Good news! The Apache Incubator Log4PHP project graduated as subproject to the Apache Logging project. This is really a big step forward! The next days I will try to push the real work behind a graduation forward, moving webpages and svn and such. After that move we’ll continue with a new small release. Cheers all!
New Java Magazin article
March 5th, 2010
In the new Java Magazin is a printed version of my review of “Apache Geronimo 2.1: Quick Reference” available. It’s only a short entry to this Java Magazin, but for the sake of completeness I listed it also in my publications section. However, this one comes with a DVD – on it are all Java Magazines from 2009. Thats pretty nice to have, esspecially because I didn’t have the time to read all the issues last year.
Log4PHP tries to graduate to Apache Logging
March 2nd, 2010The past year has been very well for Log4PHP. As you might have noticed, the Log4PHP 2.0.0 release is out. There has been some good feedback so far. Some users even contributed smaller bugfixes or the trace level which wasn’t in the API before. Besides that, there is a good activity on the mailinglist and there are at least 3 active committers. In other terms: time to graduate an bring out Log4PHP from the temporary incubator project 
Now Log4PHP needs to succeed 3 votes. One for the Log4PHP team to vote for graduating; one for Apache Logging to accept the podling as a subproject. And finally – after the first two have succeeded – a vote on the incubator list to release the podling to its final destination.
The first two votes are already running and it looks very good so far. Votes need to be open another day then the next step can be done. For those who are interested – there is a detailed document about graduation available.
Let’s see how it works out – I think everything could be in place in quite less time, maybe the next two or three weeks.
Rewire Propellerheads Reason 4.0 to Logic Pro 8
January 22nd, 2010Rewiring Reason is a nice feature – you can use all the Reason synths, effects and instruments in Logic Pro (it should work even in Express Edition). Basis is the so called Rewire protocoll which has been invented by Propellerhead before a good while.
Basically its pretty forward to wire both application together. You just need to know that one of the apps should be the Master, while the other is the slave. Usually you have Logic Pro as the Master, from which you control everything and Reason only as some kind of big effect box.
To start with it, please open Logic Pro and afterwards Propellerhead Reason – NOT vice versa. The master needs to be opened first.
Then create a new track in Logic. The type is “External MIDI”.
In Reason, step up to highest hardware component, the hardware device. There is a button called “Adv. Midi Device”. Click it.
In Logic you are now able to choose Reason in the Library. Just select your “External MIDI” Track and open the Library. You’ll see a folder called “Reason” and then several instruments, depending of what you created. I have chosen one called “Synth”.
Now the signal should go into Reason and do things, but you need to wire it back into Logic to hear it. This can be done with a new track in Logic, an AUX track. You can create it in the Mixer view in “Options > Create new Aux”. Once done you are able to choose the channel which comes from Reason in Logics “I/O” section. I have chosen R/Cha 9/10. If you choose the stereo sum: this already works, but if you want to separate between different channels you need to patch the reason components. I wanted to use the single outputs, so, back to reason.
In Reason you can choose in Options that you would like to view the Rack from the back.
Choose the instrument you want and patch two cabels from the for example master out in the hardware controller on top. The hardware controller finally decides which channels you can hear in Logic. Because I have choosen 9 and 10, my stereo out from the instrument goes into the hardware device in slot 9 and 10 too.
Once done, this is finished and you have successfully rewired Logic to Reason and vice versa. Now your creativity can begin and learning start Enjoy!
Enjoy!Wavediver: An Adobe Wave API
January 8th, 2010Readers of my blog maybe have already noticed it: Jason found out, that somebody has taken my code, removed the copyright stuff and uploaded it to the Wordpress directory. I was quite surprised – the content-thief is telling on his blog that he had two weeks holiday while he came across Wave and implemented this plugin. I mean, what the f***? Are people really thinking that nobody will notice that theft in the case of beta software? I just can say: don’t use tecinfor-wave. This is outdated code and the distributor didn’t write it – I doubt he can help in error cases.
But everything has its good sides. I decided to put my development on that plugin more into public and created a new google code project: Wavediver. You can find the original Wordpress plugin there. I will try to update the API and make it more usable. At the moment it’s a little bit, well, ugly Let’s hope that it will reach the status to be included in the PIWI framework later.
Already included is a cli.php file, which enables you to send Adobe Wave message from the command line, just with: php -f cli.php. That can help testing.
If there is anybody who wants to join up – don’t hesitate.
That’s all – 2009
December 23rd, 2009The years is on it’s end and this is finally the last post (I guess). It was a very hectic year. On day life I worked on two different huge projects. At night life I joined Apache Software Foundation as Committer for Commons, Committer and PMC for Log4PHP and today I have been elected as PMC for the Logging TLP. That’s great, I really enjoy working with the Apache people. And could learn lots, of course. In that time I helped with Commons Compress 1.0 and Log4PHP 2.0.0. Unfortunatly I had several ideas for which I simply had not time left. So I wanted to put my Json Component to Commons and write a Compression Component for Apache Camel. Well, maybe next year.
I read several books this year, but could not find any extraordinary ones. Except for the very good new novels of Boris Koch. This man is quite a rising star in germanys youth book division. Even when I am not exactly what people call young, I enjoyed his books very much. If you like fantastic and great stories, you should try him. Of course, only german – at the moment. In the technic section, there is only one book I want to mention. Its Extending and Embedding PHP from Sara Golemon. I am afraid that it’s currently sold out, but I hope there will be a new edition out soon. Well, my efforts of compiling PHP are not succesfull currently, but maybe next year I will get it running and then with Saras help I might be able
Only less articles have been published in 2009. But I in autumn I created several new stuff for the PHP Magazin. Hopefully they will appear in the next two issues. Let’s see.
Musically I have started to play Shakuhachi which has become very important to me. It’s a long way to go with that bamboo flute, but I will try. On the synths part of life, I upgrade to Logic 8 which is MUCH fun. Unfortunatly shortly after I bought it, Logic 9 came out. Guess I will not update the next time….
Let’s see what the new year brings. I wish you all a merry chrismas and a happy new year!
Apache Log4PHP 2.0.0 released
December 14th, 2009After long work, I sent out the announcement for the first Log4PHP release this morning. Let’s see how this one works out – first reports from DBpedia users were promising.
Here is the original statement:
The Log4PHP community is pleased to introduce the Apache Log4PHP 2.0.0 (Incubating) release [1]. It’s the first Log4PHP release since 2004 and tons of changes have been done. Finally Log4PHP has become a well tested framework made for PHP 5. Many thanks to all the contributors who made this release possible. Please download [2] Log4PHP and enjoy
The Log4PHP team
[1] http://incubator.apache.org/log4php/changes-report.html
[2] http://incubator.apache.org/log4php/download.html
Book review: Apache Geronimo Quick Reference
December 9th, 2009
I recently got a copy of Apache Geronimo 2.1: Quick Reference
My first impression was: wow, is that really a quick reference? The book has a good format and comes with roundabout 370 pages. I hoped for a short book in these times I don’t have too much time for huge novels in the kind of “Gone with the wind”. However, I jumped through the content and figured out that this is actually a quick reference - very good for the impatient developers like me!
In fact, this book covers all relevant topics I can imagine: it starts with an introduction and a description of Geronimos architecture, which gives an brief (sometimes a bit short) overview of how Geronimo works with its plugins and its deployment strategy. I would have loved to read a bit more about the “hot deployment” feature of Geronimo. In JBoss world, this has brought me some headache. In this book it’s only covered with roundabout one page, just saying that it exists, were you need to place your files and how you can monitor that activity. Even later it’s not mentioned in special. Well, but that’s ok for a Quick Reference.
After this, one gets in touch with the most important knowledge of JMS, Database connectivity and JPA. Then there is an extraordinary good chapter about Security. Its one of the biggest chapters in this book and one can feel quite well how expierenced these guys are. Topics are handled in some kind of How-To way, like “Creating a new keystore” or “Changing a private key password”. These guys know what they speak about, probably the best chapter in this book.
Then it comes to CORBA, which I found also interesting, but to short in general. JNDI was reduced to the most important “put your hands there” information. Then it comes to Geronimo Plugins. This one was very interesting too and I wished to read more about it, but well, again, it’s short reference. You can find much Listings in this chapter, but I cannot say that they helped me too much without digging in the containers documentation.
In the administration chapter, the authors show the different portlets Geronimo provides for monitoring actions. It’s basically a walk through of the different pages of the Geronimo console. I think, this chapter could have been improved much more. For example, the Thread Pools Portlet is described with just one sentence: “…lists the thread pools defined in the server, and lets you monitor the thread pools.”. Ok, I don’t need a book for that information. Some other portlets are described a bit more in detail, but nothing which makes me to a Geronimo Guru.
Later you will have a How-To use the Geronimo Eclipse Plugin. It contains lots of screenshots which helps you to create a project specifically for the Geronimo. More impressive was the Cluster chapter. Clustering is a difficult topic and I would use this section for doing the job. It’s a good mix between explanation and reference.
Last chapter I was eager to see was the one with the Geronimo Internals. At some parts it reads like a smaller version of an API. It should help to develop own GBeans and it does, but not so much that I would have a huge benefit compared to the docs.
Final words: this one is really a reference and not a teaching book. If you would like to buy it, you should have some knowledge about JEE and about Containers in general. This book will not help you to understand the technologies behind. It’s more a collection of How-Tos, and that is what I expected from a Quick Reference. The authors made this point clear on the cover, were they are stating that you need to know about JEE5 concepts. At some points I would have preferred some more information. Sometimes I would have wished that they put not so much unnecessary listings (I don’t need import statements in java listing nor do I need XML-Comments in a 10 line XML file). I think, if you are developing an application, this book is a nice to have. If you are more an administrator and need to develop, package or cluster Geronimo, this book will probably give you some benefits. Especially the security chapter is well done.
However, thanks for this book, I like it, but it’s not one of my all-time faves.
First steps into Apache Geronimo
November 18th, 2009The last weeks I struggled with JavaScript. I hated it quite soon, but with knowledge came some comfort and finally I am now able to use jQuery without too much pain. Let’s hope that I don’t have requirements which need a deep knowledge of that stuff However, that brought me to the idea (as odd as it sounds) to try out some server side javascript. It was exactly the right time when Packt Pub. contacted me about their new book on Apache Geronimo.
I wanted to step into Geronimo before a few years, but JBoss, Weblogic and even Websphere were used on my projects. No time for playing with Geronimo. Well, but with this book I will start finally and check out whats possible with this little beast
From the table of contents, server side javascript seems not to be on the list. But thats not to bad – I think I have a new idea for a blog post.
However, I am looking forward to this book. Packt already informed that it’s on the way to me. So far a very good impression of this publisher. Polite people, quick delivery. Let’s see how good the book is.
Komuso Shakuhachi Konzert
October 30th, 2009Meister IKKEI Hanada
spielt traditionelle, seit dem 14. Jahrhundert überlieferte Musik der Komuso (Fuke Shakuhachi-Mönche) auf der Shakuhachi (japanische Bambusflöte).
Samstag, 14. November 2009, 19.00 Uhr
Münchner Kung Fu und Tai Chi Sportschule GmbH
Unterer Anger 15, 80331 München
Karten zu 15 Euro
Telefonische Reservierung unter:
Tel: 08179/929375
Fax: 08179/929376