Today I got introduced to a new site that looks promising www.libzter.com. The aim of the site is to provide developers of any programming language, a collaborative playground where they can present programming libraries to each other. The site is built using the Mediawiki platform with additional plugins added so that developers will be able to comment and rate the libraries.

www.libzter.com

I think that if this site becomes adopted by a large group of people, it will be a really awesome resource to learn and discover new programming libraries. So I will definitely keep an eye on the development of this site.

A couple of months ago at work, I struggled to find a solution to an irritating problem that we had with two Websphere 6.0 broker installations on SLES9. The problem itself is kind of hard to explain but I will give it a try.

In our brokers we have a custom installed java node that executes 3red party software using the Exec class found in the libraries of the open source project Ant. The node initiated ok in the broker, it was also able to execute the 3red party program and it began waiting for a return from it, but then the node just halted and was never able to finish. If you used the command top on the command line we saw an additional java process that took a lot of resources and it went away if the broker was stopped. Another strange thing with this issue were that it worked on one broker/machine and not on the other one and both brokers were installed on equivalent systems, or that was what we thought.

After a lots of trails and errors, we found the thing that weren’t equally configured on the two systems; The difference were an environment variable named LD_ASSUME_KERNEL that hold the value 2.4.1 on the failing system and on the working system the value were even set. After I removed the environment variable on the system that didn’t work, it magically began running the node to its end.

After some research of the environment variable I discovered that the LD_ASSUME_KERNEL among other things tells the linker in Linux what libc to use. In my case, setting the LD_ASSUME_KERNEL to the value 2.4.1 made Linux to use an older thread model that were not compliant with the requirements of Websphere Mq Broker.

If you are interested in finding out more about LD_ASSUME_KERNEL you should head over to these two sites.

http://people.redhat.com/drepper/assumekernel.html
http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/linux/library/l-threading.html

Today I downloaded the fourth Beta version of Firefox since one of my friend told me that it featured some new interesting functionalities, he also gave me a promise that it would be faster than ever! With this promises in mind I moved my Firefox version 2 browser over to http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/all-beta.html for my first experience of Firefox3.

After I had downloaded and Installed Firefox3 parallel with Firefox2, I pressed the “Mozilla Firefox3 Beta 4″ icon which launched the browser. I would want to be able to say that it loads a lot faster than the older version, but I only experienced minor improvements there, but hey it loaded pretty fast.
The first thing that caught my eyes were the new skin for the browser that featured new icons an a nice touch of graphite look for the actual skin (I run Vista on the test machine).

After surfing around for a while I discovered that the new browser actually seamed to perform better and that it loaded sites faster than before. First I thought that I might only had imagined this. But after a while I realized that it had to be faster. I found an article on ZDNet that provided test performance results of firefox3 compared with other different browsers. If the results of this test are correct it means that firefox3 finished the tests 3 times faster than firefox2, not to mention more than five times faster than IE 7.

So what has happened with the memory usage? I brought up my task manager and located the Firefox3 process, my process were consuming 25Mb of ram with only on instance of Firefox running. This is pretty much the same as the older version of the fox that consumes 26Mb with the same instance and sites running. But after running the two browsers for a while I saw that the new version performed better, this is probably because it is better at freeing up memory that are not used.  But isn’t 25Mb still a lot of memory? So it still eats some memory, but with todays memory pricing, who can complain?
I also read about the memory improvements on mozilla links and it seams that much improvements have been made to the memory management area. The article implies that a new “memory cycle collector” is in place, and that it frees up memory of modules that has requested memory but failed to release it properly.

Other features that I found to be a good contribution to the new version are,

• Full page zoom. You are now able to zoom the whole page including the images and not just the text that were possible in version2.
• The new address bar. At first I found it annoying having the title showing along with its URL, but after a while I began to appreciate this. I also read that Firefox3’s address bar will learn your surfing habits and tune it self for a more customized experience for the user.

A great summery of all Firefox improvements can also be found here on mozilla links.

This week I have been checking out the new Eee Pc 900, This little machine looks like the machine I have been searching for. The thing is that I want a computer that is really portable, for me this means that it is relatively small in size and doesn’t weight over 1kg. An other thing that has been important is that it look like an ordinary laptop, no fancy touch screens and other high tech stuff that can break, just a regular computer that you can do regular office work on. And last week I stumble upon an article about the new Eee PC 900. The regular Eee Pc 700 and its companions have been out on the market for a while now, but I think that the screen resolution of 800×480 are a bit low, but the new 900 machine supports a resolution of 1024×600 and that’s just perfect, and it gets even better, the new 900 machine also provides a 8.9-inch screen instead of the 7-inch screen on the 700 series.

The sad thing is that the 900 series are not released on the market yet, but an article I read today said that the new Eee Pc will be released next month and cost approximately $499 and up depending on what version of the computer you buy. An other thing that’s a problem for me is that I live in Sweden and we haven’t even got the 700 series yet… The only thing to do is to buy it online and have it shipped overseas to me. I hope that it won’t be to expensive to do this. But time will tell.