BangBits

So after 5+ years, we finally have a new version of Java. In spite of mixed reviews , as a software engineer working a lot on the JVM, I still wanted to take it for a spin. However, being an Ubuntu user, this involves a tad bit of work since there are only RPM and binary packages available at this time. So until there are official or unofficial .deb packages available, we're going to have to sneak in the raw binaries outselves. The following is how I did this on my 64bit Ubuntu 11.04 system. I take no responsibility in breaking your existing Java installation yada yada, you do this at your own responsibility. Procedure Start by downloading the binary. casper@workstation:~$ wget http://download.oracle.com/otn-pub/java/jdk/7/jdk-7-linux-x64.tar.gz Then unpack it. casper@workstation:~$ tar -xzf jdk-7-linux-x64.tar.gz Remove packed archive and move/rename the extracted folder into something a little more Ubuntu appropiate. casper@workstation:~$ sudo rm java-7-sun-1

Modding Note that the following covers the DS211+ device, which is characterized by being based on the Marvell Kirkwood mv6282 ARM core (1.6Ghz version of 1.2Ghz mv6281). AFAIK the content of this blog entry should be equally applicable to all DS211 variations, but you should consult the Synology wiki for your device to be certain. While quite feature rich out-of-the-box, developer types will likely want to make their NAS do even more, either out of a real need or just to tinker. For instance, I eventually plan to connect my USB weather station and generate live charts. Because of the modding desire, Synology has a faily comprehensive wiki about the subject. To make a long story short, ease of modding is greatly assisted by the possibility of installing Optware package manager. Installing Optware Optware (ipkg) is an online package system a la what you may know from Debian/Ubuntu. This makes it easy to locate, install and uninstall compiled binaries (*.ipk) through the command

Having recently purchased a new NAS device , as well as upgraded network cables in my house to cat6 (1Gbps), I started wondering about just how fast and healthy my network setup was. Are all cables in order? Are any of my switches a bottleneck? Any particular slow endpoints? performance challenged There are of course commercial software to assist in this, but after having compiled and loaded up a bunch of Linux software onto my small NAS, it was only natural to give "iperf" a try. It's a small open source client-server utility you start in listening mode on one device, and in transmission mode on another, and have it transfer a bunch of random data over TCP. You can obtain iperf from sourceforge , from your Linux package manager or just Google for precompiled binaries if you are lazy. Simple unidirectional test The process is simple, log onto the receiving device and run iperf in listening mode, in the following case it's my Synology NAS: NAS> iperf -s -p 5

Subversion (SVN) is a decent step up from CVS, and Maven (MVN) likewise from Ant. However one thing continues to bug me about how the two work together. Since MVN requires a fixed directory layout of /trunk, /tags and /branches, it becomes more and more painful to checkout or update a complete corporate source tree from one of the lower roots. In the perfect world, every project may be checked in at the root of the tree, but we all know the world ain't perfect and it's not unusual to require checkout and build of up to a dozen SNAPSHOT dependencies spread around deeper in the hierarchy. There is no (to my knowledge) easy way around this, either you have to live with insanely long checkout times and the associated waste of disk space, or meticulously checkout each every project trunk individually. As unimpressed I am by the Java language itself, the hat must come off to the plethora of readily available libraries on this platform. One of these libraries is SVNKit , a complete cl