Markets close up after Bernanke speaks!

Maybe for once the markets will close up after a new Fed chairman makes his first speech before congress (prepared remarks). The markets are up after day 1; one more day of speeches to go...

A back-handed compliment for the old chairman?

"We're going to miss Chairman Greenspan. No one talks like him -- and no one wants you to," Rep. Maxine Waters, D-Calif., told the new chairman.

OBoss?

In the last couple of weeks there has been a lot of speculation about Oracle buying JBoss. Some of the earlier articles suggested the purchase would allow Oracle to move towards a subscription-based model, but that didn't make a lot of sense to me. Yesterday the Oracle CEO rationed that the move was more about leveraging the ease of getting "low end" open source into a company, then offering commercial "high-end" mix-and-match upgrade options at production deployment time. IBM are experimenting with a similiar strategy by releasing WebSphere Community Edition, which is based on Apache Geronimo.

In the case of Oracle I would suggest this might be the first step in actually getting rid of their J2EE Application Server oc4j. In its short history there have been 3 code bases for oc4j - started from scratch twice, then lastly a fork of the Orion appserver. Despite being part of the massive Oracle 9i/10i stack, oc4j just hasn't gained much market share. Using JBoss as part of the stack would give them a much better chance at expanding market share in the mature J2EE market. LGPL license issues could make things very interesting :)

But, looks like JBoss is too expensive for Oracle or BEA to swallow.

Notepad really, really sucks

After many years use and being bitten by its limitations I finally replaced crappy Notepad with the groovy open source Notepad2. This tool handles CR/LF between DOS/UNIX systems, decent Unicode switching, syntax highlighting for popular programming languages, mouse wheel zooming, column/line indicators, unlimited undo and more! The only thing it seems to struggle with is scrolling through large text files (eg. 10MB or more).

To replace Notepad with Notepad2 simply copy notepad2.exe to %windir%/system32/notepad.exe and - magic!

Now, if only Miscrosoft would fix Explorer text file search. Then I could completely ditch TextPad :)

The wild cry of a dying computer

One institute has been doing research on ways to represent server usage as sounds, based on the idea support staff may respond better to music than a bunch of graphs on a screen. As soon as the servers get near capacity the music changes from, say, classical to heavy metal (though some younger admins may prefer metal to be the normal condition :)) Reminds me of many years ago when I used to administer a bunch of Solaris servers. Every time one of the servers would reboot it would play the theme song of a TV show. Mission Impossible was the theme I heard the most (faulty CPU in that server).

Are contagious jokes random?

The Huffington Post Contagious Festival is an interesting competition. Remember all of those joke emails/links that are lifted from obscurity to almost global popularity for a week or two via word of mouth (or word of email)? The Post are holding a competition to see if someone can create such a phonemenon, or can this only happen at random? Some of the epidemics I remember from the past are This Land Is Your Land, Troops, Tourist Guy (9/11 photo) and the original episode of South Park.

Ice Skiing in the eastern USA

It is that time of year when the ski itch needs scratching. A few bruises later I am reminded of the typical ski weekend in eastern USA - ice, ice and more ice - at Hunter Mountain, snowmaking capital of the world. Hopefully there will be some cheap deals to Colorado in the next few months.

True Developer Dedication

The Graphing Calculator is a story of true dedication to finishing a project - even months after they have stopped paying the developers!