The state of Java and MySql are changing. In case you missed it. Sun bought MySql and Oracle bought Sun. I’ve been working on Java for over 10 years and MySql for over 5 now. I’m not happy with what is happening.
The Java and MySql websites have changed. On the mysql.com site there is no prominent link to get to the community edition. If you go to mysql.org to redirects to dev.mysql.com where you can find it.
This is not good for me or a country like Sri Lanka. Most of the solutions I’ve been involved over the years have used open source foundations. So we were able to deliver solutions to clients at a very reasonable cost. If things get too commercial I’m a afraid the licensing costs will far overtake the implementation costs.
I’m sure there will always be open source or free to use versions of Java and MySql, but with a large commercial entity backing them profit comes first then community. I don’t know I think its time to look at some alternatives.
Update: They got to VirtualBox too.
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I use a plugin to post to twitter every time I post a blog post. I also have Facebook pull in my new posts and notes. This works reasonably well and I get some traffic from them.
You can also use twitter tools to post your tweets on your blog after a certain threshold. I don’t use that because I want to keep things separate. I’d rather have a block that shows my latest tweets somewhere.
There are so many ways you can cross post from your blog to twitter to Facebook and LinkedIn. For me personally this is too much cross posting of not too related content. Let me explain.
On twitter I have mostly techies, locals, bloggers and new age marketers. On Facebook I have friends and family who for the most part are not techies at all. On LinkedIn I have co-workers and professionals.
So for me at least these networks mean different things. I saw a tweet yesterday on LinkedIn it was a personal quote about love. Also when you see auto posted blog posts with tweets and link bits it seems less personal and mechanical. You know the blogger hasn’t taken the time to write something.
I prefer to post separately to each network depending on what I have to say. This is except for getting link backs for my blog posts which I mentioned first.
I’m sure there are people with a consistent profiles across networks that pull this off well, but I’ve yet to see one.
My 2 cents is keep things simple and think of the audience for your post before you setup automatic cross site posting.
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I’ve finally got around to putting up a page (ya just one for now) showing my freelance work. I’ve been freelancing here and there since around 1996. Most of the things I built have been too small to mention.
I give you Open Path IT.
Just a basic start for now. Open Path IT (Information or Inspiration Technologies) was supposed to be a software company that never got formed. One day maybe.
So if you got some work or looking for work within the skill-set I’ve mentioned get in touch.
Popularity: 2% [?]
Welcome to 2009! There is nothing like a hot summer day to think about global warming. 
What we do in the next few years will hopefully reverse the effect or we are toast. Here are 2 interesting concepts I saw on kids science program* and sounded promising.
Supercapacitors are a hybrid of capacitors and batteries. They charge faster and hold more power than batteries. Hopefully it’ll make a difference in electric cars.
Polymer solar cells are plastic solar cells. They should be cheaper than silicone ones and they should be able to put them almost anywhere. In the program they mentioned how it could be weaved or lined on curtains for example.
* Ya kids program, these things should be in the news or other places where they could attract some investment.
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I’m pretty happy with moving some common Java libraries out of the project source folders.
I have about 4 branches of the same project checked out. Each of them were about 57mb a piece. I noticed this while I was trying to sync my projects to a remote server. (I hate slow running scripts)
I managed to move the jar files out to a common folder which was about 27mb. I wrote another recursive ant clean script (which I will share below) that helped me clean up before the sync.
Moving the libraries was relatively simple with a few changes in the ant build scripts.
Anyway I managed to bring down each project to about 10mb. Here is the recursive ant clean script.
#!/bin/bash
projects=~/projects
for project in $(ls $projects/);
do
if [ -f $projects/$project/build.xml ]; then
echo ""
echo "Cleaning $project"
cd $projects/$project
ant clean
fi
done
I tried a similar script in Windows batch, didn’t work as easily. Don’t need bat files, Cygwin is better. And the same bash shell scripts on Linux most of the time with little or no modification.
For a programmer tweaking never stops. I try not to work on Sunday. But its a good day to take a step back and do backups, cleanups etc.
I knew about this jar duplication but really saw it while trying to run a backup and then looking at the projects folder with jDiskReport. Need more tools like this.
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