Bob Lee has the AOP elevator speech. A clean, short explanation of what AOP is, without the pseudo-academic blahblah that's so typical for "computer scientists". So this also marks the introduction of a new category in my weblog :-).

Well, the crash reoccured a few times over the last few days. To be exact:

#
# HotSpot Virtual Machine Error : 11
# Error ID : 4F530E43505002EF
# Please report this error at
# http://java.sun.com/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi
#
# Java VM: Java HotSpot(TM) Server VM (1.4.2_05-b04 mixed mode)
#

This seems to be a known problem. There are numerous bug reports in Sun's bug parade. However, they fixed at least one instance of this bug. It seems to be a threading / synchronization / classloader issue. For the moment I fixed it by installing IBM's JVM that's at least just-as-good. Unfortunately, IBM's JVM for Windows is not publicly available anymore. You can still get it by downloading trial packages of Java-based IBM-Software, but I dislike the fact that I can't have a consistent development environment on Windows and Linux. Let's hope that Sun fixes this bug in time for Java 5.

I'm sorry, but they should have added a leading zero to mod_jk2's version before they released v "0.2.0.4". I spent hours today trying to compile this thing on a Debian Linux v3 machine. That machine (the very machine this weblog is running on) uses a couple of backports.org's packages (apache2 and mysql, for example). For some reason mod_jk2 didn't want to compile at all. There are issues with libtool, backport.org's APR package, a missing apr-util library and more. The release isn't polished at all. In fact, In the end I settled on compiling the last release without APR "0.2.0.2". This one at least compiled with just a little bit of hassle. Just like the newer release it has a hard-coded path to libtool, for example.

Still, the documentation is in a very sad state, so then I had to fiddle a few hours with the configuration. Interestingly , the previously supported "JkMount" directive is now commented out in the code. VirtualHost-support is now provided in <Location>s via the JkUriSet-directive. Unfortunately, this also isn't documented.

Well, it runs now, but halfway through installing Scarab, the JVM (1.4.2_05) crashed. I don't know why... installing Scarab also is a pain. If you ever wonder why the documented "ant create-db" doesn't create any tables, well, it seems like that's because you need a MySQL Connector/J version >= 3.0 if you're using MySQL > 4.0

The JK2-connector really needs a lot of work, badly. Scarab b19, at least, is in a half-way usable state now, since I last tested it (b17). We'll use it for a few weeks, then I'll write more.

The curse of Dick Cheney: a great history lesson. Must-read! (via)

I finally came around to watch the movie today. I had read alot about it and frankly, I heard a few bad things. For example, that Michael Moore failed to include a video snippet of a Congressman whose kids actually were in Iraq at the time and how this makes the movie left-wing propaganda.

I again learned today that movie reviews, especially political ones have the approximate value of, well, crap. M. Moore actually says it right in the opening scene of the part that exactly one congressman has a son serving in Iraq. He didn't fail to mention it, it's just a right-wing-propaganda review that says so!

Please, dear Americans, for your own sake, vote that Bush-family-mafia out of office. Even if the Heinz-Kerry connection just gets another billionaire, upper-class, anti-medicare, somewhere-in-between-left-edge-right-wing-conservative-liberal-republican into office who will change the rhetoric, but do the same thing...

Unlike over oil, there never has been and never will be a "greed-motivated, justified-by-lies, finish-my-dad's-job, protect-my-terrorist-friends" war over the natural ketchup reserves! It can only get better from here.

I'm still working on the comments pages. However, the time to take the old maurus.net offline seems to be near. This might very well be my last test post.

now, besides Doom3, Half-life 2 and Evil Genius, Tribes: Vengeance is also coming up. It's not going to be easy to keep working on all the other stuff I have to get done.
Download the demo

Great stuff. If you enjoyed Dungeon Keeper, this one's for you.
Evil Genius Homepage Download the demo

It's done.

After months I finally got the new layout up. I switched from Radio Userland to WordPress. Unfortunately, most of the content of my old weblog evaporated in the process. However, I might be able to at least restore a HTML version as an archive. We'll see...