Up to today, I’ve always been horrified by the amount of work that was involved in erasing a HD properly – get a Linux ISO, burn it, boot, shred – it was always pretty stupid to waste a CD and lots of time. BUT: I learned how to speed this up today.

There’s a nifty tool called UNetbootin that allows you to quickly create a bootable USB stick. You can pick neat distros like Mint 9 Live (and even Mint back to version 3 or so), lots of Ubuntu editions, DamnSmallLinux, a couple of antivir rescue images, boot loader images, and so on – then, you only need to click a button and your USB stick will be prepared with the selected image. Cool.

I picked Mint 9 Live for my task because a) I wanted to see how fast it would be, running from a USB stick, and b) I wanted some eyecandy for this emotionally draining task of erasing beloved data.

I recommend using a reasonably “new” USB stick, because old ones are often very slow and/or buggy. So now I have this really nice Mint Live USB stick, and the old laptop is shred’ding away /dev/sda – as soon as it’s done, I’ll create a new partition, format it a couple of times using different fs types, and then return the laptop to the company’s hardware pool. :)

Now for the question: dear Oracle, Sun, or whatever you may wish to be called – why can’t you simply put a checkbox on your website, a checkbox that allows me to agree to your terms and conditions, and then give me a ZIP that I can simply extract and use? Please! I know that this was possible in the past. Come on, it can’t be that hard, can it?

Comments welcome.

Don’t get confused if you use Google because most forum postings will tell you to update the Windows Installer etc. etc., this is probably senseless, especially if you – like me – have a completely up to date Windows 7 on your box.

I’m slightly disappointed by the VirtualBox “upgrade” process though. The installer would simply hang at the point where it configures the network interfaces – I had to first uninstall the old VirtualBox, reboot, then install the new version. This is not really (and never has been) an “update” or “upgrade”, it’s a complete reinstall. Being the lucky guy that I am, I could at least use the existing VMs without any problems after the “upgrade”. This needs to be improved, no matter what the company behind the product is called. >:)

Oh, by the way: I was sure that I had cancelled my pre-orders for both RDR and Mario Galaxy 2 – the latter arrived today. Seamless switch from the Wild West to another Mario adventure! Yay!

Nice, isn’t it? :) I can also get early Helios releases directly from a special mirror. Nice.

• JBoss 4.2.3
• JBoss 4.2.3 JDK6

The latter contains a couple additional JARs in lib/endorsed:

• jaxb-api.jar
• jboss-jaxrpc.jar
• jboss-jaxws.jar
• jboss-jaxws-ext.jar
• jboss-saaj.jar

The release notes contain some hidden hints that the JDK6 version of JBoss 4.2.3 is still experimental. Those JARs, especially the jaxws JARs, contain implementations that appear to be under active development. Looking at the source code reveals some pretty “hacky” portions of code here and there. The downside of those JARs is that if you have an application that contains libraries like CXF or Axis, you might run into severe trouble because the JBoss implementation of classes like javax.xml.ws.Service gets loaded first, instead of the version you have packaged with your application. You can of course tune the classloading options of your app, which MAY resolve the problem, but it does not necessarily help you a lot – you will either have to package a whole bunch of additional JARs with the application, or you will simply not make it around the classes from lib/endorsed.

My opinion at the moment is this: unless you have a very good reason OR an application that is completely based on the JBoss JAXWS et alii implementations anyway, simply use the “normal” JBoss 4.2.3, which is compiled against JDK 5 and does not bring along those libraries. On the web, you will most likely find hints like “delete the *jaxws*.jar from lib/endorsed” – actually, why delete them, if you can download the version that was compiled against JDK5. Comments?

I’m currently preparing for CX-310-065, you name it, “Sun Certified Programmer for the Java Platform, Standard Edition 6″. It’s interesting to learn about the gory details of Java, although it does sometimes require a good bit of Buddha-like meditation to make it through the SCJP dungeon. Here’s why:

• Many of the exam questions seem to be pure tests for the trained eye. Most of the example code would blast into red x’es in Eclipse, or whatever icon your favourite IDE would put in place. Are there any serious Java programmers out there using vi?
• Getting the voucher is a WoW-like quest. If you live in Germany, you cannot order the voucher via Sun’s US website. (Which they tell you only as soon as you log in, and then your shopping cart is automatically emptied) If you order the voucher from the german website, you are under the impression that you are ordering a voucher for a german test. Bad if you are preparing using an english book.
• There are different conditions regarding the exam. If you take the english version, you are given a lower number of questions. The amount of correct answers for both versions is roughly equivalent if you express it in percent.
• You have to schedule and take the exam via Prometric – they have an ultra-slow website. Waiting for 2 to 3 minutes between pages is not uncommon. Additionally, I remember the site going down all the time while I was taking my JBoss test in 2007.
• If you have made it through the Prometric website and you did NOT get the voucher beforehand, you have to go back all the way, feeling a slight bit of pain because you didn’t realize that you CAN NOT buy a voucher directly from Prometric – they do have pricing information on their site though.

In the end, putting aside all the technical trouble and the mix of information you find on the various SUN websites, I’m a little concerned with the title I’m going to earn – “Certified Programmer” sounds pretty nice, but as soon as you pass the exam, you won’t have written a single line of Java code, unless you have tried some of the examples from the various books. Good for me that I’ve been collecting development experience for about two and a half years by now, this makes the certificate a sensible … certificate :-) And of course it’s a prerequisite for the higher levels of certification, like the SCWCD, Sun Certified Web Component Developer, which I’m going to tackle in the near future. Wish me luck for the exam. Thanks :-)