Today was a banner day for the Movable Type spam comment goons on this weblog. In two 3-minute bursts about half an hour apart, 50 spam posts were placed in comments to weblog archive entries of mine. They are a real pain to extract. So, if you notice a number of entries that do not allow comment, now you’ll know why. It’s a shame, because I really enjoy when folks leave comments and we are able to interact. That is part of what makes a weblog great, the interaction.

And then the idiot hack profiteers devoid of scruple enter the picture.

This has me looking seriously at other weblog platforms. I have had other gripes about Movable Type, the biggest one being that it is not open source. I recently stumbled across WordPress thanks to the weblog of a fellow Atlanta Linux Enthusiasts member. It is under the GPL, and seems to have an impressive feature set. Blojsom just doesn’t appeal to me; neither did Blosxom. Anything that requires me to host my weblog on someone else’s server is out of the question.

I had been wrestling with an odd problem for days in my current project at work. We have a project using the Spring framework, the Struts framework, and Hibernate. When trying run a JUnit TestCase
that has more than one test, I kept getting an error saying that more than one database connection pool with the same name was attempting to be registered with Hibernate through the Spring application context.

Pragmatic Unit Testing in Java with JUnit to the rescue.

I had mistakenly thought that the setUp() and tearDown() methods for a TestCase ran once each, before and after any of the tests had run. The code sample on page 31 of the book had an easily-understood and concise code sample of how to wrap your tests in a TestSuite within the TestCase class and then provide methods to contain work that is called for the setUp() and tearDown() methods of the suite. Needless to say, the approach worked like a champ.

God bless those Pragmatic Programmers.

This weekend I actually got my account set up on Alioth, the development environment for Debian GNU/Linux. I have signed on for involvement with the Eclipse packaging project and the Lucene packaging project. The timing is a bit off, as I am heading into a 60-hour week at work, but I think that is the norm when you are moonlighting for open source. It’s catch as catch can, most of us (if not all when it comes to Debian) working purely as volunteers.

I have to admit that I am pretty excited about being “officially” involved with Debian. I hope to be able to come up to speed quickly on the processes and policies, but there’s quite a bit of that to work through. I don’t mind, though, because the organization and discipline of Debian is a major part of its draw for me.

Sun was told by folks at my local Linux user group that we would like to demo their Sun Java Desktop System (JDS) at one of our meetings. They subsequently became alarmed and insisted that their people needed to demo it, so the whole user group should come to their facility here in Atlanta. For those who don’t know, the JDS is a Linux distribution packaged by Sun with an office suite, email client and (I think) Java IDE for around US$150. Sound pretty innovative? Add up the cost of your last Windows upgrade, what you should have paid for your pirated copy of Microsoft Office, and you get past $150 really quick. Neat idea, huh?

UPDATE: Thanks to the watchful eye of my friend Tom Kovarik, it has been brought to my attention that I failed to include that the JDS has an Exchange-compatible email client.

Well, yeah, in some respects.

I don’t know if it’s going to fly. If it did, I would really get a kick out of that. Anything to diversify the computing environments out there. If this causes some corporations to migrate away from Windows and Office, great. It’s not like Novell hasn’t already been working on this with SuSe. Heck, you can download a CD of that for free via FTP.
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The topic at Atlanta Linux Enthusiasts meeting tonight was Linux and Java - a can’t miss for me personally. It was a great meeting, and Bjorn Roche and Michael Hirsch stepped up to the plate to give some great discussion-inspiring presentations. Java is a controversial topic with Linux folks; the cross-platform nature really appeals to some and the strict Sun licensing and closed source code reviles others.

There’s pretty much no other platform that offers the ability to write an application and deploy it on Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X with a little bit of packaging. That “little bit” can be maddening sometimes, but by comparison there is not another platform with the level of tool support and richness of APIs that can approach Java.

I could go on about it, but I am out of time. Maybe I will have some further installments later.