[digital:meditation]

Let’s get it straight: Most of the time, I hate dealing with content management systems in my professional environment, as so far I haven’t found the right solution to that: Either they don’t team up that well with the rest of our (Java / tomcat based) environment (there’s a vast load of rather powerful PHP based content management solutions out there…) and/or take ages to get set up and started with and/or are seemingly way too “heavy” to carry a few simple pages just for the sake of having an easily accessible management / editing facility. The last thing on that I did so far was installing OpenCMS (astoundingly powerful, for sure), which I quickly and quietly discarded in favor of a simple, “home-grown” solution based on Spring, servlets and JSPs. Though this works reasonably well, it always tends to be tedious once these sites are supposed to be maintained, content needs to be added, things want to be changed, … . So, starting the search all over again.

However, for now I am pretty sure to have found a solution that could end this search – MeshCMS definitely is the best Java based content management solution I have tried so far. The list of features is pretty close to what I need/want:

• Installation is as easy as dumping meshcms.war to tomcats webapp folder and let things happen.
• MeshCMS is fully file-based, allowing for editing content (located by then in sub-folders in webapps/meshcms/), inserting images, … using arbitrary file-editing tools, as well as eliminating the need to throw in an RDBMS server (usually that’s not an issue given free options like postgresql, but in some cases the effort of setting up, maintaining, backing up the DB is just not worth it).
• Theme creation surely is a breeze: On one side, talking about the theme content this is way less “rocket science” compared to other CMS and something easily done by anyone who knows how to deal with JSPs and CSS. On the other side, the structure itself is rather simple and easy to be maintained – create a subfolder in themes, dump your files there and you’re done.
• The administration environment, file manager and friends are lean, reasonably fast and usable without having to deal with a learning curve too steep – a perfect system for any situation in which you’d like lesser experienced users to deal with content of your site.

Overally, diving into it and moving our current web sites theme there took me less than five minutes. Let’s see how the next steps will look like…

Herr Kantel ärgert sich (berechtigt, wie ich finde) über das Ansinnen von Deutsche-Bank-Chef Ackermann, die Regierungen mögen den derzeitigen ‘Turbulenzen’ der weltweiten Finanzmärkte durch geeignete Maßnahmen entgegenwirken. An anderer Stelle wünscht sich der Internationale Währungsfonds den Einsatz von Steuergeldern, um die aktuelle Krise des Geldmarktes zu kompensieren, …

…wenn die Möglichkeiten des Marktes ausgeschöpft seien.

Einerseits erfüllt es in der Tat mit Staunen, daß gerade die Befürworter möglichst uneingeschränkten Treibens auf freien Märkten in dieser konkreten Situation offensichtlich vom Glauben an die “Allmächtigkeit der Märkte” abrücken. Aber interessanter noch als das: Hätten die Banken, die sich jetzt Steuergelder “zur Hilfe” in der Krise wünschen, alternativ auf (auf der anderen Seite) die steuer-zahlende Öffentlichkeit an den Gewinnen beteiligt, wenn sich die Kreditinvestitionen nicht zur Krise, sondern zum hochprofitablen Geschäft entwickelt hätten?

Das Bundesministerium für Bildung und Forschung hat 2008 kurzerhand zum Jahr der Mathematik erklärt, ein Grund mehr, sich doch wieder einmal intensiver mit Zahlen und Formeln auseinanderzusetzen außerhalb des “regulären” Alltagsbetriebs. Eine schöne Spielwiese bietet hierfür das Algebra-System Maxima, das, in Verbindung mit dem grafischen Frontend wxmaxima, ein Software-Paket ergibt, welches dem Klassiker Mathematica zwar in verschiedener Hinsicht funktional noch nicht ebenbürtig ist, dafür auch, nun, zu preislich etwas freundlicheren Konditionen zu bekommen und darüber hinaus auch noch GPL-Freie Software ist. Das rechtfertigt eigentlich zumindest eine Testinstallation und ein paar Stunden unbekümmerten Herumprobierens mit Zahlen, Formeln und Funktionen. Zum Einstieg hat math-blog ein 10-Minuten-Tutorial, zwar in englischer Sprache verfaßt, aber die Beispiele sollten sich trotzdem leicht erschließen. Wer mehr braucht: ‘Mathematik für Informatiker’, Bd. I, von Frau und Herrn Teschl, für einen knappen Zehner bei terrashop. Happy number-crunching. ;)

via golem.de: “Stopp bei 100 Dezibel: MP3-Player müssen leiser werden”. Hmmmmmmmmmmmmmm… Manchmal fragt man sich schon… Welches Bild mag man in Brüssel wohl von den Bürgern der EU haben? Unmündige Nullen, eines Aufpassers bedürftig, der ihnen sagt, daß es unklug ist, ein Audio-Abspielgerät dauerhauft zu laut zu betreiben? Vielleicht sollte man aufhören, die eigene Bevölkerung als ein Heer von Dummköpfen zu betrachten, eventuell würden dann verschiedene andere Dinge einfacher werden…

Oh yeah, time passes quickly… Seems it was only yesterday to deal with the prerelease builds of NetBeans 6.0, by now things are already “beta” once again, steadily heading for the 6.1 release supposed to be released in late April 2008. One might wonder whether, just less than five months after releasing a stable 6.0 version, time’s right for a new “stable release” already, but, looking at the current pre-release builds, I’d say it’s definitely worth dealing with, as quite a lot of work obviously has been put into what’s likely to be 6.1 rather soon:

• Issue 44035 is likely to be fixed, making it easier to share NetBeans projects around, including libraries and additional code they possibly use. So far, getting, say, started with a NetBeans project on a different machine and/or a different version of NetBeans on the same machine prove to be difficult once in a while if the project used libraries not known to the IDE library manager. Maybe the changes introduced in 6.1 even make one give up on maven2 for doing dependency management – let’s see…
• Support for Java Bean Patterns is back in 6.1. Though being a feature available in earlier releases, this seemingly got lost somewhere on the way to 6.0 and has caused quite some discussion ever since. Overally, it’s good to see this feature is back to the IDE…
• The tooling for working with the Spring framework has seen some massive improvements. Initially built as a third-party module, it seems the code of spring-netbeans is now part of the official distribution (or at least an official add-on) and comes with a set of useful features, classpath and code-completion for Spring’s XML configuration files being the most notable one in my opinion. Though Eclipse’s SpringIDE still does better in terms of features and performance (code completion in a decently sized applicationContext.xml is ranging somewhere between “somewhat slow” and “unusable”), this is an important first step to ease NetBeans adoption by those used to doing their work based on Spring. And it seems there’s a growing amount of people who do so…
• It seems that tweaking performance has been a major field of work on the way to 6.1… Though I experienced the IDE “hangin’” just in very few situations (like dealing with large JSP files), I couldn’t help noticing that 6.1 prereleases (a) start up faster and (b) seem to get everyday things just done faster than stable 6.0. Surely a good thing. :)
• NetBeans 6.1 is likely to offer somwhat tight integration of MySQL database, which comes as no surprise given that Sun acquired MySQL AB just a while ago. I am torn about that: Given that the NetBeans services / database manager is amazingly good at dealing with generic RDBMS using JDBC and a homogenous interface not introducing any db-specific dependencies, this seems to be definitely a step back. Then again, it’s a good way helping the IDE being adopted by users heavily relying upon the MySQL database, possibly using some sort of LAMP software stack, who by now are provided with a well-integrated, comfortable working environment.

So, after all: I switched to 6.1 prerelease builds for doing productive work in early January, and while watching the IDE grow better and better, I am sure that 6.1, once released, is likely to push forth a movement tendency already seen with earlier stable NetBeans releases. Not much more than that to say: Have a look at the release notes, get it, get work done. Now if I only figured out how to disable that “transparency” effect while moving NetBeans windows around… :)

Still, working with NetBeans on an everyday basis is a breeze, especially talking about the upcoming 6.1 release which indeed has seen quite a bunch of improvements in virtually every field of view (quite a job indeed, given that 6.0 was rather good already). By now, having all these months gone after moving here from Eclipse, there’s only one minor annoyance I stumbled across which however seems to persist and keep on bugging me once in a while when creating new projects using NetBeans: It seems the IDE in some situations has a rather peculiar way of figuring out where to place a newly created projects folder, which makes me then and now fire up an arbitrary file manager (well, usually some sort of Unix shell) to find where on earth my new project actually has been created:

Overally, things seem rather fine: Initially, creating your first new project, NetBeans decides to dump it to a “NetBeansProjects” folder which, on Unix systems, lives in your $HOME. This is rather good, and I tend to go with this default as the place is reasonably named and I don’t have to throw in confusion choosing a different name anyhow. :) So, if you only create “simple” projects in there, you’re perfectly fine. Chances are you will learn to suffer nevertheless, in two different situations:

1. … if you are using Project Groups. This is a pretty good feature, helping you keeping track of projects that somehow belong together without manually opening and closing sets of projects all the time. A very convenient feature, here, is to create a project group to be a “folder of projects”, a group which, as the name implies, contains all the projects in a chosen folder. From that point of view however, switching to that very project group and creating a “new project”, one would expect the IDE to automatically place the newly created project into the group folder rather than the folder the last project used to be created in.
2. … if you are using projects that somehow can have sub-projects. This, in my opinion, is worse than the other point: Right now, you can create, say, a NetBeans module suite, add some modules to it (which are subsequently placed in the module suite’s folder) and, then, create a new webapp, which also will end up in the module suite’s folder even while there’s no obvious reason to add a webapp to a module suite. At this point, it would be great if the IDE could be smarter in figuring out where to place a new project, and be that back to “default” (~/NetBeansProjects) again…

Oh well, but perhaps I should stop complaining and/or filing bugs against the IDE but rather have a look at the source and see whether to fix this on my own. Isn’t that the good thing about open-source software? :)

… via heise.de: Verfassungsgericht stemmt sich gegen den gläsernen Autofahrer – nach einem inhaltlich ähnlichen Urteil in Sachen ‘heimliche Online-Durchsuchung’ ein weiterer Sieg für all jene, die in Zeiten wachsender Möglichkeiten technicher Überwachung, in Zeiten massiver Begehrlichkeiten aller Art, Daten so umfassend wie nur irgend möglich zu erheben und zu speichern, auf die Grundrechte und -freiheiten drängen, die unsere Gesellschaft tragen sollten? Was mich indes beeindruckt, ist dieser Nachsatz:

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Die Lizenzen zur Massenkontrolle schienen den Verfassungsrichtern schon bei der Verhandlung im Herbst handwerklich schlampig gearbeitet zu sein. Ein Phänomen, das die Karlsruher Richter bei vielen Landesgesetzen beobachten müssen. Zu unpräzise, zu weit gefasst, zu wenig grundrechtssensibel – dieses Verdikt traf kürzlich auch erst das nordrhein-westfälische Verfassungsschutzgesetz mit seiner für nichtig erklärten Erlaubnis heimlicher Online-Durchsuchungen sowie 2005 etwa die Regelung zur präventiven Telekommunikationsüberwachung in Niedersachsen. Selbst die Deutsche Polizeigewerkschaft (DPolG) ist inzwischen empört: “Es ist ein absolutes Unding, dass die Politik schon wieder Gesetze verabschiedet hat, die offensichtlich nicht mit der Verfassung übereinstimmen und im Nachhinein vom Bundesverfassungsgericht korrigiert werden müssen.”
…

Konsequenz der Anstrengung, in der Gesetzgebung “Druck zu machen” und umstrittene Gesetzesvorhaben schnell umzusetzen? Stimmt einen insgesamt sehr nachdenklich…

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Es folgt, dass die Naturwissenschaft sowie die von ihr abgeleiteten Technologien nicht wertfrei sind. [...] In einer Gesellschaft, deren Werte hauptsächlich vom Streben nach Reichtum und Macht abgeleitet sind, sind sie entsprechend gestaltet. Die Werte der Wissenschaft, eingebettet in eine vernünftige Gesellschaft, würden vernünftig, also human sein. Dann würden die von ihr abgeleiteten Technologien nicht mehr dem Tod dienen, sondern dem Leben.
…

… aus “Grenzen des Wissens – Wir gegen die Gier” in Erinnerung an Joseph Weizenbaum (08.01.1923 – 05.03.2008). Vielleicht sollten wir öfter innehalten und zur Disposition stellen, welche gesellschaftlichen und politischen Konsequenzen die Wirkungen unserer Technologien haben…