Gremlin’s Fireside Chat

Open-ID is a great concept; not too sure how big its going to get, but I think its going to be massive. What better than one place dedicated to doing authentication  and sign up and then third party products and websites using the authentication and permission systems of the first company/entity to do the actual login. Makes sense to me; save writing up all that pesky login code, and from a user perspective you only have to write down all those user names and passwords for the various websites you use.

So how does this related to the title of this posting? Well I was reading Mike Desjardins article on “A reason to hate enterprise Java” which gave a link to another one by Scribd on the “Java Technology Concept Map”. This latter page allows you to download the article as a PDF – but you have to subscribe to the site to do so. Surprisingly this is the first site I came across that gave you an option to login via open-ID, and this already peaked my interest since I knew basically what open-id is but at the time did not have one. So off I went to the Open-ID site and off the main page there is a link to where to get an Open-ID and to my surprise Flickr, Wordpress and Yahoo are all listed as providers. In the end all I had to do was to in the login page for the “Java Technology Concept Map” put “yahoo.com” and sign in using my Yahoo account and I could download the article.

Hope you find it useful.

For developers who want to use Open-ID with their product you might be interested in Open-ID’s Developer Page.

When I signed up with digiweb I had their line-of-sight option – after a year when DSL became available where I live I upgraded to a 3MB ADSL “DSL extra” package  with a static IP address. You can imagine my delight this week when a colleague at work mentioned that Digiweb had for free doubled the line rates for DSL customers (I cannot find an announcement); Best of all IT’s True … have a look here and when I checked the lines rates for my modem – its true!!!!

All in the Leeson family say a BIG THANK YOU DIGIWEB.

I am working on a project, and am spending a fair bit of time trying to get the Java Virtual Machine to perform better. This is very much a black art and in reality there is not much out there in the ether to look at. I did however find this excellent page on the JVM Parameters you can use which provides much more information that “java -help” which only lists the basics.
The only downside is I would like to more information on what a load of the parameters do…. Anyway hope you find this useful.

My old company Apple Computers have again come up with a jaw-dropping drooling piece of kit called the “Mac Pro” – Dual Quad Core Processors – thats 8 running at 3.2GHz!!!!! Gimme gimme gimme.

If like me you are a java developer on unix this little blog might be of some use if you have lots of jars and are prone to “which jar contains the class X” where X could be riomhaire.roster.model.User and you find your self in a long search. What I do is ….

Have a file in my home directory called “classlist.txt” which contains the output of “jar -t” after some text replacements to remove non classes and to replace “/” with “.” so we can get the class names correct. Each jar dump includes the jar name and location.

The script is fairly simple being :

#####################################################################
echo “##### ${1} ####”
jar -tf ${1} | sed ’s/\//./g’ | grep “\.class$”
echo “”
#####################################################################
and which I call ‘listJarClasses’

I invoke the script via the shell command line:

find / -name “*\.jar” -exec listJarClasses {} >>classLocations.txt \;

at the end I end up with a file which can look like:

##### ./ant/etc/ant-bootstrap.jar ####
org.apache.tools.ant.Main.class

##### ./ant/lib/ant-antlr.jar ####
org.apache.tools.ant.taskdefs.optional.ANTLR.class

##### ./ant/lib/ant-apache-bcel.jar ####
org.apache.tools.ant.filters.util.JavaClassHelper.class
org.apache.tools.ant.util.depend.bcel.AncestorAnalyzer.class
org.apache.tools.ant.util.depend.bcel.DependencyVisitor.class
org.apache.tools.ant.util.depend.bcel.FullAnalyzer.class

……

Then if I want to find a class I open the file and search for the class name I am looking for and look for the preceeding jar name.
Hope this is of some use.