zSAPping

Developers tend to be creative people, quite often with a talent for making music. Therefor one shouldn’t be surprised about the amount of geek song by developers. Lately my pal Vassil pointed me to this sond by Roy Osherove, .Net Developer and author of several free tools. I wonder if Sting would be fine wih this cover.

Mozilla Foundation released lately security update 2.0.0.8 for FireFox which broke my favorite Twitter client TwitterFox by that links in posts did not open anymore. I did a quick dive into the source and after a few tries I had a basic fix running. It is available for download here.

To install close FF, locate your profile directory and copy TwitterFox.jar to [profiledir]\extensions\twitternotifier@naan.net\chrome\

The fix will remove the ability for TwitterFox to locate a tab, that has the URL already opened but I can easily live without that.

The author is informed and we will hopefully see an official update shortly.

This morning I got the final proof that SDN is in deed running on a Enterprise Portal. Looks like they messed up the display configuration and the standard portal theme showed up for me…funny

Update: After logging out/logging in everything seems to be fine again.

In the last couple of days I had some time to work on a widget for a new instance of this blog I’m builing up at the moment. The idea was to have a sidebar widget with some information from my SDN profile like total points and the latest blog posts.

My blog is running on WordPress. Because I didn’t had any experience with PHP I found the del.icio.us widget by Automattic, Inc. very useful as a basic example for a plugin including how to build the widget configuration view. Frank Bueldges work on WP-RSSImport fitted well for reading the blog feed. Nigel James pointed me to curl which did a great job fetching a SDN Business Card related website to parse it for the name and total number of points.

The widget is called SDN Contributor and now available as version 1.0 and you can see it running on my new blog. I’ve set up a wiki page with all further information like installation instructions and download location. If you’re a SDN member and have a WordPress blog under your own control, give it a try.

Having daily automatic posts of my del.icio.us bookmarks to the blog looked like a welcome feature when I discovered it, but after using for a quite some time now it feels to me more like blog noise, so I turned it of last week. If you want to follow my bookmarks, there are still multiple ways to it.

1. If you have your own del.icio.us account, I would prefer you add me to your del.icio.us network. You will get a RSS feed for the bookmarks of all the people in your network. And people in your network will see that you added them and will get a chance to add you back to their network.
2. Consume my del.icio.us feed in your preferred feed reader.
3. My bookmarks are still available as a widget in my blog.

Some people at RailsConf this year had the idea to do charity funding at the conference and raised the amazing amount of 33.000$. Nigel James picked this post up and asked on SDN what SAP TechEd could do in this respect:

“We are about to go to a conference and spend a small fortune on fees, food, hotels and travel. What if you took a small portion of what you are going to spend on TechEd and made some contribution to help someone break out of poverty?”

The post got a lot of feedback in the comments and Craig and Dennis Howlett wrote about it to support the idea.

There will be over 1000 attendees at TechEd this year, spending up to 2500$ just for entry fee and an another couple of bucks for hotel and expenses. If only a small amount of this could go into charity, this could make a big difference and help a lot of people who really need it. I will do my best to support whatever may come out of this and I hope you will think about it too.

Update: Dennis Howlett commented on the efforts that James Governor and RedMonk is planning on their community day track at TechEd. Great first step!

As I had already told you I submitted two proposals for the TechEd speaker sessions in Munich. After some back and forth I finally got the confirmation mail, that the session about Portal unit tests made it under the last 15.

“We have had an additional opening for the SDN Community sessions at SAP TechEd ‘07 Munich, and your session was the next one in line from the voting. Your session “Unit Tests for Enterprise Portal Applications” is now an approved SDN Community session for Munich.”

Looks like someone didn’t took his chance and that would be my ticket to Munich. Fine for me. The final voting results should be up on SDN at any time today. I know for sure that Chris got an approval for both of his sessions so he will be in Munich too.

• NetWeaver JavaDocs
  NetWeaver JavaDocs on SDN.
  (tags: api java javadoc netweaver portal sap sdn)
• ThinkTank: Open-source Java Interface to Twitter
  GPL Java wrapper for the Twitter API.
  (tags: development library programming twitter java)
• Google Mashup Editor - Mashup Framework and Tools
  Google Mashup Editor is an AJAX development framework and a set of tools that enable developers to quickly and easily create simple web applications and is a great tool for grabbing information from feeds and letting users see and manipulate it.
  (tags: google mashup editor programming tools ajax framework)
• SAP Guidelines for iViews
  This edition of the SAP iView Guidelines comprises guidelines for the interaction design of iViews. It does not intend to replicate interaction rules found in other SAP guidelines. Instead, it typically presents only rules that are specific to iViews.
  (tags: sap portal iview guidelines design)

• P4WSAD Help
  Online help for the Perforce NWDS/WSAD plug-in containing step by step guides for all important tasks.
  (tags: java perforce nwds plug-in help tutorial)

Well, it took a little bit longer than expected but finally it’s done. The blog is from now on available at blog.zsapping.com. Links to old posts will get redirected by WordPress to the new domain, a service that I think is worth it 10 bucks per anno. WordPress is hosting millions of round about one million blogs for free, so I see this as a donation to their commitment to free blogging.

I haven’t decided yet where to go with the other subdomains. Some of them will probably be used for some necessary tools like a Wiki, SVN server etc. The www subdomain is still pointing to some silly, non configured start page. I leave that for now so at least nobody will expect the blog to appear there.

And now I should check all the places and services where I registered the blog with its old URL…

• InfoQ: Unit-Testing XML
  (tags: java xml unittest xmlunit)
• The J2EE(TM) 1.4 Tutorial
  (tags: sun java j2ee 1.4 tutorial)

• Moonwatcher: Peter Norvig on Theorizing from Data
  (tags: google developer days PeterNorvig data)
• YouTube - GoogleDeveloperDay’s Videos
  (tags: google developer days video)

A Linksys WRT54GS is the backbone of my network at home. A college once pointed me to this fine product because it has an OSS firmware. Shortly after its first release in 2003 some Linux hackers found out that the firmware was based on Linux. To avoid any legal arguments with the GPL horde, they open sources the firmware which led to a couple of branches that include bug fixes and feature enhancements, some of them only available in much more expensive router products. And it’s always good to know that such an important piece of hardware is backed up by an OSS community so it won’t go away anytime soon.

Until recently it served me well running on the original firmware but I was curious what else had become available in the meantime. First I tried DD-WRT, bricked it (because I didn’t read the installation instructions carefully enough), reinstalled it and finally found out, that their latest version seems to have some obscure problem with (german?) DSL which lead to regular disconnects on my side. Although its features were compelling (VPN/VoIP Server, WDS, RADIUS, IPv6 or mesh networks) I had to give up on this.

My router is running on Tomato now. I really do like it when something just works and Tomato is small, fast, looks great (AJAX & SVG) and does its job. Browsing the web “feels” faster for me now then the original firmware and it has some advanced and very welcome features (static DHCP, better security, statistics, etc.). But I will keep an eye on DD-WRT because I really would like to have a VPN tunnel into my local network and get access to my files from where ever I want.

• Tomato Firmware | polarcloud.com
  “Tomato is a small, lean and simple replacement firmware for Linksys’ WRT54G/GL/GS, Buffalo WHR-G54S/WHR-HP-G54 and other Broadcom-based routers.”
  (tags: firmware wrt54gs linksys router wireless networking hardware)

• Berliner Quakeforen :: View topic - WRT54GS v4 - can’t recover with all solutions
  (tags: wrt54gs linksys router revival guide)
• Scratch | How To
  (tags: kids programming technology language fun scratch children mit)
• Main Page - Mahalo
  Mahalo is the world’s first human-powered search engine. And the new project from Jason Calacanis?
  (tags: Search searchengine directory web2.0 guide service jasoncalacanis)

• Linksysinfo - The WRT54G Revival Guide.
  Killed my router with a firmware upgrade over the weekend
  (tags: firmware guide howto linksys router tech tutorial wrt54g)
• JavaOne Online Technical Sessions -
  Session papers for JavaOne 2007. Good read if you didn’t had the chance to go there.
  (tags: java javafx javaone netbeans 2007 session papers)
• Log4Twitter
  Interesting approach to use Twitter. Log4Twitter is an Appender plug-in for Log4j and Logback that sends log messages to twitter. With Log4Twitter, you can integrate any application using Log4j or Logback without any modification to the code.
  (tags: java programming twitter log4j)
• JFXBuilder - The First JavaFX Graphical Editor
  First visual tool support for building JavaFX apps.
  (tags: design development editor java javafx jfx programming software tools web)

• Towel Day :: A tribute to Douglas Adams (1952-2001)
  What the strag will think is that any man who can hitch the length and breadth of the galaxy, rough it, slum it, struggle against terrible odds, win through, and still knows where his towel is is clearly a man to be reckoned with.
  (tags: towel humor H2G2 Geek adams tribute hitchhikers)
• Jacob Lehrbaum Explains JavaFX Mobile
  6:12 minutes introduction to JavaFX by Jacob Lehrbaum. It’s important that JavaFX is not JavaFX Script, formaly known as F3.
  (tags: interview development java jme Podcast)
• Buchkritik: Die Commodore Story
  Es handelt sich bei Commodore nicht nur um eine Marke mit Erfolg, sondern auch um eine Geschichte des Scheiterns - von falscher Produktpolitik und schlechtem Management in einem heiss umkämpften Hardwaremarkt.
  (tags: commodore book review amiga c64)

• Main Page - Planet JFX - a Wikia wiki
  Planet JFX is an open-source documentation wiki for the new JavaFX scripting platform.
  (tags: wiki Programming community jfx web java javascript)

• DD-WRT Wiki
  OSS firmware replacement for my WRT54-GS router with cool features like static DHCP, build in VPN client, Dynamic DNS support, Samba FS Automount, RFlow, WAP2, etc.
  (tags: router linksys WRT-54GS OSS firmware)
• sellmic.com » “Easy Deployment Is Finally Here” session, my notes
  Summary of the JavaOne session from Ethan Nicholas about the next enhancements for Desktop Java.
  (tags: javaone session java jre desktop deployment)
• Scruffles.net: JavaFX in Perspective
  JavaFX is more like XAML or Flex. What’s missing is all the tool and IDE support to really compete with Silverlight and Flash.
  (tags: javafx silverlight flash flex comparison)
• Introducing Design Patterns in XML Schemas
  Usage of four XML schema design patterns and convertion in NetBeans.
  (tags: xml schema design patterns netbeans)

A couple of weeks ago there was a Call for Proposals on SDN for SAP’s annual developer conference TechEd. All SDN members were invited to submit session abstracts for Munich, Bangalore and Las Vegas, which got preselected and are now up for voting by the community until 28th of May.

Linda Bortolus already asked you to vote last week, just like Nigel James did, who is also with two PHP related proposals in the finals. There is still one week left and this is your chance to raise your voice and vote for what and who do you want to see at TechEd this year. And even if you don’t plan to go there, take the time and vote your favorites. Maybe you will benefit from material of sessions released after TechEd.

I submitted three papers and two of them made it into the finals.

1. Unit Test for Enterprise Portal Applications

I became a member of an XP user group a couple of month ago. It’s located in Düsseldorf and we meet up once a month. The first sessions were exciting. The topic we started with was TDD and it was really eye opening to see this done live by a bunch of experienced developers. This is one of the things for me I just don’t get only by reading about it but I had to see and feel how it’s done to get my head around it.

As most of my current development is happening in Enterprise/NetWeaver Portal, it was an obvious next step to figure out how to do it in that environment. So this session is all about TDD and the tools and APIs to do Unit Test in EP and my experiences and lessons learned from the last couple of month.

2. Maximize your Productivity in NWDS

Maybe you have followed my “Pimp Up My NWDS” blog series on SDN. OK, there were only two and they were written already last year but only because there were no follow ups doesn’t mean I’m not constantly trying to optimize my virtual developer workplace where I have to spend most of my working time day by day. Actually I have another PUMN blog in the work and a bunch of other add-ons I’m using in NWDS and plan to write about.

But this session won’t be only about NWDS/Eclipse add-ons but also about how to build up your overall development environment. Development on the NetWeaver Java stack is very different that good old ABAP and I don’t talk about the language perspective here. To keep productive and stay independent you have to have your own server running and once you have to jump between projects with different Java WAS versions it can get nasty.

I wasn’t sure in the beginning if this would fit into the sessions topics that are normally covered but it got excepted for the finals so here we are.

Another sessions I want to point you to is the one by Christian Günther where he talks about Portal Security. Chris is a good friend of mine and I can say he knows what he’s talking about and I expect this to become a really interesting session.

And not to forget Gregor Wolf. He is also taking his chance and is in the finals with a session on Type3 integration.