work in progress

I am leaving for a week of skiing in Macedonia this Sunday. I have been looking forward to this trip all winter (and long before the winter really started..) and now I can hardly wait to get there!

I have been following the blogs of people that have already been there, and it seems most of them are happy. However, it looks like there have been some problems with the snowcat the last week. I can’t tell how much I hope the problems are fixed before we arrive..

The trip is with a group of friends, we are 8 guys travelling together. Most of us were together last winter in Vail, CO and had a blast. Hope to have an equally great time this year

Now I am about to start packing, I hope I have everything I need and am able to get room for it in a single bag. If not, I have to go shopping tomorrow. Don’t really need that stress on a Saturday in Oslo, but if I have to I have to. Still not sure whether I should bring my computer along for the trip. Don’t really know if I will be able to connect to the internet, but it seems there is a possibility at least. Perhaps I should just bring it and hope for the best.

The JavaZone conference to be held in Oslo, Norway this September has had its Call for Papers (CfP) out a while.

This year the Program Committee has opened for both regular-length (60min) presentations and 10min Lightning Talks. I’m excited to see if there will be many LTs, I have enjoyed the shorter format at several other conferences and at work many times.

Anyway: the CfP is available at here. I’m trying to wring some idea of talk out of my head and submit an abstract, but no luck yet.

Most software developers today have heard of the Agile Manifesto, and many of us live by it to. In recent discussions there seems many have interpreted the use of Agile as a “Silver Bullet”-solution to developing good software. It’s not. A process alone will not make good solutions. It may help, but in the end there is only one way to make good software: Do a Good Job.

As a response for the need, many have discussed what makes a good programmer and what practices we need in order to do a good job. What makes us good craftsmen. Last week an extension to the Agile Manifesto was posted at http://manifesto.softwarecraftsmanship.org. The manifesto states:

As aspiring Software Craftsmen we are raising the bar of professional software development by practicing it and helping others learn the craft. Through this work we have come to value:

Not only working software, but also well-crafted software

Not only responding to change, but also steadily adding value

Not only individuals and interactions, but also a community of professionals

Not only customer collaboration, but also productive partnerships

That is, in pursuit of the items on the left we have found the items on the right to be indispensable.

I think this is an important extension for us to be able to grow our community and gain the respect we need from our customers and our peers. Software development is a craft, and should indeed be treated as one.

I have been a good boy this Christmas. I had a goal to go skiing a lot, and so far I have spent 5 days skiing. That’s not that bad

The only downside is that I haven’t been able to go downhill-skiing as much as I wanted to. Two days (one hike to the top of Seimsåsen, one day in Filefjell) is not quite enough for me, so I hope to spend at least one or two more days at Filefjell before the vacation is over.

The fact that I have had 3 trips cross-country skiing is good though. My physical condition is a bit below par, and I think that one of the best ways to improve overall strength and condition is by cross-country skiing. And I’m starting to like it again after an 8 year pause. I get tired, and satisfied

Wow.. It’s been a while since my last entry. So much for keeping a steady pace I guess..

Well, to the point. We have been having a lot of trouble with our CI-server lately. Continuum didn’t quite hold out in the long run. For a while it worked fine, but lately it has been crashing, builds have been hanging, notifiers have failed and all sorts of problems.
A friend of mine has been using atlassian’s Bamboo for a while he has been very happy with it. The downside is the pricetag, making it non-feasible for my current project.

Enters TeamCity. I had heard a lot of good about TeamCity and decided to take a look. The feature-list is almost as comprehensive as Bamboo and certainly seems to meet our needs (basically maven2 and subversion). The install went like a charm and I had my build up-and-running in about an hour-and-a-half. I only had some minor issues related to how to define my svn-directories correctly.

After about 8 hours of running, we have had 10 regular builds and I tried a couple nightly-style site:deploy cycles which also run just fine. The first impression of TC is just great and if nothing major occurs I would say I have a new favorite

As I mentioned yesterday I have bought new ski boots for the season. I had a new day skiing today, with much better conditions than yesterday, and just have to give an update on the boots. I didn’t write it yesterday, but my new boots are the Full Tilt Bumble Bee Pro. I got them recommended from my sports dealer and tried them on. At once I noticed that they are like nothing I ever tried before and liked them way more than the other boots I tried. So far the feeling has only been increased and I can’t tell how happy I am.

After two days I am very, very, very satisfied. They are definitely not like anything I have tried before. As you see from the image above, the design is quite different from todays normal boots. The special design gives a more consistent and progressive flex, allowing for a better feeling and contact with my skis and in turn the snow.
Also, they treat my feet much better than all boots I have previously. I no longer have any problem skiing for a full day, my feet are comfortable and warm all day.

Conclusion so far: 12 out of 10 from me

Spent my first day skiing for the season today, at Filefjell. Filefjell is pretty close to my parents home, where I am spending the Christmas holidays. The conditions were far from great. There was way to little snow in the slopes and the weather pretty much sucked with rain and strong winds. Actually they closed the resort two hours early because of high winds.
Any hows, it was great to finally get some snow under my feet and try out my new equipment (I bought new boots and skis about a month ago..) To say the least I am happy with the new gear

If the weather tomorrow seems nice, I will try for a new day in the slopes. Certainly hope so

My current project uses JBoss (version 4.0.4GA) and Hibernate.Thinking that since Hibernate is developed and maintained by JBoss, we decided to use the proprietary HAR-archive deployment option for our Hibernate configuration (see also this JBoss Wiki page). This uses a custom JMX MBean (org.jboss.hibernate.jmx.Hibernate) that is supposed to wire up all our configuration and make the finished SessionFactory available through JNDI.
We have used this configuration for well over a year now (approaching two years) and haven’t had any major problems with it. (Had to write a custom maven-1 plugin to create an appropriate archive though..) That suddenly changed the other day when we were trying to modify some configuration options for performance reasons, we stumbled into a hornets nest.

We tried to deploy two different Hibernate Archives using ehCache as the second-level cache provider. The first deployed fine, but the second one failed bigtime. Digging through the logs gave us the answer to why: it tries to use the same configuration file (ehcache.xml) as the first one. The fix for this is easy: configure a new file and point a Hibernate property to use this file. That’s when the shock comes to us: The JMX Bean doesn’t allow us to set all hibernate properties.

How shocked do you think I was? You would assume that when JBoss supplies their preferred way to deploy a Hibernate configuration, it would just work. Well let me tell you: it doesn’t!

So far, my search has resultet in me finding several (old) issues in the JBoss-Hibernate JIRA. Many of the common Hibernate configuration options are not configurable through the JMX interface.

Our solution? Download the JBoss source code, expand the JMX interface, build the source and deploy the newly patched jboss-hibernate.jar into our server instance. So for each configuration setting we need to change, we must re-patch our JBoss.
Does it work? Yes, it seems so
Do I like it? Not at all