One of the issues I ran into at some of my most recent project, is the classic classpath issue. In any Java project sooner or later too many classes and libraries (i.e. characters) are loaded onto the runtime classpath, either because of a lack of housekeeping or perhaps as a result of too much fragmented code.

Given the limited space of environment variables on some operating systems, this type of overflow on the classpath can result in the application failing to start (e.g. if the MainClass is not available) or ClassNotFound errors later on at runtime (e.g. a specific window uses a class that is not available). On Windows XP for instance there is a limit of 1023 characters for a single environment variable. Even if the CLASSPATH variable is not truncated the JVM must still search the CLASSPATH when loading classes, thus slowing down the applcation.

There are a number of structural ways to solve these issues, one being refactoring code. As projects often evolve over time, it is hard to trace back why certain code has found its way into the project workstream. This does nevertheless, still leave room for a number of other technical solutions to ‘crop’ the classpath down to a bare minimum.

Challenges

My current project uses a number of different subsets of code to form classpaths that are used in Eclipse, Build and Runtime. This makes it pretty hard for any outsider (like myself) to understand the logic and dependencies between libraries, classes, properties, etc. Some efforts have been made to document the history of certain jar files, however no documents give a complete overview of the full application landscape.

In essence the code in this project can be split into three big so-called ‘chunks’; vendor core code, vendor fixes code and custom (or Project) code. The correct working of the application heavily depends on the order of the these three code ‘chunks’. The JVM will want to access the vendor fixes code first, then the custom code and finally the vendor core code.  Depending on the Operating System or Client Interface, the correct order may have to be reversed.

A Unix server will append classes (or jar files) at the start of the CLASSPATH variable. So in essence the vendor core code is loaded first, then the custom code and then the Calypso hotfixes. The JVM will be able to interpret this as it is suggested, but for instance when using Java Webstart, the JNLP files containing the classpath references will have to be loaded in the reversed order.

A small change to the code makes the sorting a bit more obvious and will allow you to track any highlighted errors a bit sooner, so you can fix them by priority.

In the {findbugs.home}/webapps/cruisecontrol/xsl directory, open the file findbugs-details.xsl with your favourite text editor, vi in my case. Search for the “generateWarningTable” template.

Change the following code fragment:

<xsl:sort select="@abbrev"/>
<xsl:sort select=""Class/@classname"/>


To the following and save the file:

<xsl:sort select="@priority" data-type="number" order="ascending"/>
<xsl:sort select="@abbrev"/>
<xsl:sort select="Class/@classname"/>


Detailed results will now be displayed by severity.

This is how to fix them on your Mac

$ cat foo | col -b > foo2

Where foo is the file that has the Control+M characters at the end of the line, and foo2 the new file you are creating!

Enjoy!

Now there are a few tools on the market, however they all assume you have full access on the PC at your workplace. As my main customers have a very ‘security aware’ desktop environment, none of these tools really appealed to me. Nonetheless, tools like Littlemachines’ O2M are very useful. They convert your Outlook Inbox (and other folders) to the Apple mbox format.

In my case, all I could do was export the mail to a file, in my case PST. Let me get to the point. In order to import these emails into Apple Mail, I found an open source project that releases regular updates on a utility called libpst. The libpst utility has some functionality to convert, list and diff mailbox formats. The thing I was after was obviously the converter.

Now what do you need to do to get this working?

1. Start the Terminal application (Terminal.app)

You can find it under Applications -> Utilities -> Terminal.

2. Check your C compiler.

In order to use libpst, we will need gcc (or any other c compiler that can do the job).

From the Terminal you just started at step 1, type the following command:

macbook $ which gcc

It should return /usr/bin/gcc or another path where gcc is installed. If so, proceed with step 3.

If there is no response, that means gcc needs to be installed. Insert the Snow Leopard CD.

Enter the “Optional Installs” folder. Run Xcode.mpkg. This should install gcc. Once the install is complete check again by running the command “which gcc” at the command prompt.

If you do not have the Snow Leopard CD at this point, you can download the Xcode suite from Apple’s website.

3. Get the software

Now that we are ready, you will need to download the source package from the 510 Software Group website. The packages can be downloaded from:

http://www.five-ten-sg.com/libpst/packages/

I downloaded libpst-0.6.45.tar.gz which was the latest version. Once downloaded, it should automatically unzip in the folder you downloaded it into. Remember this directory path for later.

4. Some additional steps

Depending on how active you are on compiling software, you may be able to skip the following. If not, please proceed below.

In order to install libpst you also need to install “boost”. You can download boost from:

http://sourceforge.net/projects/boost/files/boost/

In the Terminal that was opened up under step 1, type the following.

macbook $ sudo su -

You will be prompted for a password. Provide the login password, that you enter when you access your Mac. You will need a root account setup. If you encounter problems at this stage, either contact me, or google for the steps to activate the root account. Now let’s continue:

root # cd /usr/local/

Unpack the boost package. The ‘<xxx>’ in the example below represents the version number for boost, in my case this was ’1_41_0′.

root # tar –bzip2 -xf /your/download/directory/boost_<xxx>.tar.bz2

Once that is complete you will see a directory now under /usr/local/ called boost_<xxx>.

root # cd /usr/local/boost_<xxx>

Run the following command. This will take a few mins to run.

root # ./bootstrap.sh –prefix=/usr/local/

Once that is done at the command prompt type

root # ./bjam install

This will take a while to run – 15 to 30 mins. Get a cup of coffee.

5. Compile the software

First we need to go back to the directory to which we downloaded (and unzipped) our libpst.

root # cd /path/to/download/directory/libpst-0.6.45

Run the following commands (some of them will create some funky output, make sure everything run without any errors):

root # ./configure

root # make

root # make install

6. Great you did it! Start the conversion

You should find libpst, readpst and pst2ldif under the /usr/local/bin directory.

To use the utility, run the command at the command prompt in the directory you want the mbox file created (for example /Users/<yourname>/Mail):

root # cd /Users/<yourname>/Mail

root # readpst -r /path/to/the/pst/file/<your>.pst

7. Using the new mailbox file

From Apple Mail, you can use the Import Mailboxes function from the File Menu. When prompted for the file format to import from, choose “Files in mbox format” and click next.

You will then be able to user your mbox file created under step 6. This will result in a new folder in the left menu pane in Apple Mail, which usually is labeled IMPORT.

In case of any question, put a comment below or contact me directly! Credits to akaran at HOWTOGEEK, who posted most of this info there.

There is only so much a person can take, but this is not the first time I got stuck at an airport this year. Remember the snow?

So apart from the complaining, the shouting at ground staff, the decline of my credit card funds, Starbucks running out of English breakfast tea, is there anything that I actually gain from all this?

There is!! I actually learned a lot about volcanos,  and how they can terrorise a continent. It all makes the last 100 years very relative, actually it makes the last 15 years even more relative.

We have progressed from a global village in to a series of continents again by closing the air space over Europe. Most people may think internet gives us so much more freedom, but as we still struggle with the idea of people working from home and have not really utilised social networks  (whatever happened to 2nd life?) on the work-floor, it is tough in times like this.

Do I sound like a passenger who has been stuck at an airport for too long? Maybe I do, but it also makes me realise how the ideas I put into Consectic a few years ago were simply not ready to bring to market at that point. The simple thought of being able to carry all your office work on a java card would appeal to me right now.

Not only does thin client computing over the Internet lower CO2 emissions on the ‘client’ end, but it also utilises the server and computing powers companies struggle with even more. On average a Unix or Linux server will be idle for 80-90%, so why not put the client end on there as well and have thin clients running on less than 4W of power.

Take out flights, drives, train rides, etc. Or at least bring them down to a bare minimum and maybe these ‘acts of god’ (as some insurance company in the UK calls them) may be kept to a minimum as well.

So what have I learned? That Frank Sinatra’s song Come Fly With Me for me refers to the fact that I should explore the ideas from some years ago again and put them into practice. The ‘flight’ in this case is a new business adventure, as (trust me) there will be no real flights leaving from Schiphol anytime soon.

Installing Sun Ray Server on my macbook as we speak … Ow yeah and they just got a new box of tea bags in. Hooray!

Ok, so this one is quite useful for you Solaris geeks that need to report uptime of machines on a regular basis. You could login with SSH and type uptime for your hosts, but if you have SNMP enabled, you can use snmpget commands to get the info on your screen or web port. The setup is very simple.

To get the uptime of a Solaris 10 host with SNMP enabled, simply run the following command, where 10.10.10.10 is the IP of your Solaris host:

root@server# /usr/sfw/bin/snmpget -v 2c -c dtv_ro 10.10.10.10 sysUpTimeInstance

The script below is a simple implementation of the command above, allowing you to add more IP addresses. You can alternative create an input file, which could be getting input from /etc/hosts. Obviously there are many ways of implementing this. I left it up to yourself to do that.

#!/bin/sh

echo
echo ${DATE}
for ip in ${IPS}
do
/usr/bin/printf "${ip}: "
${CMD} ${ip} ${OID}
done

Enjoy! For any other OS simply change the path for SNMP.

In this example I am assuming you have a cable similar as the one pictured above. Simply make sure the cable you have has a PL2303 chipset, which is the most commonly used chipset for these cables anyway. Cable prices may vary, but I recall buying my cable under $5. If you cannot find one get in touch with me. The driver for the cable can be downloaded from the Prolific website, however I have found an open source driver, which does the job and more over gives some better performance. I recommend you download the open source driver.

After you have installed the driver, connect your cable to any of your free USB ports. Mac OS X will automatically create a serial device, which can be found in /dev. Start a terminal session and list all available serial (or tty) devices available.

user@mac # ls -l /dev/tty*

Find the entry that is referring to your cable. Typically this should look similar to:

/dev/tty.PL2303-0002600D

Now that we have identified our new serial device, we can start connecting to a switch or server. Most people will use a Terminal Emulator, but as most of these programs were built pre-Leopard, you may find some difficulties running them on new(er) Mac hardware. I simply use the built-in screen program on Mac OS. So in the same terminal window, simply type:

user@mac # screen /dev/tty.PL2303-0002600D 9600

You can obviously change the baud rate or any other options to what you need to connect to your specific device. I mainly connect to Solaris servers, which work fine with a baud rate of 9600. I did notice that every time you connect and re-connect the cable’s tty device id changes.

Make a small donation if you feel this post has saved your day!!

Included in this update are a number of stability and compatibility improvements, as well as patches for security issues, among them including the more recent version of the Flash plug-in for Safari.

The Flash issue is notable as the Snow Leopard installer was criticized for installing an older version of the plug-in that contained security vulnerabilities, even if the user already had a more recent version installed. The 10.6.1 update deploys the most recent version of the Flash plug-in.

In addition, this first update of Snow Leopard makes some updates to device compatibility, specifically involving some models of Sierra Wireless 3G modems as well a situation in which Snow Leopard might not correctly display printer drivers in the Add Printer browser. It also fixes an issue that could cause DVD playback to stop unexpectedly and one that could make it difficult to remove something from the Dock.

A couple of bugs in Mail were fixed as well, including an instance in which the program’s auto account setup might not work, a problem experienced when sending mail with some SMTP servers, and an issue where the Command-Option-T shortcut unexpectedly brought up the special characters menu in both Mail and TextEdit.

Obviously I can only recommend this 75.1MB update to any user running Mac OS X Snow Leopard. The update is presently is presently available via Software Update.

One of the bonuses of frequent travelling is access to airport lounges. Obviously after a while it gets as boring as sitting at the local airport coffee shop, but still for any outsider it might be interesting to know what is going on in these lounges. In the next couple of weeks I will give my humble opinion on the lounges I access weekly. As I mostly fly from Bristol and Birmingham I can already tell you nothing else than that the lounges at both Airports are pretty horrible and utterly boring. So let me start of with a rather more exciting lounge, the Privium Lounge at Amsterdam Airport.

Now the Privium Lounge cannot be accessed with any Gold, Diamond or Crystal card from any airliner. Privium is the equivalent to the British IRIS and US Global Entry programs. The basic Privium card is available for frequent flyers within the Schengen region and provides a method of fast border passage, using your an iris scanner. Of course one may question the fact if you can then be tracked moving around Europe, but quite frankly I love the fact that I do not have to queue at 7.30am or 6pm, when the next flight to Ibiza has just returned.

The Privium Plus card also gives you access to the Privium Lounge. I have seen quite a few lounges in the last ten years, but this lounge has been put together very nicely. With a complete white backdrop and some very arty farty furniture, they still managed to create a ‘living room’ experience, something you see in many lounges. The lounge was opened last year and has so far managed to attract more and more visitors.

Marketing in the Privium Lounge is also done in a very clever way. If you want to apply for the basic membership (which does not allow you to access the lounge), you still have to walk through the lounge and may have you wondering if you want to pay that extra £50 to add the lounge option as well. Not a bargain, but if you are a frequent traveller, a glass of wine every week will get you back that extra money in a few weeks.

Now there must be some downsides you may wonder? Yeah there are. I have to say the selection of drinks is getting a bit boring after a while, but I suppose that is the same in any lounge. I have been a member for over a year, but I cannot eat any more mini muffins or mini quiches. However the food is always prepared well and there are always plenty of drinks available. The other downside for me, as I travel mostly in the evenings, is the fact that the lounge closes at 8pm and is not opened on weekends. Most of my flights depart at 9pm, so there is always that one hour gap of wandering around in Schiphol. Other than that, it is a great experience.

It is almost 8pm, so I am off to the KLM Crown Lounge, which I will put online next week.