Greg Luck's WebLog

cvs unknown host error

I am getting a but rusty on cvs. I went to run cvs up on a project and got "unknown host error". A google search did not yield anything useful. Playing around with it, my problem was that the host was not added to ssh's known hosts. I sshed to the host and accepted it into known hosts. Then cvs worked fine.

Mac OS X Desktop Switching bug fixed by making Java 6 your default

As readers will know, Apple released Java 6 for 64 bit intel architectures this week.

What you may not know, is that making it your first preference in the "Java Application Runtime Settings" "Java Preference" app in Utilities, fixes a nasty app switching bug you get when using spaces.

That bug is that if you change away from a space and then change back, the Java app you had in focus has gone and it is fiddly to get back.

Curlew Retreat�is now open

Curlew Retreat�is now open.�Curlew Retreat is a luxury villa on a one hundred acre estate located just to the north east of Stanthorpe. It�overlooks a beautiful gorge on the Maryland River.

�

This has been a project of mine for the past couple of years which has now come to fruition.

It is a nice place to get away to. Because of the height which is 2,800 feet above sea level it has a cool crisp climate with frosts about 5 months of the year. Day time temperatures tend to be 4-6 degrees cooler than Brisbane.

It is located two and quarter hours south west of Brisbane, QLD, Australia.

�

For anyone who is interested the retreat is available for rent. See�http://curlewretreat.com.au �for information, rates and instant booking.

Open Message Queue Session at Community One

I am presenting a session on JMS and OpenMQ at Community One 2008 as follows:

Session ID: S297892
Session Title: OpenMQ
Session Abstract: This session discusses why you should consider Java� Message Service (JMS) and OpenMQ for scalable and reliable architectures. The presentation includes a use case from the No. 2 Australian e-business site.
Track: GlassFish�
Duration: 55
Speaker(s): Greg Luck
Where: Moscone South - Esplanade Room 305

(This talk was initially presented at Sun Technology Days in Sydney last month by Dave Whitla where it generated a great deal of interest.)

Glassfish Unconference - Moscone Center San Francisco 4 May 2008

I am going to the Glassfish Unconference which is being held at the Moscone Center San Francisco 4 May 2008.

I am interested in or might lead discussions on:

SPNEGO - Kerberos and Glassfish Open Message Queue Maven Glassfish Plugin Ehcache and Glassfish

If you are interested in these please come along and have a chat. See http://wikis.sun.com/display/GFunconfSF08/GlassFish+unconference+planning.

Glassfish Case Study from Sun Tech Days' Glassfish Day in Sydney March 2008

I gave a case study on our use of Glassfish V1UR1 at the Sun Tech Days' Glassfish Day in Sydney March 2008 for which the slides and podcast are available here.

With Glassfish V2UR1 now out and a great roadmap to V3, Glassfish is looking great.

Ehcache is the SourceForge.net February project of the month

Ehcache has been honoured as the February 2008 SourceForge project of the month. See http://sourceforge.net/community/index.php/potm-200802/.

Who can tell me about the Brisbane Bottle Exchange Propty Limited

I am on holidays at present on Curlew Retreat. I went for a walk today down a reentrant which joins Curlew Gorge. I found a beer bottle made by the "Brisbane Bottle Exchange Propty Limited", embossed on the base of the neck of the bottle.

The land was "selected" in the 1880s and has been inhabited since then. I suspect the bottle might go back almost as far.

Various search engines do not turn up much. If anyone knows anything about this please comment.

Antipodean Summer Reading => Lulu.com

I am reading two books at the moment: The Long Tail and 50 Great E-businesses and the minds behind them.

The Long Tail is by Chris Anderson and was written in 2004. Call me a late adopter. I thought I understood the long tail, but reading the book introduces the idea of the democratization of production, aggregators and findability. I picked it up in a discount bin in a bookstore in Toowoomba, Queensland while looking for something to veg out on before a wedding. Perhaps I should tell Chris he was not a "hit". There, anyway.

50 Great E-businesses and the minds behind them is a book by a Melbourne couple published in mid 2007. I work for one of the companies mentioned in their book so it caught my interest. But there are so many others that I had: a) not heard of; or b) heard of but nor seriously checked out.

One of the former is Lulu.com. Both books mentioned Lulu.com, which piqued my interest. And they won a Web 2.0 award. Founded by RedHat co-founder Bob Young, it democratizes publishing. Last year I was looking at publishing a book on ehcache. I had 150 pages that I had put a fair bit of work into. I thought it would be a simple matter of finding a technical publisher and then sitting back and getting royalties. NOT. Bob discovered the same thing and decided to do something about it.

I have had my ehcache book self-published up on Lulu.com for a few weeks now. The only real issue I came across was Lulu's requirement to embed fonts. The best answer I have come up with is to use Save As PDFX-3 from Preview, which embeds fonts while retaining clear previews. Lulu is great: I get to publish my book and people get to buy it. And the middleman is reasonable.

See http://www.lulu.com/content/1538666 to see the result.

And maybe I am three years late to the ideas introduced in the Long Tail, but I think there is, to use a much abused term, a paradigm shift underway. In Australia it is going to take low cost high speed broadband for the digital media long tail to really work.

BTW, one job I have to do is to upgrade Movable Type to fix the spam problem I have with this blog. Perhaps a job for the Xmas break. If anyone wants to comment, please just email me and I will post it.

Ehcache Guide and Reference now available as a book

Ehcache Guide and Reference for the forthcoming 1.4.0 release is available as a book. The price for the high quality bound edition is USD49.95 plus shipping. The price for the downloadable print-ready version is USD37.50. The book has 154 pages and covers the following:

- Preface
- Introduction
- Getting Started
- Dependencies
- Cache Concepts
- Cache Configuration
- Storage Options
- Cache Eviction Algorithms
- Code Samples
- Class loading and Class Loaders
- Performance Considerations
- Garbage Collection
- Cache Decorators
- Java EE Servlet Caching
- Distributed Caching
- Distributed Design
- Shutting Down Ehcache
- Logging & Debugging
- JMX Management & Monitoring
- CacheManager Event Listeners
- Cache Event Listeners
- Cache Exception Handlers
- Cache Extensions
- Cache Loaders
- Hibernate Caching
- Constructs Design
- Using ehcache with Hibernate
- Tomcat Issues and Best Practices
- JSR107 (JCACHE) Support
- Building From Source
- FAQ

Many people have asked for a format for the documentation where it can be printed out as a book and even where they can get it.

Of course, full documentation in html will always remain available online at http://ehcache.sf.net.

Buy it from the Ehcache Storefront at Lulu Books.

Announcing Curlew Retreat

Regular readers of my blog know it for discussions of technology, Java and Open Source.

For the past four years I have been working on Curlew Retreat. It is now a few months away from completion, so I thought it time to announce it.

Curlew Retreat - your own luxury villa on your own estate, overlooking a beautiful gorge on the Maryland River - creates a retreat of privacy, quiet and serenity, all perfectly located just to the north east of Stanthorpe. Supremely romantic, indulgent and exclusive, Curlew Retreat is the ultimate boutique 2 bedroom villa perfect for couples or families to relax, revive and re-energise. from the hustle and bustle of day to day life. Curlew, high up in the Mountain country, has a cool, crisp climate, a world away from the heat of the lowlands. With 100 beautiful acres to yourself, follow the graded track to the gorge, and, in summer, enjoy the spectacular natural rock swimming pool, or simply relax in the quiet and solitude.

The website is here: http://curlewretreat.com.au

For the technologists:

The site was created in iWeb from iLife '08. It turns out this tool is almost perfectly suited for creating brochure style web sites. Coming soon but not yet integrated is booking from the web site itself. This takes 3-4 weeks to set up with the supplier. So why iWeb? I hadn't used it before and I was focusing on graphic design and copy writing. For once I did not want to be distracted by technology. And the ability to work from 20 or so professionally designed themes with more from third party artisans was huge. In the end the whole site was done without input from a graphic designer.

The animation on the home page is Flash. This is the first Flash I have done. Flash is a bit of a paradigm shift from the normal Java server side stuff I do. But it's 99+% browser market share is hard to argue with. The competing approach from Apple - Quicktime, will involve a download for lots of folks, so not an option. In the future Flash's dominance for this type of thing is going to be challenged by Silverlight and JavaFX. But for now it is the way to go.

All the other magic on the site, including the image gallery, is out of the box with iWeb.

Adjusting the networking MTU on Mac OS X

My wife is newly involved with a Arbonne, a network selling cosmetics company. They set up in Australia a few months ago. She has an a website http://arbonnebrisbane.myarbonne.com.au . Anyway the web site did not work from Mac OS X or Linux from our home, only Windows (running in VM Ware). The problem was seen in all browsers, curl and wget. Not a problem I have seen before.

The issue, viewed from wget, looks like:

Using wget we get:

http://www.myarbonne.com.au/
=> `index.html.1'
Resolving www.myarbonne.com.au... 208.179.207.104
Caching www.myarbonne.com.au => 208.179.207.104
Connecting to www.myarbonne.com.au|208.179.207.104|:80... connected.
Created socket 4.
Releasing 0x00516290 (new refcount 1).

---request begin---
GET / HTTP/1.0
User-Agent: Wget/1.10.2
Accept: */*
Host: www.myarbonne.com.au
Connection: Keep-Alive

---request end---
HTTP request sent, awaiting response...
---response begin---
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Server: Lotus-Domino
Date: Tue, 28 Aug 2007 22:36:16 GMT
Connection: close
Content-Type: text/html
Content-Length: 14036
Last-Modified: Sun, 01 Jul 2007 21:15:36 GMT
Accept-Ranges: bytes

---response end---
200 OK
Length: 14,036 (14K) [text/html]

0% [ ] 0 --.--K/s

i.e. the response is always stuck on 0%. You never get any data.

A colleague, Dave Whitla, suggested that our default MTU of 1500 bytes could be at issue. Not all networking equipment deals properly with fragments. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maximum_transmission_unit

The default MTU on Mac OS X is 1500. I adjusted the MTU to 1000 bytes and sure enough, the problems were resolved.

On Mac the MTU can be adjusted to 1000 bytes using:

sudo ifconfig en1 mtu 1000

You then to stop and start the interface. You then get:

en1: flags=8863 mtu 1000
tunnel inet -->
inet6 fe80::216:cbff:feb9:7131%en1 prefixlen 64 scopeid 0x5
inet 192.168.0.119 netmask 0xffffff00 broadcast 192.168.0.255
ether 00:16:cb:b9:71:31
media: autoselect status: active
supported media: autoselect
vlan: 0 parent interface:
bond interfaces:

MTU can also be on the server side. See http://help.expedient.net/broadband/mtu.shtml

Adjusting the networking MTU on Mac OS X

The issue, viewed from wget, looks like:

Using wget we get:

---request begin---
GET / HTTP/1.0
User-Agent: Wget/1.10.2
Accept: */*
Host: www.myarbonne.com.au
Connection: Keep-Alive

---response end---
200 OK
Length: 14,036 (14K) [text/html]

0% [ ] 0 --.--K/s

i.e. the response is always stuck on 0%. You never get any data.

The default MTU on Mac OS X is 1500. I adjusted the MTU to 1000 bytes and sure enough, the problems were resolved.

On Mac the MTU can be adjusted to 1000 bytes using:

sudo ifconfig en1 mtu 1000

You then to stop and start the interface. You then get:

MTU can also be on the server side. See http://help.expedient.net/broadband/mtu.shtml

Ehcache-1.4 beta Released

The beta version of ehcache-1.4 is available on sourceforge and the Maven central repository.

This version significantly enrichens the ehcache API and enhances extension of ehcache. The new features are:

You can now define CacheLoaders in the ehcache core API. They supplement the existing SelfPopulatingCache. They can be configured in ehcache.xml or programmatically. They can be used for cache warming, and simple pull-through caching. See the Cache Loaders chapter in the documentation for more details.

You can now define a CacheExceptionHandler and register it progammatically or in ehcache.xml. The enable an exception handler to be registered with a cache so that it is called on exception rather than the exception being thrown. See the Cache Exception Handler chapter in the documentation for more details.

You can now define CacheExtensions and register them progammatically or in ehcache.xml. A CacheExtension is a generic facility which holds a reference to a cache and is bound to the cache lifecycle, making possible a wide variety of extensions to behaviour. Usage examples are a cache refresh timer or a file monitoring mechanism. See the Cache Extensions chapter in the documentation for more details.

There are 5 minor bug fixes in the release. At the time of release there are no open bugs in ehcache.

See http://ehcache.sourceforge.net/ for more information.

Dynamic Proxy Performance

Ehcache 1.4, which is nearing completion, adds some user requested features such as ExceptionHandler(s). These are implemented in ehcache as dynamic proxies. One todo I have had is to investigate the performance degradation from use of same. An article by Brian Goetz (fellow JSR107 member) on IBM developerworks a few years ago predicted a 2x cost.

I have done some testing using a memory only cache in ehcache and come with a line ball. For ehcache afficianados, the test is in CacheTest.testProportionMemoryAndDiskPerformance. This is a test that protects against regression in ehcache by asserting outside times for variations in memory and disk store sizes. I added a memory only test using the new CacheExceptionHandler dynamic proxy.

It does 5000 puts and gets, sleeps for 500ms to give the hotspot compiler a chance to optimise, and repeats 10 times. Then it does the same for a dynamic proxy.

INFO: Time for MemoryStore: 120
Aug 19, 2007 5:10:52 PM net.sf.ehcache.CacheTest testProportionMemoryAndDiskPerformance
INFO: Time for MemoryStore: 123
Aug 19, 2007 5:10:53 PM net.sf.ehcache.CacheTest testProportionMemoryAndDiskPerformance
INFO: Time for MemoryStore: 63
Aug 19, 2007 5:10:53 PM net.sf.ehcache.CacheTest testProportionMemoryAndDiskPerformance
INFO: Time for MemoryStore: 40
Aug 19, 2007 5:10:54 PM net.sf.ehcache.CacheTest testProportionMemoryAndDiskPerformance
INFO: Time for MemoryStore: 128
Aug 19, 2007 5:10:55 PM net.sf.ehcache.CacheTest testProportionMemoryAndDiskPerformance
INFO: Time for MemoryStore: 30
Aug 19, 2007 5:10:55 PM net.sf.ehcache.CacheTest testProportionMemoryAndDiskPerformance
INFO: Time for MemoryStore: 131
Aug 19, 2007 5:10:56 PM net.sf.ehcache.CacheTest testProportionMemoryAndDiskPerformance
INFO: Time for MemoryStore: 29
Aug 19, 2007 5:10:56 PM net.sf.ehcache.CacheTest testProportionMemoryAndDiskPerformance
INFO: Time for MemoryStore: 35
Aug 19, 2007 5:10:57 PM net.sf.ehcache.CacheTest testProportionMemoryAndDiskPerformance
INFO: Time for MemoryStore: 35
Aug 19, 2007 5:10:57 PM net.sf.ehcache.CacheTest testProportionMemoryAndDiskPerformance
INFO: Time for MemoryStore: 130

Mean: 86ms

Aug 19, 2007 5:10:58 PM net.sf.ehcache.CacheTest testProportionMemoryAndDiskPerformance
INFO: Time for exception handling MemoryStore: 69
Aug 19, 2007 5:10:59 PM net.sf.ehcache.CacheTest testProportionMemoryAndDiskPerformance
INFO: Time for exception handling MemoryStore: 46
Aug 19, 2007 5:10:59 PM net.sf.ehcache.CacheTest testProportionMemoryAndDiskPerformance
INFO: Time for exception handling MemoryStore: 91
Aug 19, 2007 5:11:00 PM net.sf.ehcache.CacheTest testProportionMemoryAndDiskPerformance
INFO: Time for exception handling MemoryStore: 158
Aug 19, 2007 5:11:00 PM net.sf.ehcache.CacheTest testProportionMemoryAndDiskPerformance
INFO: Time for exception handling MemoryStore: 69
Aug 19, 2007 5:11:01 PM net.sf.ehcache.CacheTest testProportionMemoryAndDiskPerformance
INFO: Time for exception handling MemoryStore: 51
Aug 19, 2007 5:11:02 PM net.sf.ehcache.CacheTest testProportionMemoryAndDiskPerformance
INFO: Time for exception handling MemoryStore: 137
Aug 19, 2007 5:11:02 PM net.sf.ehcache.CacheTest testProportionMemoryAndDiskPerformance
INFO: Time for exception handling MemoryStore: 39
Aug 19, 2007 5:11:03 PM net.sf.ehcache.CacheTest testProportionMemoryAndDiskPerformance
INFO: Time for exception handling MemoryStore: 45
Aug 19, 2007 5:11:03 PM net.sf.ehcache.CacheTest testProportionMemoryAndDiskPerformance
INFO: Time for exception handling MemoryStore: 38

Mean: 74ms

The result is that I cannot detect a performance differnece.

Maybe the reason is that ehcache just passes the requests on unless they throw an exception. We have

try {
invocationResult = method.invoke(ehcache, args);
} catch (Exception e) {

In Java 5 at least the cost seems to be negligle, even with an in-memory cache.