22 Mar 2006
On a whim I decided to migrate our development environment from being Linux-based to at least being usable on a Windows machine.
My original intentions were to package everything together with cygwin and attempt to keep things self contained. It probably would have worked but I soon realized that it was just as easy if not easier to install the native equivalents (PostgreSQL, ant, JBoss, etc).
To make a long story short, it took a couple hours but I’ve pretty much got everything running with 95% of the unit tests passing (the unit tests that aren’t have hard coded unix paths in them). I couldn’t get rid of cygwin completely but I’m only using it as an sftp daemon.
I haven’t done a lot of Java development lately on Windows but I had heard that it was pretty fast compared to similar Linux operating environments.
After the migration, the first thing I noticed was that an initial JBoss load and deploy of the application took ~20-30s whereas on my Linux machine (actually a dualboot on this laptop so the hardware is equivalent @ 2.00ghz/2GB) it would take ~1m40s. Even the application seemed to run substantially faster but I haven’t had time to do much in the way of timing. Either way, I’m pretty impressed. Originally I did this because its an inconvience to ahve to dualboot when I’m at home and want to work, but after seeing these numbers I might actually try it out for awhile in the office.
Perhaps there’s something I can tune in the Linux environments to get the same sorts of performance improvements.
13 Mar 2006
Anyone know if its possible?
I’ve got a significant number of bookmarks but I’d like to do a bit of re-organization. Trouble is, I haven’t come across a mechanism to do it in any way that resembles a batch. It would be rather tedious to have to resort to entry-by-entry edits.
What I have come across are a couple of greasemonkey scripts that might be a step in the right direction. They might work, but why isn’t similar functionality already provided by the service itself?
01 Mar 2006
I didn’t really know what to think at first. I signed up, added one person to my contact list, had one conversation, and stopped using it.
For one, I already had a jabber account (for work IM) and a personal MSN account, not to mention a throw back ICQ account from the old days.
I didn’t really see the need for yet another IM service, regardless of the technical advantages (or in the case of GoogleTalk’s initial release, the lack thereof). IMO Google missed the boat with me, it wasn’t until the integration with GMail that it became useful and actually pretty cool.
I’m a big fan of its relative simplicity and the centralized archival is a nice side benefit. What I’d love to see is someone attempt a decent (and long lived) federation across the existing IM services. It’s cool and all, but I can count the number of chat-enabled people on my contact list with one hand. I don’t know enough about the Jabber protocols/setup to know if its possible, but from a bit of reading it looks like there has been some effort put into it.
This post on BigBlueBall talks about using different transports to chat across the other services. It’s about a month old and looks to preceed the GMail/GTalk integration but it might still work. Unfortunately it sounds like the MSN transport isn’t the greatest…