Tom's Blog

I momentarily got the Firefox upgrade blues when I upgraded my Pre 1 browser to the 1.0 release. As has happened nearly every time I've upgraded Firefox, my installed extensions break.

I figured this upgrade probably didn't change a whole lot on how Firefox handles extensions, so I thought I could rifle through the extension XPI files and tell them it's OK to run in 1.0. Thirty seconds later, I said, "that was easy!" and I figure I'd write the instructions here for other folks whose extensions stopped working after they upgraded to Firefox 1.0.

Before I went to the trouble to write the instructions, I checked to see if there already were instructions out there to forcibly "upgrade" browser extensions. Um, yeah, a few, including comments on several extension pages whose authors hadn't yet upgraded the XPI files.

The first set of instructions I found using Google were from Liew Cheon Fong. So why repeat his work?

I wonder though, rather than unzipping the XPI file, editing the install.rdf file, then rezipping everything back into an XPI file, would it work to edit the exploded XPI file in my Firefox profile directory? I haven't tried it yet, but I think it should work.
Tuesday November 23, 2004 Permalink Comments [2] Despite Chris and his Powerbook coming to my rescue when my company-owned Wintel laptop couldn't connect to a VGA overhead projector at last Wednesday's Denver JUG meeting, I'm still concerned the Mac won't work for me. I wouldn't be able to run JDK 5.0 for some time, and that generally seems to be true for a lot of software: It comes out on the Mac much later or not at all.

Then there's the $700 to $800 "penalty" for buying a Mac, for which Chris had a great response: How much is my time worth when I waste it getting Windows or Windows apps to cooperate.

I did check out the Powerbook at a computer store. The user interface seemed to act sluggish, and I don't think it was just because I was biased by Matt Raible's regular rags about the slow Powerbook. Nothing jumped out at me as being impressive. I certainly did not put the Powerbook through its paces, so in no way was I being fair to the Mac. But the big price tag, and the concern that, say, WebLogic 9 won't run on it makes me want to steer clear for now.

I appreciate the many people who tried to get me to see the light. When I have enough money to afford a second laptop, it'll probably be a Mac just so I can experience what everyone tells me is the one, true way.
Monday November 15, 2004 Permalink Comments [1] I'm in the market for a new laptop. Many developers I know and respect own an Apple Powerbook. They say the usability is much better than Windows XP. Friends also recommend the Powerbook. One of them, Chris Huston, said there is no contest between the Powerbook/OS X and a Windows XP laptop. He said it won't be one big Powerbook feature that will blow me away. It will be 1,000 little features that will continue to impress me every day.

But I've never owned a Mac. I'm a long-time user of Windows, since the 3.1 days, and MSDOS before that. I think I've discovered every keyboard shortcut possible in Windows, and I've banished the Office paperclip and the scratching/sniffing Search puppy to the Recycle Bin. And, yes, I can write rudimentary Windows shell scripts, even though I'd much prefer BASH or CSH. So using Windows isn't a problem for me.

But I also like Unix, so I don't foresee the OS X command line as seeming strange. In fact, I've used Unix longer than any other operating system, starting with BSD Unix at college. I've used System V, HP-UX, AIX, and Solaris. And I've been using Linux on development boxes at home for more than five years, including customizing my own Linux and BSD kernels.

So I priced a 15-inch Powerbook at the Apple web site to see how feasible buying a Mac would be. Ouch. It would cost me $800 more for a Powerbook than a similarly equipped Dell. Is the quality of the Powerbook hardware and software that much better? Or does Apple take advantage of its loyal customer base and the fact it has really no competition for non-Windows laptops?

What I'm looking for is a laptop that has:

• A fast processor for development, but not so fast that a high-speed fan system is needed to cool it. (The fans in my company-issued Pentium 4 laptop make a racket. When I run Ant/Maven or launch something huge like WebLogic, I keep expecting Newton's third law to send it flying across my desk.)
• A 15-inch screen is probably big enough
• At least 1 GB of RAM, expandable to 2 GB
• Hard drive 60+ GB
• A non-fancy video card. I'm not a gamer or plan to watch movies from my laptop.
• WiFi and USB 2.0 (almost standard nowadays)
• CD burner, DVD reader.
• Software to read and write Microsoft Word and Powerpoint files.

In other words, nothing too fancy. It won't be my primary development box, but when I'm using it for development at a client's site or on the road, it has to be fast enough not to irritate me with its pokiness.

My current question is, for my needs, do the features and usability of OS X really warrant the extra $800. Not to mention the extra frustration I will undergo getting applications like WebLogic 8.1 installed under OS X. (Folks at BEA say it is possible, they just don't support it or make it easy.)
Sunday October 31, 2004 Permalink Comments [6] In trying to build Apache Geronimo from the subversion trunk tonight, I noticed that eight JAR files are missing from the remote repository Maven uses to download the files.

In case you're trying to build Geronimo before the files get placed in the repository, I got the missing JAR files from http://cvs.apache.org/repository/geronimo-spec/jars/. I just put the missing files in my local Maven repository and everything built fine.

Here was Maven's first complaint

+----------------------------------------
| Executing (default): Geronimo :: Demo Webapp
| Memory: 7M/10M
+----------------------------------------
Attempting to download geronimo-spec-servlet-2.4-SNAPSHOT.jar.
WARNING: Failed to download geronimo-spec-servlet-2.4-SNAPSHOT.jar.
Attempting to download mx4j-jmx-2.0.1.jar.
261K downloaded

BUILD FAILED
File...... C:\Projects\Geronimo\maven.xml
Element... maven:reactor
Line...... 454
Column.... 27
The build cannot continue because of the following unsatisfied dependency:

geronimo-spec-servlet-2.4-SNAPSHOT.jar

I didn't look into the Maven project files to see from where it was trying to download the files. I just grabbed the missing geronimo-spec-servlet-2.4-SNAPSHOT.jar file from the Apache CVS repository.

Continuing the build, that led to this message, which seemed to satisfy Maven that it had the file available:

+----------------------------------------
Attempting to download geronimo-spec-servlet-2.4-SNAPSHOT.jar.
Artifact /geronimo-spec/jars/geronimo-spec-servlet-2.4-SNAPSHOT.jar doesn't
exists in remote repository, but it exists locally
build:start:

The build continued but still more files not found:

Attempting to download geronimo-spec-j2ee-management-1.0-SNAPSHOT.jar.
WARNING: Failed to download geronimo-spec-j2ee-management-1.0-SNAPSHOT.jar.
Attempting to download geronimo-spec-j2ee-deployment-1.1-SNAPSHOT.jar.
WARNING: Failed to download geronimo-spec-j2ee-deployment-1.1-SNAPSHOT.jar.
Attempting to download cglib-full-2.0.jar.
280K downloaded
Attempting to download mx4j-2.0.1.jar.
382K downloaded

BUILD FAILED
File...... C:\Projects\Geronimo\maven.xml
Element... maven:reactor
Line...... 454
Column.... 27
The build cannot continue because of the following unsatisfied dependencies:

geronimo-spec-j2ee-management-1.0-SNAPSHOT.jar
geronimo-spec-j2ee-deployment-1.1-SNAPSHOT.jar

After a few of these runs with complaints of missing JARs from the remote repository, here is a complete list of the missing JARs in the hopes it saves someone else a little frustration:

geronimo-spec-servlet-2.4-SNAPSHOT.jar
geronimo-spec-j2ee-management-1.0-SNAPSHOT.jar
geronimo-spec-j2ee-deployment-1.1-SNAPSHOT.jar
geronimo-spec-jta-1.0.1B-SNAPSHOT.jar
geronimo-spec-ejb-2.1-SNAPSHOT.jar
geronimo-spec-j2ee-connector-1.5-SNAPSHOT.jar
geronimo-spec-j2ee-jacc-1.0-SNAPSHOT.jar
geronimo-spec-jsp-2.0-SNAPSHOT.jar

Monday October 18, 2004 Permalink Comments [2] Sun Microsystems said today it will pay Eastman Kodak $92 million to settle a Java patent-infringement lawsuit.

Sun's news release says it does not admit or deny that Java violates Kodak's three object-activation patents. A federal jury in Rochester, New York, ruled Oct. 1 that Sun violated Kodak's patents. According to the Democrat and Chronicle, the jury was scheduled to begin a penalty hearing today to decide how much money Sun owe's Kodak for violating the patents. Kodak was asking for $1.06 billion, while Sun had said it should pay no more than $25 million.

Sun's statement says the settlement resolves "all claims in pending litigation between the parties." The settlement amount includes a license for Kodak's patents. The three-paragraph statement quotes Jonathan Schwartz, president and chief operating officer, as saying:

"We are eager to put this punitive litigation behind us,
to have reached a decision in the best interest of our
stockholders, customers and employees, and to focus our
future activities on the evolution of the Internet and
Sun's place within it."

Kodak's also-three-paragraph news release, also issued today, quotes Willy Shih, Kodak senior vice president, as saying:

"We achieved our goals in this case, which was to protect
our intellectual property rights. We are pleased that the
Court has validated these fundamental Kodak patents and we
now look forward to building a more productive relationship
and continued collaboration with Sun...."

Thursday October 07, 2004 Permalink