Apparently it will still be possible to connect to Google Talk through a third-party XMPP client for now, but we’ll not be able to chat with people using other XMPP servers. For that we’ll now need a separate account on a decent XMPP server.

After all the changes in recent months the only Google product that I now can still actively use is GMail. Until they drop SMTP support.

This is a really interesting development, given that Amazon Web Services can definitely use some competition, but I’m a little missing the innovative features. The command line tools like gcutil look very neat and they support Debian wheezy, so that’s definitely a plus :)

In the last years I’ve mostly done my small personal-time development projects on VMware Fusion instances, but I was also looking at what benefits I can get from using the cloud. Right now there aren’t too many providers that have hourly billing that is a good fit for just firing up VMs when you need them and then shutting them down again. I’ll definitely add GCE to my list of services to try, but I’ll have to test out DigitalOcean first :)

First, don’t bother with the USB serial link. It won’t work with complex vCard files as apparently the AT serial connection won’t support multiple phone numbers per contact. Yes, it’s that retro. So setup a bluetooth connection and it will work beautifully. I used the following gammurc:

gpoul@debian:~$ cat .gammurc
[gammu1]
port=<NOKIA-MAC>
connection=bluerfphonet
name=Nokia 6300

Now to actually gammu restore with the contacts.vcf you exported from Google Contacts you also want to do this:

sed -i.orig "/^TEL;/s/[[:space:]-]//g;/^ADR;/d" contacts.vcf

Now you’re all set, but you might want to check that the number of imported contacts actually matches what you get back from gammu getallmemory just to be sure you’re not running into more problems than I did :-)

The following are the most important changes for me:

• Liberty profile now supports the complete Java EE Web Profile
• Liberty profile is now also available as WAS Liberty Core – can be optionally used with a collective controller from WAS ND and is limited to only two load distributed servers.
• Liberty collective controller is available on WAS ND or WAS for zOS
• WebSphere eXtreme Scale is now also delivered as a part of WAS V8.5.5, although entitlements vary by edition. WAS ND includes full entitlements, but if you plan to use a remote data grid, you want to purchase XC10 or WXS.

A full list of capabilities and changes can be found in the announcement letter.

While there are quite a number of communication options an important concept to understand is that this appliance is not a queue manager or broker. It’s basically a messaging gateway that makes it possible to only connect a small number of devices to internal IT systems, but still gather or push messages to millions of devices. A full list of its key capabilities can be found in the announcement letter.

Also be aware that some of the behavior you’re seeing in verbose gc output might be because of the characteristics of the underlying platform. I’ve seen JVMs with large amounts of threads take a long time to be stopped by the collector on Solaris on Niagara boxes, so don’t assume different behavior between platforms is necessarily a defect in the GC itself.

First, find the dn for your user:

$ ldapsearch -x -h bluepages.ibm.com -b ou=bluepages,o=ibm.com "(mail=NAME@CC.ibm.com)" dn

Then use that dn to find the groups you’re a member of:

$ ldapsearch -x -h bluepages.ibm.com -b ou=memberList,ou=ibmgroups,o=ibm.com "(uniqueMember=uid=SSSSSSCCC,c=CC,ou=bluepages,o=ibm.com)" dn