As of today, I have reached my limit for tolerating the default stylesheet collection available for Movable Type. The weblog now looks more like I picked out the design, for better or worse. That forced all caps and Verdana were maddening. The colors, although the lesser of the five or so evils, also made things too dark. Enter the revolutionary concept of Helvetica with black, white, and blue. Shocking. Plain…it’s the new fancy. I have to get some sleep.

Yeah, so I’m working away on my EJB tutorials and upon checking Apple Developer Connection (ADC), I notice that there was an SDK update to accompany the Java 1.4.2 Update for the runtime. Egad, how careless of me! I pull down the 50.6MB chunk and install it right away. Upon reboot, my Sun Linux J2EE 1.3 SDK reference implementation (RI) and deploytool are dead. Yep, dead. Imagine the horror.

I posted to the help for Head First EJB and to the Apple Java Development mailing list, hoping for a good word. It turned out that Google led me to a Debian Java mailing list post that outlined the solution wonderfully. Go Debian!

The notes from the Head First EJB site are for when your shell is tcsh, the default in Jaguar (Mac OS X 10.2.x) and earlier. As of Panther (10.3), the default shell is bash. So, the additions to your .bashrc or .bash_profile or .profile (adjusting the installation path as appropriate) would be:

# Java general settings
export JAVA_HOME=/Library/Java/Home
export CLASSPATH=.

# J2EE-specific settings
export PATH=”${PATH}”:/Users/username/j2ee/j2sdkee1.3.1/bin
export J2EE_HOME=/Users/username/j2ee/j2sdkee1.3.1
export CLASSPATH=”${CLASSPATH}”:”${J2EE_HOME}”/lib/j2ee.jar:”${J2EE_HOME}”/lib/locale

Upon adding the “${J2EE_HOME}”/lib/locale to the PATH environment variable and deleting j2ee.jar from /Library/Java/Home/lib/ext, I saw a dramatic performance increase in both the RI and deploytool. (I had put j2ee.jar in that folder as a lazy way to poke around in it with the Java Browser tool from Apple.) It goes without saying that this has restored a certain level of order to my world. It’s hard to study J2EE without the SDK.

You know, I wonder what it was like when the dim light first turned on in the head of the original spammers. I envision it as a sodium-halide sort of light, cheap and poor in quality. Was it the junkmail folks? Did they suddenly realize, “hey, we can send electronic junkmail, just like with the postal mail!”

Yeah, eureka, morons. Thanks a ton. I hope their inboxes are as plagued as my own. What is so hideous is that they get responses from people who actually buy what they offer. Spam works. How tragic.

The more I think about it, maybe they don’t even use email. Perhaps they are those types that exploit something without having any personal interest or involvement in it, like successful dealers of controlled substances.

I don’t think I have had a single original thought in this entire post; my apologies. I think I am just ticked because I have now added my eleventh “banned IP” to try and block comment spam on this weblog.

There was a time when nobody else in the major bookstore arena could compete with Barnes & Noble as far as discount programs for books. I don’t know if that’s true anymore. I have heartily recommended Reader’s Advantage, particularly if your an IT person. For those who don’t know, IT people can easily spend US$500 to US$1,000 a year in books, depending on your field and how much independent learning you do.

It appears that Borders has caught on, but they seem to be taking a different approach. Rather than have you subscribe to a program. You sign up for their email list at no charge (they offer an opt-out for spam stuff), and you get coupons and sales via those messages. Depending upon your frequency of purchase, these coupons can come along often enough to meet your needs.

And yes, Amazon plays into the picture, too. With free shipping, even with Reader’s Advantage it is often cheaper to buy from Amazon.

So, if you are reading this, and I have recommended Reader’s Advantage to you, please be advised that the suggestion may no longer apply. This has been a public service announcement.

We are at the point of going through the material for Enterprise Java Beans (EJB) in my Sun Certified Enterprise Architect (SCEA) study group. After wading through the morass that is chapter seven of the SCEA study guide, I heard several people in the group mention Head First EJB. Those of you who have read this weblog know that I am very fond of the Head First series. So, off to Barnes & Noble I went.

This is another great one from Kathy Sierra and Bert Bates. The very first chapter leaves you with having created a simple-yet-educational stateless session bean using the Sun J2EE 1.3.1 SDK Reference Implementation. (At this point I must confess a certain level of happiness in having all the screenshots come from a Mac - I am the only Mac user in our study group to my knowledge.)

A big thanks to Kathy and the crew for the notes from the site for the book which helped me to get the J2EE SDK up and running.