GuruBlog

Halve of my time i'm working at a costomers office, everyone has a different network environment, some usuale proxies some don't. in some environments i can use my mailclient, in some i have to use my webmail account.

so i usualy spent the first 5 to 10 minutes of my workday switching network profiles, configuring proxies, changing my subversion configurations, stopping and starting various propgramms, etc

doing repetitive stupid work is something i dont like. im a computer programmer and these are exactly the ones that sould be automated in my oppinion.

so i startet to create a little applescipt for every environment im in. it switches to the correct network profile stops my mailclient where nessesery and changes my current subversion profile, if a proxy is required.

changing the subversion config was the easiest part. i just fired up iterm and changed the config by setting a symlink using a shellscript so i have two copies of my .subversion/servers file one for using the proxy and one for direct connections, and the 'servers' file is a symlink to one of those

well at least i thought it woult be easy ...

the tricky part starts when iTerm is running but has no open windows. then i have to start a Termintal before i can call the shellscript so this is what the shellscript-starting part looks like

tell application "iTerm"
    activate
    delay 1
    if (count of windows) is 1 then
        set myterm to (current terminal)
    else
        set myterm to (make terminal)
    end if
    tell myterm
        set mysession to (launch session "Default Session")
        tell the last session
            write text "/Users/nikki/tools/switchsvn2 default"
        end tell
    end tell
end tell

and the corresponding shell script is

#!/bin/bash
cd ~/.subversion
rm servers
ln -s servers.$1 servers

to switch the current network profile applescript UI events need to be activated. Then applescript can be told to click on various menu items like this

tell application "Finder"
    activate
end tell

tell application "System Events"
    click menu item "networkprofilename" of menu "Location" 
                  of menu item "Location" of menu "Apple" of menu bar 1 of process "Finder"
end tell    

to start the applescript files i use quicksilver. So all i have to do now when starting my working day in a different environment is fire up quicksilver using - and entering the name of the environment

thats how i like it :-)

Im currently sitting in Wiesbaden at the Jax2007 (missing a keynote from SAP :-) ) i've seen a lot of new interessting tools and techniques which will keep me busy some times.

webtest from canoo, for example has evolved in a very interesting way since i gave it the last try,

one thing that many of the speakers are showing ist the tendency to use more languages on the JVM and choose the right tool for the problem. and not let the language shape the solution.

there were some nice sessions showning how to generate textual DSL with ruby or open architecture ware.

this time there were some netbeans sessions where new features from the upcoming netbeans 6 release where shown - realy nice

and i heard abount ApacheDS a ldap server which is completely written in java and can be embedded into other applications.

ok the sap keynote is comming to an end - i will go to the next session now ...

Category:

I have used macos X for some time now and resently switched my main console back to linux.

No problem so far because most of the tools ive used in macos X where unix tools i knew from conding on linux - the only thing I realy missed was exposeè.

For this reason I gave compiz a try now

Installation was realy simple on my gentoo box all I had to do was emerge compiz and reemerge kde with the useflag "xcomposite" acvite

then add a

Section "Extensions"
    Option "Composite" "Enable"
EndSection

at the end of xorg.conf and add

Option "AddARGBGLXVisuals" "True"

to the "Device" Section. This option is very important, because wihout it the kde-window-decorator doesnt draw any window headers.

after restarting X11 compiz can be started with

compiz-start 

in a shell. To let it start automatically i have put a little shellscript in my .kde/Autostart folder. I also have deactivated the wobbly plugin. This is realy funny in the beginning but start getting REALY annoing very fast :-)

Compiz can be downloaded on their website (http://www.go-compiz.org). They also have some very nice tutorials showing how to install it on various systems

Java 1.5 introduced a bunch of new classes for handling multithreaded programming. The one I realy like the most is Future.

With future its possible to start the calculation of something you know you will need at a later point in yout programm. When you reach that point you can call Future.get() to fetch the result of the calculation. If it is already avaliable the result is returned immediately, if the calculation is still running or has not started yet Future.get() blocks until the results are here.

one gets a future by submitting an object implementing Runnable or Callable to an ExecutorService. This is an interface that is implemented by ThreadPoolExecutor.

ExecutorService e = Executors.newSingleThreadExecutor();
Future<String> future = e.submit(callable);
...
String result = future.get();

This Class implements a queue and a threadpool. using ExecutorService.submit() you can put some Workload in an queue, from where the threads of the pool will fetch and execute them. the submit method returns an Future which can be used to fetch the results of the workload.

There are various preconfigured Threadpools available from Executors Class. For example

ExecutorService e = Executors.newSingleThreadExecutor(); 

creates a degenerated Threadpool using just one thread. This is very usefull if one has to garantee that no two instances of the submitted callable are executed at the same time. If you have to use an external service that is implemented by offering an api via webservice thats not threadsave beacause of a missing transaction handling, this SingleThreadExecutor can be used to serialize the requests comming from a webapplication. All the clientrequests can be spooled in the executor service but all the calls to the service api are strictly searialized.

Another very usefull class is

ExecutorService e = Executors.newCachedThreadPool()

this is what most people think of when they refere to a threadpool. The class generatets new threads if needed but reuses existing ones if they do idle. Threads that are not used for 60 seconds are removed from the pool.

ExecutorService e = Executors.newFixedThreadPool(n)

creates a Threadpool containing n threads. No new threads are generated an there also is no timeout. SingleThreadExecutor is an fixedThreadPool with n = 1.

I think the java.util.concurrent package is the one of the best things that got introduced with java 1.5.

so i have done it - ive started another blog :-)