Working for a very big customer, I found a very nasty interaction between Sun HttpClient (JDK 1.4) and Http  Load Balancers.

In a complex network environment, sometimes you can experience low level TCP/IP comunication errors, because sometimes HttpClient get confused and hangs.

The bad behavior of Sun HttpClient is well known: some guys suggested me to use the Axis Web Client. Anyway you can solve the issue adding these three parameters to the JVM launch line

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HttpFox

An HTTP analyzer addon for Firefox

The Gioorgi.com’s Knowledge Base is a new service provided to readers.

The Knowledge base arranges tips & tricks scattered on the web, and based on the Giovanni Giorgi’s  IT consulting experience.

The information are mostly based on open source technology, but also commercial products are described. Albeit knowledge base born as a small random “basket for notes”, it is an ideal place for comments, discussions on arguments and so on.

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After my past experience with bad hosting provider, I am happy to say I have find a very good hosting service. If you need VPS hosting, Rimuhosting is a very good choice.

After about two years with Rimuhosting, I can summarize their feature here:

• They have a very good  entry-price for a virtual hosting
• System aministrator has a very prompt response: on every issue I get support in 24 hours, also on Sunday
• Rimuhosting uses a Xen virtualization mechanism which is very effective. I have tried other virtualized solution, which are worst.
• Java hosting works well, without problems.
• The default Bandwith is very huge (30GB). There is also  an automatic backup and a remote web-based shell out-of-the-box.
• You can choose between high-end Linux distribution  (like Red Hat enterprise) and free one.

Google Chrome (BETA)

12/11/2008 10:00:00 AM

Since we first released Google Chrome, the development team has been hard at work improving the stability and overall performance of the browser. In just 100 days, we have reached more than 10 million active users around the world (on all seven continents, no less) and released 14 updates to the product. We’re excited to announce that with today’s fifteenth release we are taking off the “beta” label!

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I am happy Django Team has released version 1.0 of its python web framework. It was planned for 21th of September, but they speed up things :) We can read on Django web site:

Developed and used over two years by a fast-moving online-news operation, Django was designed to handle two challenges: the intensive deadlines of a newsroom and the stringent requirements of the experienced Web developers who wrote it. It lets you build high-performing, elegant Web applications quickly.

Django focuses on automating as much as possible and adhering to the DRY principle.

In my own opinion django is too much “DRY”, and sometimes simpler solutions was avoided by them because considered “dirty”. Anyway, I have followed Django from 2006, and I suggest you to give it a try.

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I am happy to annouce to the world a new website, which will substitute the old Vamp site

It is Gioorgi.com, the italian blog of Giovanni Giorgi.
Gioorgi.com will also spot a new technology "gym" during the year 2009.

Stay tuned!

Finally I managed to buy a Asus EEE PC 700  this week. I would thanks a lot Next Store and its kindly clerks, which I will prefer in future to Mediaword :)
If you are at Milan and you plan to buy it, Next Store is a good choice.

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Per un importante cliente di ValueTeam, ho sviluppato per un'applicazione chiamata PDFGenerator, che è stata pacchettizzata come un vero e proprio prodotto.
PDFGenerator nasce in una situazione caratterizzata da un alta variabilità dei requisiti utente.

Le specifiche del progetto hanno subito variazioni significative nell'arco di quattro anni, ed alla fine i requisiti utente erano parecchio mutati.  L'applicazione, già fatturata, non era ancora stata validata dal Cliente finale, ed era passata di mano moltissime volte.
Da un lato c'era la necessità di fornire uno strumento semplice da utilizzare, dall'altro la possibilità di espanderlo nel momento in cui le esigenze di Business del Cliente fossero cambiate, contenendo i costi di sviluppo.
Questi due aspetti erano acuiti in questo contesto, poiché i dati potevano provenire da fonti assai eterogenee per tipologia (database o personale del marketing) e l'utente finale doveva elaborarle in modo uniforme e rapido.
Per queste ragioni la specifica era cambiata spesso nel tempo, e la sfida era notevole.
PDFGenerator è semplice dal punto di vista software, e la sua forza sta nell'idea, e nella capacità di capire l'utente finale.

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There is a future for SmallTalk? I was a very strong fan of the SmallTalk language, but in the last five years I have seen more and more contraction of its usage in the IT field.

The OLPC project, which uses also Squeak Smalltalk and its done by the core team fo Squeak, is not going very well.

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We read in wikipedia:

"Mac OS X is the successor to the original Mac OS, which had been Apple's primary operating system since 1984 [...] The first version released was Mac OS X Server 1.0 in 1999, and a desktop-oriented version, Mac OS X v10.0 followed in March 2001"
The funny thing about MacOSX launch was the huge hype on the retail box: it was named "The world's most advanced operating system" and really it was very huge leap ahead.

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I have read http://www.manageability.org/blog/stuff/chandler-failure and I think it is very danger way of exposing concepts.

In the article pointed out, the quite dead Chandler project is compared to the multi-billion Eclipse project. And then a too easy analysis is done against dynamic languages, where Java is the absolute winner.

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Oracle buys BEA and Sun buys MySql.

In reply,Migrosoft is hungry and is watching Yahoo :-)

<joking> 

Any bets on the next money-based-news?

I'm going for

• Oracle buys Sun: "We need more hardware to run Oracle and WebLogic together! "
  
• Google buys Oracle: "We have *even* more hardware...come on!"
  
• Apple buys Google: "So nice LOGO", retrodating a bunch of stock options, I suppose.
  
• Microsoft buys Apple ("So annoied their are more cool then us!") and shut down all them all so you will end up using their search engine, I hope.

</joking> 

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This is the sad true: parsing is boring. And writing parser is even worst.

If you can choose a scripting language for parsing you can think to do it in perl.

For this way, take a big breath and go in the black sea  of perl's funny regexp. They are funny only if you have that special love for the regular expressions.

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Let the Zend Framework introduce itself as a Borg would do: 

"Hi dear RubyOnRails. Hi all. I am the Zend Framework, a small work (about  5 tons of code) done by IBM and Zend to destroy you. You think php is not able to build big project?... do you?
So you have dared to develop RubyOnRails or Perl or Python, thinking you can own the web in your way... Dear nerds you are so funny and young!!" in a lamp of light the borg duplicate itselfs in 100 indians programmers, saying together

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