Franchu’s lair

Hoy he conducido por primera vez un avión… y es una experiencia increible!

Hasta ahora sabía como encender la electrónica… ahora ya se encender los motores y mover el avión… una prueba del recorrido que he hecho hoy la podeis ver en la imagen… no está mal para una primera vez

También me han explicado como despegar… pero me han dicho que lo chungo es aterrizar, así que mejor que no lo intente

Hoy estoy feliz!

Today I received the free CDs of the Solaris 10 OS by Sun Microsystems that I had ordered on 22/01/07. That same day I got in my e-mail a confirmation that said:

We have received your request for a free Solaris 10 and Developer Tools DVD Software Kit. Please allow at least 10 business days for your kit to arrive to the mailing address you provided. Please also note there are some countries Sun cannot ship media to.

Well… it seems it took a bit longer

Anyway, now I have at home a wonderful box with three original Solaris 10 DVDs:

• Solaris 10 Operating System - SPARC DVD
• Solaris 10 Operating System - x86 DVD
• Developer Tools - Sun Studio 11, Sun Java Studio Creator 2 Update 1, Sun Java Studio Enterprise 8, NetBeans 5.0

In order to try it, I have installed it as a virtual machine in Parallels in my MacBook Pro. The installation was very easy and straightforward: New VM –> OS Type: Solaris 10 –> You set up the drive size and memory allocated to the VM, and then the installation starts from the DVD

Then the installation is menu based, and by leaving the default options the installations proceeds flawlessly

After the installation finishes, if you want to enable the X11 server, just follow the instructions that I found in one of the Parallels forums:

/usr/X11/bin/xorgconfig
and then the following entries (the –> denotes my comments - don’t type these
[ENTER]
5 –> PS/2 Mouse
Y –> emulate 3 button mouse
[ENTER] –> default for /dev/kdmouse
7 –> Generic 104-Key PC
87 –> UK Keyboard
[ENTER] –> for keyboard variant
n –> additional XKB options
[ENTER]
6 –> Non-interlaced SVGA 1024×768
2 –> 50-90 vertical sync rate
apple20 –> identifier for your monitor
y –> yes, you would like to look at the card database
0 –> Generic Vesa compatible option
[ENTER] –> to continue
5 –> 4096K of memory
ati1600 –> identifier for you graphics card
4 –> the modes are ok
4 –> 16 bits
then say Y to write to /etc/X11.conf

Afterwards you just need to reboot, and you have a fully operation Solaris10 VM

You can see two screenshots I have taken, one of the login window, and another one of the desktop.

I will keep writing about it when I’ll discover more interesting things

Last week I needed to create some iCal feeds populating the list of events from a database in a Tomcat + MySQL environment.

The first impulse was to create a JSP file that complies with the iCal format defined in the RFC2445 but in the end it resulted in an ugly and unmaintainable code. So the idea died on the spot and another solution was to be found.

Fortunately, there is a nice library called iCal4j developed by Ben Fortuna that makes it very easy to create iCal compatible files from a Java application. Then, the natural solution would have been to create a servlet that would output the iCal file, but the code that I was developing was to be maintained by many people that are not necessarily comfortable coding in Java.

That is why, I started a new project iCal-taglib, that provides a JSP taglib wrapper around the functionality implemented in the library iCal4j. There is still a lot of functionality to be implemented, but at least now, creating a calendar from any JSP page is as easy as:

<ical:calendar>
<ical:event>
<ical:summary>Test</ical:summary>
<ical:startdate>2007-04-10</ical:startdate>
</ical:event>
</ical:calendar>

to create the iCal compatible text:

BEGIN:VCALENDAR
PRODID:-//Miguel Gil Biraud//ical-taglib 0.1//based on iCal4j 1.0//EN//
VERSION:2.0
METHOD:PUBLISH
CALSCALE:GREGORIAN
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTAMP:20070410T183339Z
UID:detczmfg5tgah0ldwfkf8@franchu.net
SUMMARY:Test
DTSTART;VALUE=DATE:20070410
END:VEVENT
END:VCALENDAR

In order to use it, you need to download the iCal4j files and the ical-taglib files and place them in the WEB-INF/lib folder of you application server.

Much development is still needed, but the taglib implements so far the basic functionality needed to create simple calendars that are accepted by the main calendaring software available in the market.