Enter a (masked) password on the DOS command line

If you ever had the task on how to retrieve a password from a user on the command line, you can find the right tool here: http://westmesatech.com/editv.html. The editv tool allows you to prompt a user for whatever input, and with the -m (masked) parameter, the entered value is masked with stars. Pretty cool! Thanks, Bill!

Howto: Remove processes in Unix by searching their names

I sometimes have the situation where I am left with some stuck processes from previous sessions. I'm sure this could be done better by the application, but it's not in this case. I therefore have the following command line (bash on Solaris) that solves my problem:

$ ps -ef | grep {myuserid} | grep {procname in ps} | awk '{ print $2 }' | xargs -l1 kill -9

Might be of use for anybody out there.

The user interface library Qt is licensed under LGPL

There's great news: Qt will be free starting in March 2009, finally. Qt is a cross platform GUI development library. It's a library for GUI development using C++ and Java (which I was not aware of until now). The Java integration is done via JNI. Check this out, there are some Webstart based demos available. I could not get it running on my Mac OS X, unfortunately. But it's tested on Windows and Linux only, anyway.

Setup Eclipse Ganymede (Eclipse 3.4) with Subversion and Maven 2 Plugins

That's what I found, collected and provided in a cookbook format:

1) Download a fresh copy of Eclipse 3.4 / Ganymede. I've used the EE release, but the others should work, too.

2) Follow this cook book for the subversion part.

3) Install the Maven 2 plugin from this site: http://m2eclipse.sonatype.org/update/

4) Test it with a subversion based project, e.g. my favourite is CAS. m2eclipse is officially supported by that project. However, you have to activate the "Include Modules" property in the project to get rid of initial errors. I've reported this on the CAS mailing list.

Java on Ubuntu Server 8.10

Here's some in-a-nutshell information on how to deal with Java on Ubuntu server 8.10:

To find out what's on an Ubuntu system for Java:

$ update-java-alternatives -l

Running

$ java -version

shows that the OpenJRE 6 is installed by default. Aha, it's a JRE. To install and probably run Glassfish, however, you need a JDK. Off we go and install it with:

$ sudo apt-get install sun-java6-jdk

(and get demo, doc, source, too, while you're at it)

Ok, but now, how to make this JDK the default Java on the machine. Some tools are available, fortunately, and without much background research, we make use of them to make the switch:

$ sudo update-java-alternatives -s java-6-sun

Now, calling

$ java -version

shows Sun's java to be active.

Now you can download Glassfish, install and configure it. That's very well documented already.

Tidy Up, please tidy up here!

I've switched from Windows to Mac OS X about 2 years ago, at least at home, where I have enough influence to change things on a small scale. I've converted my mother's computer from Windows 95 to Mac a couple of years ago. We've upgraded from our PowerBook to the latest MacBook Pro four weeks ago. We have iPods, and soon the touchable version of it. We also own a Nano. We love Apple and the software on it. With one exception: Tidy Up! It's that program that makes me crazy. It's my fourth test run to clean up my iTunes library with it. Everything on a Mac is easy. TidyUp is not. I bought the full version because I believed the reviews in the Internet. That must all be great marketing talk from Hyperbolic Software, because it just does not work for me. It's not Tidy Up, it's Tidy Down!

Thoughts on Technology Domains

So I have a plan: I want to start categorizing that huge pile of technologies in my company. Where do I start? How should I partition it? What has been done before me? Are there best practices already in the field of technology architecture management?

Separating the vast field of technologies in "buckets" helps to do the following:

• Apply ownership and responsibilities to groups of technologies
• Provide a governance framework based on these buckets, to foster standardization, reuse and provide the necessary processes to handle exceptions
  
• Provide detailed "cost per topic" views (e.g. database technology costs, application server costs, etc.)
  
• Create the basis for technology lifecycle management (e.g. decommissioning/phasing out of products, moving to new technologies, etc.)

The following domains are a "safe bet" to me, i.e. you will most probably not get a huge push back on them:

• Base Infrastructure: Server and workplace hardware and operating systems, network components and services
  
• Database: DBMS, Document Management Sytems
• Middleware: Application servers, workflow and messaging infrastructure
• Workplace: Laptop or desktop platform including hardware, operating system(s), and tools, with a focus on business users
• Application and Service: Buy and inhouse developed applications including internal and external services, including all around integration and software development
  

The following domains are optional, depending on structure and size of your company:

• Information Exchange: Most companies of today need a well managed platform to copy data between the applications.
• Business Process & Workflow: Platforms and tools to provide process and workflow management features to either directly to users or to the applications
• Information Exploitation: Platforms and tools to identify added value from our own data. Often, this is integrated in the Database domain

Domains that apply to all of the domains mentioned above (i.e. orthogonal to them) are:

• Security: Mechanisms to protect and properly access applications, services and their data
• Systems Management: Domain crossing tools and platforms to manage Swiss Re's runtime components

From what I've seen, such a structure os widely accepted in the market today. Apply this list to your technology portfolio and to your organizational setup.

Strategies for such domain structure differ between companies. Some might need a rigorous reduction to a small number of products, others might need a larger diversification to make sense to business. And here's the top down approach again - it is finally a call from business to define which domains are important to a company and how those domains need to be organized and managed.