[digital:meditation]

Amongst all the net labels out there nowadays, then and now I come back to the stuff found at darkwinter.com, as overall quality of these releases usually is pretty good. At the moment, however, I feel mesmerized by “elements”, which, in my opinion, is an exceptional release even by darkwinter standards. One hardly could say there is a lack of dark, “drony” ambient music these days, as it seems creating this kind of soundscapes is trivial at least from a technical point of view, you’re not really likely to need a lot of equipment and skill to get this kind of stuff. And still, listening closer to some (most?) of these releases, one quickly learns that indeed there are differences both looking at technical aspects and, even more, talking about originality and inspiration found in it.

Talking about this, “elements”, the creation of Australian one-man project Abre Ojos, surely knows how to excel. Earth, fire, water, air – each of the “four elements” captured in one long piece of musical creation, in one great, musically evolving world. In the end, these four elements end up forming an acoustic universe dense and inspired, moody, electronic and yet evolving and highly “organic”, directly next door to releases like the incredible ‘Zeit’ album by Tangerine Dream, created in 1972, or, same as ingenious, Coil’s ‘Time Machines’ released a couple of years later. From this point, I dare to consider “elements” the logical successor to the both of these records at least talking about music.

But there’s more: Along with the music, “elements” also does come with a video clip (or, better, a visual collage) for each of the elements / songs. Initially, I felt torn about this idea, given that this kind of music usually works best being a “soundtrack” for a movie to evolve in your mind while listening to it. But, however, after looking at parts of the clips I have to say that, fortunately, they indeed work out emphasizing the effect of the music itself, indeed working out as “…sound reactive looping visuals and animated mandalas to create an immersive synaesthetic experience to give time for reflection and meditation…”, as the release liner notes claim.

So, coming to a conclusion, I have to say that “elements” is one of the most outstanding pieces of drone ambient music I have been listening to in quite a while. Given it’s available on-line for free download (and, actually, under a Creative Commons license), one shouldn’t hesitate checking it out, listening to it, eventually drifting along through the worlds of Abre Ojos for while. And, if you decide you actually enjoy this one and want to show your appreciation to its creator, there’s always a carefully packed and designed CD/DVD box available to be ordered online. Worth checking out definitely, I am thinking about creating a PayPal account. :)

See:

• abreojos.net – official web site
• darkwinter dw057 – download page for “elements” on darkwinter.com

Well… after looking into this quite a while ago already, I finally did it and used the German version of the amazon.com MP3 online shop in order to do my first-ever music purchase not involving any kind of actual “physical” medium. And… yes, it feels kind of strange: On one side, if you “just” want to listen to music, it’s next to perfect – browse the album list, search whatever you’re looking for, eventually find it, buy it, download it – that’s it. No waiting for the CD to be delivered right to your mailbox, no additional shipping fees, plus (which used to finally make me actually go for it) the chance of finally getting hold of music which ceased to be availble on “physical media” (in other words: CD or vinyl…) years ago ( leaving second-hand stores aside).
On the other side of course, buying music digitally online gives you an arcane feeling of actually being “left with nothing” in some way: In the end, a collection of bits on your hard drive or music player is all you get from that. Buying a CD at least “feels” like getting more “value for money”, at the very least talking about cover artwork, packaging and all this kind of stuff.

But let aside this, I was surprised to see the amazon.com MP3 shop being a rather friendly thing. Overally, first and foremost, knowing that the music they offer is not polluted protected with DRM (and, thus, usually bound to special player software and devices) was an important thing.

Then, downloading the actual files you’ve bought there is done using a proprietary piece of software called amazonmp3, which is available for download and installation on virtually all important operating systems. Getting this piece of software to work on my Ubuntu 9.04 installation was as straightforward as downloading the .deb file, resolving a few additional dependencies and launching the application. Good. Doing the actual purchase of any MP3 music, while in there, basically works the same as purchasing anything else via amazon.com, which is a good thing if you’re an amazon.com customer anyway, as, in terms of payment and billing, it works just as you know it, keeping you from having to provide your accounting information to one more online shop. After completing the purchase, you’re left with a .amz file which, opened using the amazonmp3 application, automatically starts downloading the files that belong to your purchase (with the files being downloaded one by one, preconfigured to $HOME/Amazon MP3). This worked pretty smoothly as well and, overally, something like two minutes later the “album” I just bought was stored on my hard drive. At the very least it’s rather convenient…

… but the strange feeling remains, especially after burning this music to CD-ROM, ending with a blank, hand-labeled representation of it. Oh well… I surely will not do that every day, especially given that, looking at how fast it overally works, this seems the perfect way of wasting vast amounts of money rather quickly. But if occassionally buying a (rare?) piece of music not offered on CD or by its original author for download anymore, this seems a way to consider.

Now that’s something you don’t see every day: Quite a while ago I stumbled across the musical doings of nordvargr (and, eventually, wrote a review on one of his releases for German webzine medienkonverter back then…), and, sort of starting to like these dark, inspiring sound scapes, loosely kept track of his doings now and then. It seems Mr Nordvargr is pretty active also regarding communication and music distribution on “the internet” and in places like virbr, where he also uses to provide music for the “get-it-for-free-and-run” generation.

His latest action, however, seems at least somewhat surprising: “Interstellar 2″, a new release provided on-line, is officially available as a “Torrent Edition” – via piratebay.org. Almost an hour of dark space drone music provided right through what some people still tend to refer to as the “hub” for internet music piracy – seems a rather daring move, even better considering it is being done ” as a way of showing support for free speech and free internet”. Check it out anyway, and also feel free to read Nordvargs reflections on piracy to be found somewhere on his news page. Seems worth supporting, in any particular way.

Adding to this, quoting from the Interstellar 2 announcement on virbr.com:

[...]
I will not go in to a long rant about free internet and piracy, but to sum it up:

Support what is good and worth supporting (small independent labels are always good
and should be encouraged and supported).
[...]

Not much to add, I guess. Go and support that friendly dark drone musician next door rather than dealing with the latest artificial “superstar” in any way.

As I am usually doing day-to-day work using daily builds of the NetBeans IDE, then and now I happen to run into, let’s say, peculiar situations in which figuring out what actually happens is pretty difficult. My very special friend #162706 is one of these cases – the IDE just seems busy for quite a while without obvious reasons, and you’re not really sure whether there still is something goin’ on worth waiting for it to come to an end…

After more or less loosely following Geertjans blog I rather early found out about the jvisualvm tool that comes with recent versions of Sun JDK 6, but so far I haven’t really seen any use cases for it in my environment. However, at the very least now I have figured out that this is rather good a solution for tracking down weird NetBeans behaviour by providing more reliable information, i.e. thread dumps. And there’s even more…

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Times are changing it seems: Not that long ago we were wondering about whether or not IBM eventually would buy Sun Microsystems and, if so, what this could possibly mean to many of the pretty good Sun software products like the NetBeans IDE, the Glassfish Application Server or the mySQL database server. Oh well… and it seems that, just shortly after these negotiations have obviously come to an end, another player does appear on the scene with database / enterprise software giant Oracle finally acquiring Sun. And, yet, I think we will have to see whether or not this is better than the IBM option. Eventually, there are products and projects likely to benefit from this merger, like all the Sun hardware stuff and the (Open)Solaris operating system which will allow Oracle to enter a whole new market in which they by now still depend upon other companies (hardware manufacturers, operating system vendors, …), and there are products which eventually aren’t on grounds that safe (mySQL, Glassfish, maybe also NetBeans).

I will keep myself from speculating aloud which of these projects might be continued and which ones might be stopped sooner or later, but rather want to come up with another thought on this: Product strategy. I know quite some people who chose the BEA WebLogic Java EE server for various reasons (including not depending upon a global “software super power”) and were quite happy with this. Some time earlier however, BEA also was acquired by Oracle, and even though Oracle product managers decided to discontinue their own application server in favor of WebLogic, these customers by then still ended up being customer of a company they never wanted to work with. Same way, some of the BEA products simply were discontinued, like some of the Oracle ones, in favor of having migration paths offered to alternate products virtually replacing them. This also might not always be desirable as, even though having a migration path available is a good thing, eventually one doesn’t want to migrate as product decisions also might have happened out of technical preferences for the product initially chosen – from that point of view being forced to migrate to something you didn’t initially choose for sane reasons doesn’t seem all too compelling.

So, after all: How to get out of this mess? How to be capable of doing sane strategic product decisions without having to worry that, sooner or later, your product might be discontinued in favor of another one after some company, service provider, … has been acquired by someone else? For that, I see just one solution really practicable: Go for Open Source software, and not just for sofware being open source but also for software being open source and maintained, developed, driven forth by some kind of foundation or consortium rather than just being a former product released under an open source license but still developed and maintained mainly by one single vendor. Examples for these things include:

• The ObjectWeb Consortium is an open source development and support community, a consortium with an impressive list of members, offering a wide range of infrastructure and development platforms like the JOnAS Java EE server (which by now also is Java EE 5 certified – maybe a likely replacement when and if Oracle might decide to discontinue Glassfish?), the XWiki Java based wiki application, the Orchestra BPEL platform and a bunch of other things.
• The Apache Software Foundation, maybe the most prominent of these communities because of the Apache httpd server, then and now one of the most widely used web servers, also offers a whole load more than this. Projects hosted at apache.org include the Geronimo Java EE 5 application server, the tomcat Java EE servlet container, the James Java based e-mail server project, an extensive set of technologies related to Web Services development, a fully-featured Java Server Faces implementation named ‘myfaces’, the ServiceMix ESB platform and really way more than that…. The ASF also consists of members representing virtually all companies important in software world. And, as an interesting liner note, even Microsoft at least partly is supporting ASF, for whatever this is worth. :)
• Important as well is Eclipse Foundation, hosting the Eclipse IDE and a bunch of other projects focusing both on IDE and on general Java application development, including the Equinox OSGi implementation, the jetty Java EE servlet container, the EclipseLink reference implementation of EJB3 JPA (formerly contributed by Oracle, actually…) or the SOA Tooling Platform. Eclipse Foundation obviously has a strong support by various commercial and non-commercial entities, contributing code and development effort as well as supporting Eclipse based applications or using them in their own (proprietary?) application platforms.
• Smaller than that yet too interesting to go unnoticed, there’s also Codehaus out there, a small yet creative community hosting projects like ActiveSOAP web services framework, the XSite web site generation tool, the xstream Java-to-XML serialization library or dynamic languages like Groovy (for Java/JDK) and Boo (for CLI/.NET).

So, overally, what to learn from all this mess:

(1) Despite all dedication, keeping a little independence pays off from time to time: Using maven2 as build tool, so far we really did enjoy the clean, usable, straightforward tooling NetBeans offers for this tool, while at the same time making sure our source structures and projects aren’t tied to the IDE like, in example, they would be while using stock Eclipse projects. From that point of view, in worst case we even could go on doing development work with a tool as simple and straightforward as jedit comes the need. Likewise, keeping applications as compliant to Java EE standards (and as independent of a given Java EE implementation) as possible will, assuming worst case (which is not what you do as a technology enthusiast but definitely is what you gotta think about when you have to make strategic decisions) ease migration to another target platform. Both things aren’t on our list at the moment however, and hopefully they’ll never will. The Glassfish/NetBeans tool chain is way too convenient and powerful to be abandoned without a fight. ;)

(2) Generally, even though (in worst case) the Oracle/Sun merger might change things for people so far into using Sun-contributed open source projects, there still will be alternatives at hand, if they don’t want to go with the offerings Oracle by then will be providing to them. This is, of course, a good thing as it makes dealing with the uncertainty obviously caused by such a strategic (corporate) move a little easier. And, after all, being acquired by some “strong” company still might be the best to happen to Sun given the current business situation of the company in order to let at least part of its technology survive (I will contribute more time to using OpenSolaris from now on).

(3) Despite their brave moves in releasing a great set of technology under open source licenses, it overally seems Sun didn’t completely “do this right” in the end. I remember that, a while ago, another good Sun-based open source project, the JSF component collection labeled Project Woodstock, after a period of silence and uncertainty for its adopters ceased to exist, now “just” offering a migration path to IceFaces JSF library. For quite a while it seemed there was just an awful load of open source projects appearing on the scene, providing great technology yet leaving users unsure about the actual nature of its community: How many people are there actively developing it, how many of them are full-time Sun employees and how many are open source volunteers and/or employees of partnering companies, how many of them are enthusiasts and small-time developers? Who does make strategic decisions about project roadmap, new features, …? Who, overally, has to decide what to be done and what not to be done? This, in my opinion, is the worst to add to the momentary uncertainty about Glassfish, NetBeans, … despite the fact of these all being open source projects: Of course, being by its very nature open source projects, they don’t generally to depend upon a very company to survive, virtually anyone could to a fork and drive forth development on her/his own. But yet, at least to me it’s absolutely unclear what will remain of, say, Glassfish in case Oracle might decide to suddenly withdraw all Java EE developers in order to make better use of them in any of their existing Java EE related projects – will there be anyone left to keep up developing an “open source Glassfish” without Sun? From that point of view, there would have been a better way initially if Sun just had made, say, java.net an open source foundation similar to Apache, Eclipse, …, contributed all of its open source code to this foundation and aggressively invited third party corporate and freelance developers to contribute and participate. This, asides all other business implications (like matters of education and support offered for these technologies) at least would have made things easier by having these projects “safe”, their technical development and progress reliably outlined no matter what eventually would happen… Then again, maybe it’s not yet too late for… Apache NetBeans? Codehaus Glassfish? O’w2′penDS? What are your thoughts?

Anyway, after writing all this text, what are my personal conclusions of this? For now, I will keep sticking to “business-as-usual” of course, keep on promoting the use of NetBeans, Glassfish and related technologies. From my point of view, they’re way too valuable to be ignored and abandoned without too much ado. Especially relating to NetBeans, there’s quite a clear road ahead, with 6.7 development nearing its end, providing an impressive list of changes and other things noteworthy compared to its predecessors. Along with this, we’re also at the moment trying to, as seamlessly as possible, take the NetBeans Community Docs project to a new shape, structure and performance, hopefully making this a resource valuable to the NetBeans community as a whole. As for anything else… time will tell. Maybe “being prepared” never is a bad thing, being prepared both for keeping everyday business going and, given this might be necessary, participating in one fork or the other…

Update 2009-04-22: As there are quite some people (obviously) dealing with this issue, I have decided to collect some of these resources that seem worth reading to me here:

• Oracle folks themselves have put up an FAQ collection[PDF] addressing some of the questions for sure to arise from this merger. Not all questions are left answered, though, and one might eventually see the absence of the term “open source” throughout the whole of the document…
• Masoud Kalali, Jave EE developer, technical writer and author of an upcoming book on Glassfish v3, has done an interview with opensourcereleasefeed.com on Glassfish and NetBeans in light of the Oracle/Sun future perspective.
• As to be expected, there is a whole load of coverage relating this issue on java.dzone.com, most notably a rant basically outlining Java EE on its way to ‘Java Technology Museum’, a collection of responses on the Sun/Oracle deal throughout the web and of course a set of personal opinions mainly related to what’s in the Sun/Oracle deal for Java as a language and platform. Worth reading, most of it.
• There’s a lengthy yet interesting analysis of the implications of the Sun/Oracle deal to be found on redmonk.com as well, outlining a few options of what might be up next.
• Also an interesting statement by Cay Horstmann on this. Some of his predictions surely seem reasonable, though, then again, still not more or less vague than others of course.

A few months ago we saw the news that Toshiba and Sun were about to team up on bringing the OpenSolaris operating system pre-installed to Toshiba notebooks. And, by now, it seems this finally happened: The first line of devices of this kind is available via the OpenSolaris store. Well… There are a few thoughts coming to my mind about that:

• Generally, it’s rather good to see mainstream hardware being sold with any operating system other than Windows. Let’s hope this might help OpenSolaris gaining some market share in the desktop operating system world, as it surely has something to offer compared to, well, “other platforms”.
• It should be noted that, even though not explicitely being sold with them, recent OpenSolaris installments also work with other Toshiba machines in a rather pleasant manner. My Tecra A8 (which is a little older by now already) so far has most of its components working out of the box with recent OpenSolaris builds.
• With this hardware/software combination, I surely hope to see OpenSolaris getting the kind of attention and support needed to really be fun on a notebook. This includes, say, connecting to networks using cell phones (attached via Bluetooth or USB), sync’ing address / calendar / to-do data between mobile and desktop applications, joining wireless networks of all kind without too much ado or providing feasible ways of working in a way optimized for minimum power consumption. Though things have considerably improved here, it’s still a long way to go until being on par with Linux or Windows it seems.

Nevertheless, the mere fact a major hardware manufacturer is selling devices using OpenSolaris pre-installed is quite notable. Let’s hope for more to follow and some momentum to grow out of this. That aside, then and now I still wonder why, given the overall quality of the Solaris operating system, it took Sun Microsystems that long to get to this point. Having a viable Solaris-for-any-kind-of-desktops available along with, say, the release of MS Windows 2000 surely could have changed the operating system market. But that’s probably another story…

Well, I’m in for more (though voluntary) work soon: A while ago I have offered to act as Contribution Coordinator to the NetBeans Community Documentation program, and because (or, as I shall say now, despite) being pretty much into day-to-day work at the moment, I am about to get this started on April 1, 2009 (which is rather soon). Just a couple of days ago, this project has reached its 300th contribution exactly two years after being started, to me sort of proof that NetBeans community to some extend has accepted and embraced the idea of contributing something back to the project by writing documentation, offering tips, tricks, hints, tutorials and whatever they eventually could come up with in course of using NetBeans in everyday life projects. Notably, too, is that Varun Nischal has done a great job pushing the project ahead to reach this impressive milestone, so I guess this is quite a heritage to deal with, this is something I surely have to work to be on par with. :) By now, all I eventually could offer is quite some enthusiasm about both NetBeans and the documentation project itself, and a bunch of (hopefully) good ideas on where to go from here…

Let’s hope for the best and see what will grow out of this. At the moment, I am once again planning to do something both enjoyable and (in this context) useful in travelling to Prague once again, hope to meet some of the guys over there and see what can be done. In this “new phase” of its doings, I think the Community Documentation project basically should / could aim at a bunch of interesting goals:

• Of course, it should as good as possible “spread the word”, do its part to extending the NetBeans user base first and foremost as an IDE but of course beyond that. From this point of view, one of the most important things in my opinion is to raise awareness that NetBeans IDE is a rather good foundation for virtually any developer, be that in open-source projects or wherever, to build custom tooling for her/his shiny new framework, application server, … upon, thus also extending the feature set of the IDE, making this a tool even “sharper”.
• Asides the Community Docs, NetBeans also has an excellent Knowledge Base to offer (honestly, like most of the Sun related technologies and platforms do), providing insights and documentation on most if not all aspects interesting about the NetBeans platform, partly also filled by documents off the Community Docs program, partly written by full-time technical writers. Providing high-quality “real life” documentation and tutorials eventually could be a way for Community Docs authors to actively support the NetBeans team, eventually allowing for full-time internal writers located “near” the NetBeans core team to focus on in-depth covering technical details and all these aspects that would require documentation created along with the very authors of the code, while the Community Docs folks take care of most of the “user space” work which in many respects just seems “a load of work”. Maybe this way we all could do our best making NetBeans even better by making it one of the best-documented pieces of software available out there. :)

By now, I invite anyone interested to join the project, join the program, offer feedback, hints or comments or whatever. Same as the IDE itself, or the platform at the foundation of it, the documentation only will be as good as those using it, reporting their needs, providing comments and requesting new articles. Let’s get goin’ then…

Some time ago, in the midst of migrating at least parts of our application from an all-integrated proprietary monolith to a more “open” approach, we quickly came to embracing at least parts of the SOA architectural model to do so, as, these days, it just seemed to fit. Now, few years later, it seems we already learnt something from that, a few things, to be accurate, which I want to share here for the sake of it – maybe they will provide a good subject of discussion or eventually also help others gain insights into that matter…

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