gpoul's Out Of Memory Blog

Thinking about deploying WAS V8.0? Our developerWorks article on Garbage Collection in WebSphere Application Server V8.0 introduces you to IBM’s generational gc, which is now the default; and stay tuned for part 2, which will introduce you to the new balanced region-based collector.

Earlier this week IBM announced that the Lotus Symphony codebase will be opened and offered for consideration by the newly formed Apache OOo incubator project.

This is a great step for the Apache OOo project and for Symphony. Not only because we get the chance to consolidate this fork, but I really like the UI changes that have been made for Symphony and it can only be positive to make them available to a broader audience.

The announcement was sent to the Apache mailing list and the thread is well worth a read.

Not sure how many of you have already upgraded to Firefox 5, but you’ll probably have heard about Firefox moving to a rapid release process. They basically want to increment their version number every 6 weeks. Initially I thought this was a good thing, because who really cares about version numbers?

After reading a bit more about this on various blogs I now realize that this change might have a negative impact on corporate deployments due to the fact that Firefox will discontinue security patches for those old versions, which makes compatibility testing and large-scale roll-outs a real hassle.

A member of the IE team, Ari Bixhorn, wrote on his blog that Microsoft offers a long-term support strategy for their browser. As much as I would hate going back to IE, because it would mean platform dependency, but is Microsoft now becoming the sane option? I hope Firefox will reconsider and change their release process. For a company to maintain their own Firefox fork is just not really a sustainable – or financially sane – proposition.

Update 6/30: Mozilla starts to think about how to support Enterprises.

Update 1/14/2012: Mozilla announces that it plans to make Firefox 10 the base for an Extended Support Release targeted at corporate users.

Update 2/1/2012: Firefox released its first Extended Support Release (ESR) today.

The last few weeks I’ve worked on the WAS 7.0 Container Support (JIRA Issue ARQ-264) for Arquillian, a Java EE testing framework. My arquillian-container-was code has now been pushed upstream. No matter what container you use, if you want to improve your Java EE integration testing, make sure to check out what Arquillian can do!

I’ve now been using my Nexus One for about a year. Even early on it had a feature that allowed to set a flag on a contact that sent this contact’s phone calls directly to voicemail without ringing.

That’s a nice little feature, although it’s not really useful. There are a few other things that I think would be useful:

• Sending calls from people not in my contacts directly to voicemail
• Sending calls from specific gmail contact groups directly to voicemail
• Silence calls from specific gmail contact groups
• Doing all of the above only during certain times of the day (e.g. 6pm-8am)

I’ve had a plan on writing an application that would do that for quite some time and decided to investigate this a little more.

There is a permission in android called MODIFY_PHONE_STATE that would allow an application to act on incoming calls. With commit f4ece2086f3b7060edc4b93a12f04c9af648867a in Gingerbread (Android 2.3) this permission has been marked as signatureOrSystem, which basically means that only system applications or OEM vendors can access those “internal” functions.

There is an enhancement request open to introduce this functionality as a public API available to all applications as Android Issue 54, but as it stands right now writing such an application is not possible without modifying the base android build itself.

I only did a quick google search, but this also doesn’t appear to be possible on Windows Phone 7 and iPhone.

Seth Godin about Selling vs. inviting:

“Selling is a profession. It’s hard work. Ultimately, it’s rewarding, because the thing you’re selling delivers real value to the purchaser, and your job is to counsel them so they can get the benefit.

But please… don’t insist that the hard work be removed from your job to allow you to become an inviter. That’s great work if you can get it, but it’s not a career.”

Great video about a great story. Want to learn more? Check out our WebSphere Icon of Progress on the IBM100 site.

With WebSphere Application Server V8.0 and EJB 3.1 we’re introducing an embeddable EJB container that allows testing of EJB and JPA components inside a test JVM without starting a separate application server process. One interesting extension is that we also support a properties file or annotations to configure JDBC connections for those components. Get more info about this new embeddable EJB container and direct links to the InfoCenter articles in Jeremy Bauer’s post on Lightweight JPA testing.

Last week we announced that IBM Business Process Manager V7.5 will eGA on June 3, 2011, and GA on June 17, 2011.

WebSphere Process Server and WebSphere Lombardi Edition support will be discontinued between 2013 and 2016, depending on the version.