Groovy on NetBeans again

I tried installing Groovy support in Netbeans 6.1 on Windows and failed. I tried again on my Mac today but got this:

Should I stop trying? There where a lot of blog posts about Groovy support in NetBeans 6.1 before it was released, but is it really a supported feature?

Why do hosting providers increase prices?

I use Layeredtech as a hosting provider. It has been working fairly well. But lately they have started to increase the price substantually on existing servers. They clame that “As with so many service related items and goods purchased in today’s economic landscape, costs associated with providing those goods have increased.”

Is that true? Are the cost for electricity, computers, bandwidth and employees increasing that fast? Layeredtech has raised the price around 20% yearly, on HP servers that now are three years old.

I think it is too much and we will be moving our business away from Layeredtech, I feel that they are betting on the lock-in effect: it takes time and is expensive to move your services to another provider.

Are other hosting provider also increasing their prices?

Groovy on Netbeans 6.1

How do you enable Groovy support on Netbeans 6.1 fcs?

I read somewhere that you enable the development update center. So I did and then Groovy & Grails was available. I selected it and it said it wanted to install a bunch of other modules, among them Weblogic and WebSphere support (??).

After they where installed I restarted and Netbeans didn’t start. I had to reinstall from scratch. Not fun.

NetBeans 6.1 is (not) slow

I love the new features in NetBeans 6.1. Groovy support and faster startup are my favorites. But the responsiveness in the IDE is worse than in 6.0. It is so slow that I am thinking about downgrading to 6.0.
Expanding a tree, moving from tab to tab in the editor, even getting a menu displayed is often dead slow.

I am surprised I haven’t seen this mentioned in the blogs. Is it only me who have this issue? I’m running on a first generation MacBook with 2 Gb of memory. Java 5.0 naturally (Thanks for nothing, Apple).

I guess I should be looking at upgrading my laptop…

Update:
I did and the slowness was probably all to blame on the old laptop falling a part. On this new shiny MacBook Pro 6.1 rocks. Java 6, at LAST.

Petition: OOXML and the Swedish Standards Institute

A petition (in Swedish) has been created to persuade the Swedish Standards Institute (a member organization of ISO) to appeal the ISO decision to make Microsoft’s OOXML an official standard.

Sign here.

Lacie Ethernet Disk Mini Home

I bought a Lacie Ethernet Disk Mini Home a while ago and I am quite disappointed.

- Access to the shared drives are really slow.

- It is supposed to server music to iTunes but that feature doesn’t work for me. I can see the service in iTunes, but when I click on it I only get an error message.

- The hard drive is constantly working, day and night. I makes it very noisy and how will this affect the drive? Lacie says this is because of a bug in the media server software Twonky that they use. This bug was reported and analyzed in February, and an update has been promised for a long time.

- The web UI is very slow to work with.

I would not recommend buying it. At least not until they have fixed the issues.

.Mac madness

I am using .Mac. It was time to renew the payment and as far as I know I was not notified. If you go into the Preference panel it will say how many days that remains on the subscription, but after setting up the service, why would you go in there? It should just be doing its thing. When the subscription is about to end it should notify me on boot with a clear popup.

Ok, so it is just a matter of getting the VISA card ready and renew. No problem? Well, not quite.
Even if .Mac remembers my username, password and address, after renewing it will treat me as a NEW member. This means all my data is lost! I have all the data on both my macs, but when the sync process starts on them it will look at the .Mac server and just remove stuff! I think I have seen a warning when it is adding/removing a lot of entries to the Keychain and Addressbook, but the data on my synced iDisk was just silently DELETED.

Luckily I had one file opened so I realized it in time. I could go into the second mac and change it to overwrite the content on .Mac from this machine. But I am a software engineer. What about someone like my mother? User friendly? Not really.

.Mac is a lousy, overpriced service. The only reason I pay for it is that it is the only stable solution to keep my macs in sync. Now I start to question if that last feature is worth paying €100 for yearly…

Can we get MySQL drivers released under CDDL now, Jonathan?

Sun buys the Swedish database company MySQL.

I hope they will dual-license MySQL, or at least the drivers, with a more business friendly license like CDDL, Apache License or LGPL.

MySQL AB, as a small company, needed the strict GPL license to have a valid business model. But Sun has a totally different focus in their Open Source offerings.

Bloomberg: “BEA is the only vendor that can handle millions of transactions”

Some analyst from Cross Research commented on Oracle buying BEA on Bloomberg TV today: “BEA is the only application server that can handle millions of transactions without problem. This will strengthen Oracle in the middleware segment.”

I wonder what IBM, Sun and JBoss have to say about that analysis… When I hear stupid, shallow commentary like this on a subject where I have some knowledge, I always think about the validity of comments on other subjects. Do journalists ever know what they are talking about?

It is like watching Independence Day and laugh about the aliens using a RS-232 serial port in their ship so that Jeff Goldbloom could upload the virus. Yeah, right.

Progress on Java 6 on Macs

Apple has released a new preview of Java 6. Only for Leopard and only for Macs with Core 2 Duo or Mac Pros.

This is a step in the right direction.