Niklas | 
Tags: 
02 6th, 2008| 
On of my former colleagues, Martin Rydman, has started blogging. In one of his first posts, he takes a look at Jim Webber’s debunking of ESBs. Martin is a really clever guy and responsible for the Baseline concept (or should that be “methodology”?) so his blog will be interesting to follow. But the most interesting trend here is that Zystems wants to be more open and active in the community. I most certainly applaud that. Let’s get the discussions flowing.
May
16
One of my very smartest colleagues has just started his own blog over at this slightly odd address http://de9644.wordpress.com/. If you care about experiences concerning integration in general and WebSphere in particular, you should probably keep track.
Also added to my linkroll.
May
12
On Thursday I was interviewed by a journalist from the Swedish computer magazine Computer Sweden. The topic was how it has worked out to take paternity leave as a dad in the IT industry. I was probably a pretty dull subject since I’ve only experienced the positive sides of staying home.
Today I meet up with a photographer who took some shoots of me and Albin. Hopefully he’ll choose one with Albin in focus and me as a blur somewhere in the background. I’m no good on getting this kind of attention.
Update: rumour has it that the article was in the paper today. I haven’t seen it so I have no clue as to how stupid I look in the picture or how cute Albin is. Can’t seem to find it online and I’m not a subscriber.
Jan
28
Thursday and Friday was the Zystems Integration Days for 2007. I think this is the fourth time we’re having them and they have grown considerably. This year, more than 180 customers, partners and internals participated. Since I’m really still on parental leave, I had a fairly easy schedule this year with only one presentation, on WebSphere Service Registry and Repository. I think it went fairly well, actually managed to stay on time and even squeze in a little demo. The only technical hickup was when switching over to my VMWare image for the demo, it changed the resoluation on the projector so that any text in the GUI during the demo was pretty much unreadable. Didn’t see that coming.
But, most fun at these type of occasions is just meeting up with people you’ve worked with over the last couple of years. It now seems to be a pretty large bunch.
Aug
1
Last week I had the joy of setting up our new build server at work. Since we deal with integrating with legacy applications on god-forbidden platforms, we still need to support JDK 1.3. Since some of these platforms are somewhat weird, this tends to mean IBM JDK 1.3. But we’ve been sloppy with building on this JDK for some of our projects. Now, when setting up the build server I made sure to include both IBM JDK 1.3 and 1.4 in the available options and also included them for our main projects. They all broke. Not because we were using some fancy stuff in 1.4. No, no, they broke with the wonderful error
error: The encoding null is not supported
Google to the rescue, finds this page. Turns out that this train-wreck of a JDK doesn’t support non-ASCII characters in the Java source files. Since we’re a Swedish company, quite a few people has included @author tags which contains the letters åäö. Lots of search-and-replaces later all of those has been replaced with the harmless a and o. Oh, and someone also made the mistake of including some curly quotes in a comment which had to be replaced. That was boring, but easy. A lot of builds still wouldn’t work. That’s because some of the i18n unit tests contains strings with funky characters. Had to replace with loading that text from a file. Now everything worked as expected.
Only that some build should instead run on IBM JDK 1.4. These instead produce the equally wonderful
error: IO exception sun.io.MalformedInputException
Gee, thanks. Very helpful this time too. Google again. Found this page. This time I had to set the LANG environment variable to make the system not using UTF-8 (which Ubuntu does by default). Luckily, Pulse made this very easy.
Finally all builds worked, a few hours of massaging perfectly fine projects to build on buggy JDKs. An this was still on Linux, not one of the weird platforms. Luckily, JDKs tends to get better with each new version.
Jul
23
Lately, we’ve been having some issues with Subversion at work. We use SVN for all things that need versioning, mostly code but also documentation and deployed artefacts. Since we’re a fairly small company its not a huge repository (some 45000 total commits, approximatly 150 commits per day). Now, since begining of June some revisions has gone bad resulting in the following error on checkout or update:
Error REPORT request failed on ‘/repos/main/!svn/vcc/default’
Error REPORT of ‘/repos/main/!svn/vcc/default’: Could not read chunk delimeter:
Error Secure connection truncated
“svnadmin verify” outputted the following on examining the affected revision:
“insn 0 starts beyond the target view position”
After some Googling I found this write-up by Ian C. Blenke, describing the same problem as we see. After some discussion on svn-users and the excellent help by John Szakmeister, his fsfsverify tool now catches and fixes our first broken revision. He is still examining a second broken revision that currently breaks fsfsverify. But, since so far there hasn’t been any data corruption seen due to this bug I have high hopes for John being able to create a fix.
Update: John has now updated fsfsverify to also catch and fix our second broken revision.
So, if you’re seeing this problem, report it on svn-users, take a backup of your repository and try out John’s tool.
Apr
12
As noted by Mårten, at work we have decided to give some back to the open source community. We’re quite heavy users of open source software, both for our internal systems (e.g. Ubuntu, Subversion, Apache, Tomcat, Maven) and our software (e.g. Spring, Hibernate, commons). As a way of showing our gratitude we will be donating money to projects voted by our employees a couple of times per year.
Of course, as hopefully nice citizens we also try to contribute back improvements made on software we use, but that goes without saying :-)