Datacenter in a box – ‘Where would you like it delivered to, sir’

This is an awesome idea from Sun – fill a shipping container full of processing power and associated support equipment, all installed, setup and ready to go, and then deliver to where ever the customer needs it.

Sun’s ‘Project Blackbox’ is exactly that. Datacenters in shipping containers, ready to be delivered. Offered in various configurations, with one that will give you a computer with enough processing power to put you in the Top 200 list of supercomputers, this really is an awesome idea to get processing power delivered to where ever you need it.

Netbeans 5.5 released!

Netbeans 5.5 has been officially released. The 5.5 version has been in beta for quite some time now, and even in beta form was extremely stable and usable.

I personally switched from Eclipse to Netbeans for my own development projects at home since I was frustrated with the Eclipse WTP approach for building web projects. Netbeans 5.5 really has it all from the groundup, without the need to go out and install plugins like WTP that give you the functionality that really should already be there in the base version.

PlayB3yond.com – Sony is ramping up the hype ready for the Nov 17 launch of the PS3

Sony have an awesome promotional site for the upcoming P3 – www.playb3yond.com. The site has two currently available videos covering the processing power of the Cell processor and the storage capacility of the BluRay disk. More videos coming are under the titles of ‘Control’, ‘Higer Definition’, ‘Multi-dimensional’, and ‘Games’.

If I can find one on day one will I be buying one? Heck, yeah.

Hours wasted with Acegi’s FilterSecurityInterceptor & CONVERT_URL_TO_LOWERCASE_BEFORE_COMPARISON

Sometimes the answer to a problem is staring you right in your face. Across several evenings I spent a number of hours trying to work out why my URL based security using Acegi for my Grails application I am working on would not work. I though I was misunderstanding how to specify the wildcards using Ant syntax, and so kept trying many different variations of patterns to try and match the URLs I was trying to protect.

It finally dawned on me that the CONVERT_URL_TO_LOWERCASE_BEFORE_COMPARISON instruction defined with the FilterSecurityInterceptor was causing all my problems. Some of my URLs contain mixed case, and I had blindly copied them into my configuration file, and forgot all about this setting to convert all URLs to lower case before comparing. Wow, that seems so obvious now, but I think it took me at least 6 hours of head scratching and reading many posts online before I worked out what was going wrong.

For an example of my configuration file and more details, see my other post here.