules-updates.xml or just grab the NBM.

Something else: the destination of the module is no longer pointing now to the NBM, but to a torrent file actually which has the NBM file.

The steps are: place the torrent file on http://example.com/module1.torrent.nbm, edit the catalog to have destination="torrent://example.com/module1.torrent.nbm" and you're good to go. Behind the scenes I'll actually download the http file and then download the torrent.

<!DOCTYPE module_updates PUBLIC "-//NetBeans//DTD Autoupdate Catalog 2.3//EN"
"http://www.netbeans.org/dtds/autoupdate-catalog-2_3.dtd">
<module_updates timestamp="35/26/18/21/01/2008">

<module codenamebase="org.yourorghere.emptymodule"
distribution="torrent://example.com:6881/cc032d0c003b12568c91a0339f88301fa6ca67f5.torrent.nbm"  
... >
...

A small remark: note the .nbm extension. It's something the AutoUpdate module needs otherwise it won't be able to install the file as NBM (could be a bug, I'll report it at some point).

The module still needs some extensive testing and different BitTorrent libraries (I'm using Snark, but I would like to have the Azureus core as a different provider in the Lookup maybe) but it does show it is possible.

Using the same technique one could write multiple backend/"protocols" for the AutoUpdate. Drop me a message if you want to know more or want to help me (source code will be online soon).

The opensource bureaucracy

I always thought that only post-communist countries like mine can be bureaucratic and not capitalist, civilized countries or the meritocratic internet.

But one may be shocked to notice the kind of bureaucracy open source brings. In a normal "distributed" project where you don't have a sugar-daddy to pay for all the project hosting and other expenses, you need to get some free hosting.

This is the first place where you need to get an approval for your hosting, depending on what you do (you can't expect to have any project approved) or what license you use (you get the free hosting if you give your work under their preferred terms).

And the more "free" stuff you need (like build servers, wikis, email lists) the more you have to wait, accept rules and abide by them. But generally, wait and read a lot of strange disclaimers and terms and conditions.

Don't get me started when you get to the licensing part. Do you want your code into some high-profile codebase ? You need to sign the agreement, which needs to be scanned and emailed or even better faxed. Then you need to wait for the acknowledgment that the fax did arrive and someone is going to give you commit access, in a few days.

Basically the more people you involve the more it takes to do anything, especially since you depend on their goodwill. The more "steps" you have to follow, the more agreements you have to approve of, the more time you have to wait.

I'm waiting for a month now for some approval on a high-rated open-source nexus. I'm not being denied, I'm just waiting for someone to finally get to my item in the todo list.

It almost makes renting my own server seem like a good expense.

Not another bubble

Funny stuff:

I really like Java's tooling

There, I've said it.

Really, Java has great developer tools.

Long ago I liked to experiment with a lot of different programming languages (I own lisp.ro). Many languages got things right from the beginning while Java with the C++ inheritance is really, really verbose. Nowadays I mostly play with Python, Javascript (and studying Erlang).

But what Java lacks in succinctness compensates in tools. Big, juicy, gooey tools.

First, a bow to the JVM. It's such a nice feeling to develop on OSX and only test rarely on Windows and have everything work !

Second, I really like my NetBeans IDE with my debugger and trusty profiler. Problem with the EJB: bam! add --debug to Glassfish and connect from the IDE. Possible performance problems? kpow! attach the profiler to the application and see what's the problem.

Wanna see the health of your code: put a whole bunch of reports in maven and build your site (findbugs, pmd, taglist, checkstyle, all good stuff).

And if you feel in a coding mood, why don't you add a MBean to get quick info from jconsole, even remotely? Or even better, make a custom JMX client using JFreeChart to get a nice display of the health of the application.

It just feels like software engineering. And it's nice.

Java 6 meet Linux on MacBook Pro

It seems there's no Java 6 in the new OSX Leopard from Apple.

I mean, it's not like it's been almost 11 months since SUN released Java 6 on Linux, Solaris and Windows. And I bet it's more than an year since Apple started getting code for Java 6 from SUN in order to customize it in due time.

But I guess the iPhone and transparent menu is far too important to actually put some developers work on Java.

It's bad enough that they are supposed to force down on my throat a new OS release for a new JDK version -- I just want Java 6 on Tiger thank you very much. But now, they are delaying even that !

So, I'm thinking that in the future I'll probably go back to Linux and stay there. I thought proprietary Microsoft software is bad; well, I'm starting to believe maybe proprietary Apple software is just as bad (only prettier).

Hence, the first step is to get Linux working and see the hardware support. Because if it's not good enough I might just go for a Thinkpad.

What about that Apple ?