We took delivery of a brand new, shiny Dell preloaded with Vista today and I set about setting it up as a pairing station. Sadly, in the first 30 minutes I’d crashed Vista to the point of having to hard reset the entire machine. Finding anything in the control panels is a nightmare, not just because it’s impossible to guess where things will be, but because it takes so many more clicks to get there now.

If you’ve recently upgraded to PHP 5.2.1 (which is included in an upgrade to Debian Etch, the new Debian stable distribution), use WordPress, use the secure admin plugin and are now just seeing a blank page when you view your blog, I have a solution. Quick Fix For those who don’t care why this is broken and what I’ve done to fix it, you probably just want to download the updated plugin which works on my server, with my very brief testing.

I felt brave this evening and upgraded this server to run Debian Etch since it’s been marked stable now. The upgrade was not without it’s flaws and the server experienced some down time so if you found the site unavailable in the past few hours, now you know why. I still have no idea what kernel I’m supposed to use with the fancy virtualization – I suspect that it doesn’t really matter since the virtualization software seems to handle that level of things.

As part of a restructure of the engineering team last week I was moved into a product management role, focussing on our ready-made integrations with third party products (eg: our Alfresco integration) and to be formally in charge of LiveWorks! There’s a bunch of details regarding what the new role entails that I’m still not completely clear on, but I’m sure they’ll be worked out soon enough. I expect there will still be a fair bit of technical work so I’ll still be hands on to a reasonable degree, but what I currently see the job being about is community.

I’ve reached a point where I really need a logging framework for a small library. The trouble with logging in small libraries is that you want to avoid using a full logging system like Log4J or java.util.logging so that applications that use your library are still free to pick the logging system they want to use. Jakarta Commons Logging has been the de-facto solution for these situations for quite a while now, but it’s a library that people love to hate because of “class loading issues”.

I’m going to show my ignorance of the actual differences between URLs and URIs here, but I was a bit surprised by the fact that java.net.URL didn’t extend from java.net.URI. Along those lines URL.toURI() suggests that some URLs can’t be converted to URIs. Is this just in the context of the URLs that Java previously successfully parsed or is this a generic constraint? My main reason for asking is I’m trying to determine, when implementing an HTTP caching library, I should be using java.

One of the new features in EditLive! 6.1 that we released today is a plug-in architecture that handles deployment of extensions to the editor. Plug-ins in Java apps are pretty common these days, but there aren’t all that many applets that have them so I thought it would be worth documenting some of the challenges we faced and how we overcame them. The biggest differences between plug-ins for applications vs applets are:

One of the things we’ve been wanting to do for ages was automate our release process so that with the click of a button we’ve deployed a new version out to customers. Today, at least for EditLive! itself, that became a reality, with the “autodeployer” being tested out with it’s new release capabilities. At first glance it looks like releasing a commercial product like ours would be really straight forward, but there’s a surprising amount to it.

I’ve just spent the past three or four hours setting up Apache, Subversion, all my browsers etc etc to use SSL connections and client certificates for authentication with my Debian stable server. I’m sure the mod_ssl devs already know what’s coming here and are either chuckling gleefully or ripping their hair out right now. Anyway, the joke for all those who are mod_ssl devs, is that you can’t get subversion to use client certificates with a Debian stable server because Debian stable has Apache 2.

Just a reminder for those in Brisbane that the Redemption 101 Movie Premiere is on tonight, 6:30pm at the Schonell Theatre, Union Rd. University of Queensland, St Lucia. It’s a light hearted, quirky, full-length science fiction film made by a local studio. Party with the, er, stars, afterwards and best of all, have something to poke fun at me with. And for those who aren’t in Brisbane and can’t make it, check out the trailer below and buy a DVD from the website.

Most issue tracking/customer relation/todo list things have a concept of resolving an issue for later or a remind me later option. The idea is that you don’t want to or can’t deal with the issue straight away, but you need to come back and review it or follow up later. Unfortunately, it turns out that marking an issue for later tends to mean “make this disappear so I have no chance of remembering it” because the issue disappears from all the open issues lists forever.

There is an awful lot of money spent on user interface research, carefully tracking what users do with an application and trying to find ways to improve based on that. It’s a shame that so much of it is wasted because the captured data is misinterpreted. The Office 2007 Ribbon is a classic example of this, it was clear that Microsoft had real world data to back up their decisions about the Ribbon, they’d spent millions on it.