Month: July 2012

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Remaining Digg.com assets sold for $500k to Betaworks

Digg.com, the social news site, has sold off it’s brand, technology and website for the bargain price of $500k to Betaworks, who are looking to revive their own news sharing site with Digg’s technology. Previous parts of Digg were also recently sold – The Washington Post bought half of Digg’s staff for $12 million, and LinkedIn bought patents from Digg for a reported $4 million.

All together, that not a bad sum, but back in 2008 Google was rumored to have offered $200 million to buy them out, an offer which they refused.

It’s incredible how fast companies rise and fall in the internet world. AOL was at one point the largest ISP worldwide and now all but disappeared. Netscape was the choice of Internet browsers and webserver software was widely used – now long gone. Yahoo is also possibly on the brink of disappearing, now largely irrelevant as the world around them has changed faster than they’ve been able to keep up with. It’s an interesting and fast changing world out there, and as technology continues to evolve and change, there’s going to be plenty more companies who are are the top right now, slowly disappear over time.

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2007-2008 Macs will be oldest models supported by OS X Mountain Lion

For the next upcoming Mac OS X release, Mountain Lion, the oldest models supported (depending on type) will be those released around 2007-2008.

I have an Early 2008 MacBook Pro which I use as my daily machine, and it’s still going strong. I’ve maxed out the memory and replaced the HDD but other than that I don’t have any immediate plans to replace it. Looks like I just squeezed in under the wire though to get Mountain Lion support, so an upgrade maybe on the cards sometime in the next couple of years.

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Configuring an @MessageDriven bean on JBoss AS7

If you forget to add the destination property to the activationConfig for an MDB, when deploying to JBoss AS7 you’ll get this NullPointerException. Would be better if it told you what required property was missing:

16:30:29,007 WARN  [org.hornetq.ra.inflow.HornetQActivation] (default-short-running-threads-threads - 1) Failure in HornetQ activation org.hornetq.ra.inflow.HornetQActivationSpec(ra=org.hornetq.ra.HornetQResourceAdapter@6ba59338 destination=null destinationType=javax.jms.Queue ack=Auto-acknowledge durable=false clientID=null user=null maxSession=15): java.lang.NullPointerException
    at javax.naming.NameImpl.<init>(NameImpl.java:281) [rt.jar:1.7.0_04]
    at javax.naming.CompositeName.<init>(CompositeName.java:231) [rt.jar:1.7.0_04]
    at org.jboss.as.naming.util.NameParser.parse(NameParser.java:49)
    at org.jboss.as.naming.NamingContext.parseName(NamingContext.java:440)
    at org.jboss.as.naming.NamingContext.lookup(NamingContext.java:213)
    at javax.naming.InitialContext.lookup(InitialContext.java:411) [rt.jar:1.7.0_04]
    at org.hornetq.ra.Util.lookup(Util.java:174) [hornetq-ra-2.2.11.Final.jar:]
    at org.hornetq.ra.inflow.HornetQActivation.setupDestination(HornetQActivation.java:454) [hornetq-ra-2.2.11.Final.jar:]
    at org.hornetq.ra.inflow.HornetQActivation.setup(HornetQActivation.java:287) [hornetq-ra-2.2.11.Final.jar:]
    at org.hornetq.ra.inflow.HornetQActivation$SetupActivation.run(HornetQActivation.java:605) [hornetq-ra-2.2.11.Final.jar:]
    at org.jboss.jca.core.workmanager.WorkWrapper.run(WorkWrapper.java:212)
    at org.jboss.threads.SimpleDirectExecutor.execute(SimpleDirectExecutor.java:33)
    at org.jboss.threads.QueueExecutor.runTask(QueueExecutor.java:801)
    at org.jboss.threads.QueueExecutor.access$100(QueueExecutor.java:45)
    at org.jboss.threads.QueueExecutor$Worker.run(QueueExecutor.java:821)
    at java.lang.Thread.run(Thread.java:722) [rt.jar:1.7.0_04]
    at org.jboss.threads.JBossThread.run(JBossThread.java:122)

Here’s a correctly configured MDB:

@MessageDriven(mappedName = "queue/QueueName", activationConfig = {
        @ActivationConfigProperty(propertyName = "acknowledgeMode", propertyValue = "Auto-acknowledge"),
        @ActivationConfigProperty(propertyName = "destinationType", propertyValue = "javax.jms.Queue"),
        @ActivationConfigProperty(propertyName = "destination", propertyValue = "queue/queueName") })
public class QueueListener implements MessageListener {
...
}

 

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Upgrade to Windows 8 for $39.99?

I primarily use Mac OS X and Linux at home, although for work I’m still obliged to used Windows 7 as it’s the corporate desktop standard. I occasionally run some Windows games on XP using Bootcamp on my Mac, but I’ve never felt the need to shell out the cash for Windows 7, it just seems like too much given that I’d only rarely use it.

Microsoft just announced their upgrade prices for Windows 8, and at $39.99 it’s almost in the trivial cost ballpark, low enough that I might upgrade my XP in Bootcamp and not think twice. I imagine at this price point this is the effect that Microsoft is looking for, given the trouble they’ve had in recent years trying to get people to upgrade from their older Windows versions. Given a low enough price that it’s a no brainer, I’m sure a number of people will jump on board and upgrade. Any more than that though, I know I wouldn’t. I’d still rather something in the $20 to $30 price range like the typical Mac OS X upgrade prices though.

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