This has been a sad week for java. One of the string of bad things happening to it, is the abandonement by Mac OS X. Among the interesting thoughts that have been thrown out there for a possible rescue plan, this one seemed to stand out.
In a nutshell, the link points to a post by Adam-Bien suggesting that users might pay for a JVM on the Mac, thereby opening up a business opportunity. That might be far fetched considering
- Apple wants to be a control freak of sorts. Anything that is not objective-C is a target
- Folks usually have a very hard time convincing themselves to pay for something that they used to get for free.
- It would be pretty difficult to write a JVM targeted for the Mac from scratch, given that many native API calls are secrets.
Having switched to Suse linux a while back, I am enjoying the ride but for a few gripes. The UI does not load as smoothly as it should under certain circumstances. The keyboard also acts all crazy without warning. The new ubuntu release 10.10 is here, so I wanted to give that a shot hoping the experience would be better than what Suse had to offer. May be this was a KDE Vs Gnome problem. Perhaps 32 bit installations are less troublesome than the 64 bit ones. Well I wont know unless I try.
And it begins:
After downloading the Ubuntu ISO, I went about writing it to a CD and started the install process. The installation was riddled with error messages. Selecting partition X on hard disk 1, made the installer hate me. It complained saying ‘Either the hard disk or the CD has some sort of media related problem’. ‘hmmm… its probably the hard disk since there were no errors when the CD was written’ I thought.
Every developer out there has to troubleshoot a problem in PROD every now and then. The series of steps goes something like this
- User notices something fishy
- Clicks on a button that reads ‘Do not click here’
- Boom !
- Developer tries to figure out what happened by fishing through log files.
Now step 4 can be relatively more simple than it needs to be. It is often complicated by bad practices or obstacles like the ones mentioned below
- Developers log all application logs into a central server log
- Access to logs are restricted by a ‘log viewing’ application.
Instead of fishing around for errors, would it not be cool if you could visualize the errors that occur in your application through some sort of timeline ? After investigating a couple of frameworks that would allow one to do this, I figured ‘Simile Timeline‘ would be a good fit.