Artemis Software Blog Summary

the iPad is the holy grail for tech reading

The iPad came out a couple of weeks ago. Instead of repeating how great it is along with reviewing it's current shortcomings I'm just going to talk about how it successfully fulfills exactly the use case I was hoping it might.

If you're in any kind of tech these days (software development, engineering, biotech) or any rapidly evolving field it's gotten to the point where most likely almost anything you pick up in print supposedly on the cutting edge is already quite dated by the time it makes it to print - especially true of books (unfortunately). This has been the case for about five to seven years but more relevant is the fact that this trend is only accelerating. In fact it's becoming much harder to even find a decent book dedicated to topic you'd like to kick back with in a coffee shop for a couple of hours. You can still find several at Amazon and O'Reilly, but they are drying up at your local bookstores.

The iPad finally solves this in a way no other device does.

The perfect trifecta for tech reading are the iPad apps: Read It Later , News Rack and Safari.

Read It Later is actually the best of these. As you're going about your day and see any article on the web you want to read in more depth but not while chained to your desk/chair and not while you should be working just click on the integrated "Read It Later" link or icon in your browser of choice and it's instantly added to your reading queue. When you flip on your iPad not only does your reading list instantly appear but the app will optionally download all the content for reading even if you're offline (which many iPad users will be a lot of the time). It's simple and fantastic. Truly this is reading evolved.

News Rack is an excellent RSS reader well designed for the iPad. You can swipe through a large number of articles quickly. It integrates/syncs perfectly with Google Reader. Additionally it has "Read It Later" integration allowing you to seamlessly add articles you see in RSS directly to your 'reading list' for later if you don't want to pause for a particularly long article while scanning a few dozen blogs and articles.

Safari a pretty great mobile browser reading articles. And with this too you can mark articles for your "Read It Later" list. It does have a lot of shortcomings: lack of a good book mark manager, no tabs, and I won't even mention the F____ word.

The iPad allows you to clearly separate out your 'focused reading' time from 'should be working' time. I don't think the value of this can be overstated. You can still read stuff only found on the web (which is pretty much everything when it comes to tech reading) but without getting IM'ed, Tweeted or emailed someone just tagged your prom photos, etc.

Using the iPad this way is actually making me more productive as I spend a lot less time surfing while I should be working. I still spend a bit, but for the most part I just mark with RIL the articles of interest and now I know I actually will get to them.  And that is a first.

Oracle database - I have to do what? Are you kidding me?

I've never had much occasion to deal with Oracle directly beyond hooking software up to it. But these last couple weeks I've had to do a bit of work with it. And I am COMPLETELY shocked at the basic features it lacks. Here are two examples.

Example (1): Backup and restore

using MySQL:

using Oracle:

There is no such feature!!! Are you kidding me?
It appears you have to write something custom to achieve a subset of the above functionality.

Example (2): Search and replace some text in a CLOB object.

Here is the MySQL answer:

Here is the Oracle answer - you have to create a custom function, good luck debugging this if you have an issue:

code taken from this article

Oracle installation on Mac OS

Quite simply - FAIL. Even after I installed the compiler and other Unix tools the 'installer' requires. It was like amateur hour when they created the OS X Oracle installer. Not just because it fails completely or that UI could be from 1990, but because of the ridiculous dependencies.

Conclusions:

Perhaps I'm missing some great Oracle options. Perhaps the full time Oracle DBA I work with is missing those options. Perhaps Google is also missing those options.

What it all seems to add up to is that there might be good reasons to use Oracle - speed, stability, incremental backup features, advanced transactions, etc. I don't really know since it's hard to find where Oracle has clear advantages over modern MySQL and Postgres. But in some painfully obvious ways Oracle seems to be an inferior product to MySQL or Postgres....even if MySQL were to cost as much as Oracle (which clearly it does not and that's TCO). Another great example of a much more expensive solution that has perceived advantages while it is actually (from a certain perspective) an inferior product.

I know that Oracle is a backbone of corporate America, but then so is IE 6 and right now I see them in about the same light and used for about the same reasons (admittedly Oracle crashes a lot less).

How to set up the Apache Portable Runtime for Tomcat - Confluence - JIRA

When I was looking through the Tomcat 6 logs I noticed this.

"catalina.2009-04-16.log:INFO: The APR based Apache Tomcat Native library which allows optimal performance in production environments was not found on the java.library.path: "

After a bit of Googling came across this:

"Apache Portable Runtime to provide superior scalability, performance" for Tomcat 6.

There are comments that when using the APR Tomcat will server static content on par with Apache (httpd) server speeds - though I haven't been able to personally verify this just yet.

So that is extremely compelling. I'm still searching for some statistics on how much good the APR does and may try to create my own.

Here are some instructions on building / installing the APR: http://apr.apache.org/
(I actually used this page which was a bit easier to follow: http://www.mbaworld.com/docs/apr.html)

Basically the steps which got it working for me were:

• download the APR source zip
• build the source as per the instructions listed on the page above - if you have the privleges this installs the package to /usr/local/apr
• Follow the steps here using
  After getting the APR to build/install as mentioned above this was the line the worked for me.
  ./configure --with-apr=/usr/local/apr --with-java-home=$JAVA_HOME && make && make install
• the final trick to get it working for me was to copy the libs from /usr/local/apr/lib to one of the directories listed in the 'java.library.path' above - which will be different for each machine but Tomcat thankfully tells you where it's looking.

That's more of a high level list rather than individual steps, but those can be found

You can tell it's installed when you see this line in your log files - most likely in logs/catalina.out
Loaded APR based Apache Tomcat Native library 1.1.14

In this case the environment is:
JDK 1.6
Tomcat 6.0.18
Confluence 2.10.3
Mac OS 10.5 and a Linux Cent OS server (the notes above would vary a bit for Windows)

Atlassian Summit around the corner!

If you're an Atlassian customer using JIRA, Confluence or one of their other great products be sure to consider attending Atlassian Summit.

After attending their 'Atlas Camp' developer conference last November in 2008 the small investment of time and traveling expense was easily justified. I immediately reaped a number of rewards through new relationships, networking and being able to ask very targeted technical questions of not only the expert developers but also of whom I consider to be some of the top developers in the world.

demo of very fast Confluence plugin compile - build - deploy

Here's a quick video I made showing just how fast it is to compile / build / deploy your Confluence plugin. It's hard to win converts.

Here are the real goods