Alternative to the "200 lines kernel patch that does wonders" that you can use right away

I configured this on my laptop a couple of days ago. I can't really
notice any difference so far, but on the other hand it didn't seem
to break anything. Getting ready to try it on my work computer
which is always struggling under the heavy load (VMware,
Eclipse, Weblogic server, SQL Developer, Firefox...)

http://www.webupd8.org/2010/11/alternative-to-200-lines-kernel-patch.html

No Fluff, Just Stuff, day 3

Best presentation of day 3 again goes to Venkat for 'Test Driving
Multithreaded Code'. Concurrent stuff is oddly fascinating.
Venkat: "When I read Goetz' Java Concurrency in Practice, I
realized all my code was broken"

I scored a cool NFJS LEATHER JACKET for attending 5 times.

No Fluff, Just Stuff, day 2

Cool presentations for day 2 were 'Gaelyk: Lightweight
Groovy on the Google App Engine' by Tim Berglund and
'How to Approach Refactoring' by Venkat Subramanian.

Links:

Try to knockout before you consider mock out
There's an archive of past presentations and code
from Venkat at Agile Developer.
DbUnit
MockRunner
Unitils
Cucumber

No Fluff, Just Stuff, day 1

I wasn't going to do No Fluff, Just Stuff again so soon after
Uberconf, but I won a free admission from Denver Java
User's Group so here I am. Denver JUG has proven to be a
really amazing resource. I can't recommend it highly enough.

Neal Ford's keystone was great. The best session I went to
was Scott Davis on Grails and CouchDB.

No book sales this time and no laptop bag or knapsack
swag. Feels like they are making some adjustments.

Here are some links from day 1:

CouchDB: The Definitive Guide
Mastering Grails: RESTful Grails
The Vietnam of Computer Science
Walking Skeleton
The Petabyte Age
Post Secret

"Oracle cooks up free and premium JVMs"

This is troubling.

Back in September, Oracle's about-face on opening up the
Java spec suggested they were going to go all Microsoft on us.

I was guardedly optimistic about the recent
announcement of an Oracle-IBM partnership in OpenJDK.
Would Google, Apache and other big Java players soon join
the team? But this latest news puts that in a new light
and argues against some kind of openness thaw at Oracle.

It is not that different from what BEA was doing with
JRockit, which is a licensed product. Still, you can't help
wondering about Oracle's true intentions towards
free-as-in-beer Java.

Update: Feeling the love from Apache.

More: The Coming War over the Future of Java.

Funny

Apache vs. Oracle: A New Front in the Java War

Flame throwing Apache flees Oracle's Java group

Here's kind of a contrarian perspective from Ted Neward:
Thoughts on an Apple/Java divorce.

-XX:+UseCompressedOops

The September Denver JUG was one of the better ones with two
presentations by Venkat Subramaniam. I went to one of his
presentations at No Fluff Just Stuff maybe in 2007 about OSGi
and he didn't make much of an impression on me, but in this
case I found him to be very energetic and witty, even doing
back to back presentations.

The first one was about Java 7. Java 7 will have a feature to
enhance performance called Compressed Oops, and in fact
this feature is also available in recent Java 6 implementations
through the use of a command line argument,
-XX:+UseCompressedOops. Compressed Oops is intended to
reduce the memory usage of your 64 bit JVM by encoding some
64 bit pointers into 32 bits.

I work on a couple of x86-64 workstations with 64 bit Ubuntu
(Linux) so I thought I'd give this a try.

Well, it seems slightly unstable. After adding
-XX:+UseCompressedOops into the vmargs of Eclipse, I
observed Eclipse intermittently either fail to start or
occasionally crash. This was a really borderline effect that
occurred maybe 3 or 4 times in a week, but when I removed the
-XX:+UseCompressedOops argument the symptoms stopped.

PL/SQL

There hasn't been much cool going on to blog about lately.
At my job they're asking me to work on a PL/SQL
application. My Oracle background is fairly strong but
this is something I've never had much interest in before.
I've worked on a few applications where in my view
the PL/SQL people got out of control and migrated too
much of the functionality of the application into the
database and that is kind of how I feel about this
application.

Anyway I spent the day today getting remote debugging
working in SQL Developer (a cool tool I've been using
for years) and trying to step into the procedure I made
changes to. It's frustrating, though, the procedure
gets called from a package and it seems like the
debugger will step into procedures that are part of the
package but not a procedure that is outside of the
package.

I think I'd like this better if there was an IDE that could
provide all the support for PL/SQL development that
Eclipse provides for Java. I've been using 'search' a lot
because there's nothing to just click on a procedure call
and take you to the procedure definition. The code
isn't even indented consistently.

All the other developers on the team use TOAD which
is a great program but it only runs on Windows.

I don't think either TOAD or SQL Developer has CVS
integration, so there's a common pitfall of the developers
coding directly in the database but neglecting to update
their checked in code. Also, performing a database build
seems to be a bit of a black art... it's not fully automated
and there are only a couple of guys on the team who
know how to do it. Consistent and reproducible builds
do not just happen automatically once you start using
Ant or Maven or whatever but my sense is that Java
is way ahead when it comes to this.