Java Thinking

I spend a lot of time on the train travelling to work. Working from home has not really taken off in this part of the world - so, what better to do with that time than practice my craft? Its not comfortable, its hard to concentrate, but progress can be made. I have successfully used this tool to observe real performance problems, and confirm they've been resolved. JtSysMon is a very simple monitoring tool which will poll resources and time the response. The response time is logged to a database, and from there, you can see which resources are either slow or failing/erroring. I wrote this because I needed a way to make sure that various resources were available and responsive during development, so that we could respond quickly (proactively) to problems and have them fixed before developers or testers noticed or wasted time fault finding. Existing solutions (Nagios, Zenoss etc) seemed too complex for such a simple requirement, with too much of a learning c...

Ubuntu 10.04 is here! I've been running Ubuntu exclusively (my wife has the only Windows machine in the house) since (I think) around 6.XX and it just keeps getting better. Last year I converted my parents to Ubuntu 9.10 and every now and then they boot into windows because they don't know how to do something, but thats just because I'm in a different country - otherwise I'd be able to help them a lot more, and show them around. I've got remote control working well now ( Remmina has an option to drop the colours to 256 which means it performs fine across the Tasman) so that means I can show them how to do things easily. I'm looking forward to the new social network aspect of Ubuntu 10, with tight integration into chat and social networks - hopefully this will keep me in touch with my family much more. By the way, I really like Gwibber , and look forward to seeing that evolve. If you like the sound of Linux and/or Ubuntu, I encourage you to try it out. It can m...