Lot of stuff has been on my mind lately: finishing my last university courses, doing work for my diploma thesis and side projects, visiting concerts and reading books just took its time.

Nova rock was fabulous, the bands rocked. I was rather astonished that not everyone loved the Pearl Jam gig. Last weeks Metallica concert also was worth every Euro I payed for.. they are just one of the best live bands ever. Between all those gigs some ’smaller’ concerts where watched by me: Beatsteaks, Wolfmother, Tori Amos.. all of them where good, but still the aforementioned sticked better in my mind.

University related stuff is mostly over by now, the only missing oral exam will be taken the day after tomorrow, the workings on my diploma thesis are another story which might be told another time.

My birthday keeps happening on the 7th of July each year, and hopefully will. I was really happy to hear and see some old friends of mine, but missed some. Still I feel somewhat distressed partying in the knowledge that one the same days families are mourning their loss of two year’s ago.

I just finished reading “To kill a mockingbird”. It seems that Hollywood loved the book as the plot was featured in too many films by now, sadly most points raised are still valid. The book gains bonus points for being told from the naiive perspective of an eight years old child, also the goth pseudo-hero was a nice twist.

I’ll have to switch to “Programming language concepts” for my upcoming exam, but might have time to read a couple of pages of Sam Harris’ The End of Faith.

Finally, we’ve finished our solution for the Internet Application assignment at the TU Wien.

We didn’t find much good documentation at the net, so we decided to put up our final submission archive to this page. It is written for Java6, using JBoss 4.0.4 in conjunction with JUnit/AXIS 1.4 client test cases. There’s also a .NET c# webservice client and a rudimentary BPEL file. The submission document includes some error descriptions and our prelimitary solutions to that problems.

It includes:

• JBoss JSR-181 enabled Entity und Session beans
• build file for building and deploying the beans
• JAVA unit tests using AXIS 1.4/JUnit
• .NET c# webservice client
• BPEL workflow using our web service (doesn’t work)
• summary document

Hopefully this helps the next students that have to do that crappy work. So get it here.
.

Due to a university course I had to use EJBs with JBoss 3 (using Xdoclets) last year. I hated it: slow, undocumented and from times to times (okay, admit it: most of the times) just not working.

I didn’t learn and now I’ve enlisted to do a similar exercise using the newer JBoss 4. What (hasn’t) changed in the last year:

• Due to JSR-181 (and Java5) you can now use Java Annotations instead of Xdoclet Pseudo-Annotations. This helps debugging your code (also it looks way better) but still it’s a long way from simplicity. It still sucks big time.
• We had a new problem as we tried to run JBoss on Windows. Accessing the Beans just didn’t work while a virgin install on Linux just did the right thing. Java runs everywhere.. right, but your mileage may vary.
• There’s still the old java “where are all my JARs and which versions of a JAR and which java runtime version do i need” problems. We lost some days before we found out that some libraries just don’t work with a given java version (very, very bad backtraces/exceptions on the server console).
• The documentation is still crap. While there are lots of small (often non-working) examples on the web there’s no comprehensive and (works-for-sure) guide out there.
• The infrastructure costs are still high. A running JBoss 4.0 server including a HSQL database and without deployed user beans consumes around 700MB of virtual memory with a RSS of 130MB. Why?
• Most deployment problems vanished as we are using the supplied (and preconfigured) Eclipse JBoss designer - which of course still sucks more free memory out of my system. But the “building those ear/war files by hand” (as the ant target didn’t work) problems have disappeared.
• Same dosage of nerve breakdowns, but with better music this time..

So, did I see the glory of the new EJB ways? No. Would I use them? Hell, no. Would I like to burn everyone responsible for the sorry state of JBoss documentation? For sure. And did RedHat’s commercial overtake of JBoss increase my respect for RedHat: hardly.

To summarize: EJB is crap. JBoss sucks. Thank you for your attention.
Same old story, still feeling dirty after touching that stuff. I’m quite calm normally, but I need to sing the following song.

Corrupt, you corrupt,
Bring corruption to all that you touch.

Hold, you’ll behold,
And behold and for all that you’ve done.

And Spell, cast a spell,
Cast a spell on the country you run.

And risk, you will risk,
You will risk all their lives and their souls.

And burn, you will burn,
You will burn in hell, yeah you’ll burn in hell.
You’ll burn in hell, yeah you’ll burn in hell for your sins.

Muse - Take a Bow

Some exam gave me headaches last week.. now the results arrived: I came out with a three, which is a average, but good, mark while most of my friends are distributed around me.

Some swaggering beside, it feels good to know that my team is still able to squeeze a term lecture into eight or so learning hours.

So I’m through my second smoke-free week and still looking good. I might have quit for good this time..

My iPod is broken. Again. Thanks Apple for building something that broke five times in less than two years. Good Work! As my friends older generation iPods do not seem to be as fragile I’m slowly guessing that the price reduction introduced with the 4th iPod generation might have resulted in cheaper hardware parts.

University life runs as usual: forgetting to do my stuff, realizing that two days before exams and having a hard time catching up with 6 month’s worth of information in eight or so hours.. hopefully it will work out.

I’ve missed my sport-related lectures. Both of them. Again.

I already gave up on Tai-Chi for this term (I can hear some of my friends laugh by now) and fear for archery as I missed around half the classes by now. At least I can practice the later at home.

By now I know the procedure: first I’ll find a good excuse for missing one class (i.e. driving home, learning for a exam, doing my master thesis). After I’ll gave in once my excuses will get worse until I just don’t go there anymore. Attending those classes is even harder, as they resemble those with compulsory attendance.. which I also despise. My university life is far too chaotic to handle those periodic courses, too much is just based upon ad-hoc decisions and coffee house meetings.

Fortunately most of my future university work is project-based so there are few timing constraints. Still I think that I should try to get more structure into my life. It was possible during the summer as well as last term, so why not now? And it’s time to exercise my willpower, there are three situations left which lead me directly to smoking: during concerts, while going out and in trains, sitting for almost four hours in a smoker’s cabin. I’m gonna stop two of those three, and the middle one is not the one that will be left.

see this needle…a see my hand…
drop, drop, dropping it down…oh, so gently…
well here it comes…i touch the plane… turn me up…
won’t turn you away… spin, spin…spin the black circle

Pearl Jam - Spin the black circle

Today was this term’s first archery lesson. It’s amazing how much you can forget in six month, I made lots of errors while shooting this summer. At least I’ve got fewer ‘oh no, pain’ even if my targeting skills seem to have devolved.

Most of the people in this course are simple freaks. Running around with long bows seems to attract a very special kind of people. Those that wear a quiver while using the subway. With leather. And lots of fur. Small Asian people with hun’s rider bows made some mediaeval instincts inside me cry. At least the ‘normal’ people like me knew whom better to talk to.

And I will never make jokes about those that live in their own LOTR world - I may not survive it.

This semester was kicked off at Nelson’s with a round of coffee and table soccer. The university lecture was missed for sure (okay, it turned out that it will start only next week). Some things never change.

I wasn’t able to enrol myself on all sports courses that I wanted but got taiji and archery. The only climbing course that wasn’t booked out was on frydays at seven o’clock in the morning. While that time of the day isn’t my favourite the mere fact that this would be on frydays prevented me from registering. Thursday is the day of most university parties and I do not believe that tired and half-drunken is the perfect state while hanging from walls. And, as Birgit reminded me, 7 o’clock in the morning is while uni-parties are still going on. Have fun in Spain!

I wanted to join the sport university’s semester opening later this evening but yesterday lays heavy on my shoulders. I think I’ll take the easy ’sleeping’ way out of today.

I ordered the live recording of Pearl Jam’s concert in Vienna. They aren’t as good as the original but I felt taken back a week. It was a great concert. I was surprised that the download manager that Pearl Jam’s website uses worked under Linux. Alas two tracks were corrupted and had to be redownloaded.

Thought I was different and it seems I’m just the same
As a game I put my hand over the flame
I thought I was smarter as I flew into the sun
But it turned out the way it does with everyone

Audioslave - Moth

I’m (most of the times) proud owner of a drei 3G/UMTS Nokia N70 phone. Since my birthday (surely just kind of a present from drei) my network connectiviy has been very shakky, it seemed like UMTS networks worked fine while connectivity through GSM networks wasn’t possible anymore. This is a major PITA as most of drei’s coverage in carinthia is provided through A1’s GSM network. Thus my connectivity was down to the level of my prior provider (tele.ring), in other words: not existent.

A short chat with drei support staff brought light into this problem. There is a known problem with drei’s roaming through the A1 GSM network with this special mobile phone. It seems like a bug in A1’s access points sometimes classifies drei SIM-IDs as rouge users and thus banns that ID from its network. I got a new SIM card and am now waiting for its registration to complete. Hopefully I’ll be connected again soon.

This was the very long explanation for: “my phone’s connectivity was broken, sorry that I might have not get your calls or messages”.

In other news: I attended at a work related meeting through the last three days. It was very interesting, the goal and requirements for my part are a lot clearer now. Also the social event which happened after the meetings were ‘interesting’:

• Day 1 brought me to Maria Loretto. Very nice restaurant at the edge of the Woerther See. with very good food, but they definitely got a bug-related problem and the price is more that a bit on the expensive side. Travelling to Maria Loretto by car is a experience on its own. But this picture is shadowed by narratives that they do not treat their (summer) interns not too well.
• Day 2 was ended with a visitation of the excavation at Magdalensberg. “Leading the way” may not be my heraldic motto as it needed twice or thrice the time of the others to get there. It seems like I misunderstood the description of the starting point and through that I choose route with only two oder three direction signs (on a 10-15km long track) instead of the well-signed out normal route to the Magdalensberg. The excavation was interesting, but not that intoxicating. Dinner was consumed in the restaurant at the mountain’s top. They also serve very good food, ambience is very is nice and comforting. A thunder storm set in while we were eating so we had to stay at the restaurant for a bit. After electrical problems the rooms were lightened by candles which made the ambience even more pleasant. Hopefully our foreign guests do not conclude that this situation is normal for austria.

I’m feeling the urge to go back to sleep.

some stuff happened today:

• It seems as if my term paper was accepted. This should be my last exam/paper/whatever needed for my bakkelaurius study. Now bureaucracy is the only thing between me and the successful end of the first part of my studies.
• The other two missing lectures should be no problem, the professor has just to reedit some certificates. I’m still hoping to file my bakk’s application at the end of this week or at the beginning of the next.
• some of my ipw2200 related patches have been merged into the linux mainline (2.6.16-git1)Â kernel. It seems that an old version of the “enable Qos and Monitor mode” patch was commit, thus some defines still need to be renamed.