I’ve just finished the development of an Infinispan 4.0 based Hibernate second level cache provider. This will be included from next Hibernate 3.5 release onwards but if you cannot wait and wanna play with it in the mean time, just checkout Hibernate trunk from our SVN repository and run ‘mvn install’.

I’ve also written a wiki called “Using Infinispan as JPA/Hibernate Second Level Cache Provider” that should help users understand how to configure the Infinispan cache provider and how to make the most of it!

More detailed information can be found in the Infinispan blog. Don’t forget though to digg the story or vote for it on dzone :)

Tracklisting:

01. Your Infamous Harp – Lightfall
02. Alix Perez – Melanie
03. Madmen & Poets – Afraid Of Jazz (Lenzman Mix)
04. Cyantific – Empty Streets
05. Paul Sg – Untouchable
06. Total Science – Archive
07. Metrik – Your World
08. Mistabishi – Talk Me Down
09. XRS, Dj Marky – The Wizard (Innerground)
10. Nu:Tone – Balaclava In My System
11. Fourward – Fury
12. Mistabishi – The Light’s Really Bad
13. Chase & Status – Brazil
14. B-Complex – Beatiful Lies
15. Danny Howells – Flight Home (Matrix Remix)
16. Logistics – Cosmonaught
17. Danny Breaks – Volume 1 (Logistics Remix)
18. Sinistarr, Kiat – Black Diamonds
19. London Elektricity – Just One Second
20. Kept Blue – My Sister’s Sex Can Produce Some Sweet Objects

Links:

• Subscribe to Podcast
• Subscribe via iTunes
• Direct Download

Enjoy :)

The first app I used was twitterfox which even though had limited functionality, allowed me to follow other people’s tweets. Since joining Infinispan, I’ve had to manage Infinispan’s twitter account as well as mine, so twitterfox couldn’t help much there. Besides, I wanted to know what people were saying about Infinispan and to do that, I needed to keep an eye on a live feed of Infinispan mentions on twitter.

A few weeks ago Thomas Heute showed me a pretty cool application called tweetdeck that runs on top Adobe AIR and it looked pretty promising: multiple account management, live search feeds in the screen…etc. This week, I finally got around to installing it on Fedora 11 but it wasn’t all that straightforward. Here are the steps:

1. A warning before we start. If running Fedora 11, do not try installing it via the “Download now, it’s free” link in the tweetdeck site. In my particular case, whenever I tried to install it this way, I was getting an Error# 3003 and an SE linux security warning like this even though I had typed the root password correctly:

   Summary:
SELinux is preventing rpm (unconfined_execmem_t) "transition" rpm_script_t.
Detailed Description:
SELinux denied access requested by rpm. It is not expected that this access is required by rpm and this access may signal an intrusion attempt. It is also possible that the specific version or configuration of the application is causing it to require additional access.
Allowing Access:
You can generate a local policy module to allow this access - see FAQ (http://fedora.redhat.com/docs/selinux-faq-fc5/#id2961385) Or you can disable SELinux protection altogether. Disabling SELinux protection is not recommended. Please file a bug report (http://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/enter_bug.cgi) against this package.
Additional Information:
...etc

2. So instead, download Adobe AIR manually
3. Go to the directory where you downloaded Adobe AIR install file and execute:
   
   
   ^?View Code BASH

   1 2	chmod +x AdobeAIRInstaller.bin ./AdobeAIRInstaller.bin

4. Download tweetdeck from this link. Don’t worry if there’s a newer version available in the site, because it will ask you to update as soon as it figures out there’s a newer version available.
5. Finally, execute the Adobe AIR installer and select the downloaded .air file:
   
   
   ^?View Code BASH

   1	sudo /usr/bin/Adobe\ AIR\ Application\ Installer

That’s it! I’ve now been using it tweetdeck for a few days and it rocks! Although it’s Adobe and hence, closed source, tweetdeck is a million years ahead of any native twitter Linux app. As someone said on twitter, it also kicks Java Web Start’s arse big time!

Happy tweeting :)

Having spent the last 3 weeks in Ibiza, would it make any sense at all to stay in front of a computer, specially when it’s so nice out there that you just wanna be blessed by the sun, or drink up some freezing cold mojitos? 3 years ago I went to Ibiza for a week and discovered its nightlife, this year I had the luck of spending 3 weeks in the island and discovered… the island, with all its pluses (stunning little beaches – my favourite was Cala Conta, delicious food, breathtaking sunsets – my fav here was Puertas del Cielo, near Santa Ines) and minuses (having my mobile phone and wallet stolen and my cards immediately misused :( ). This year though had the advantage of knowing some Ibiza old timers that showed “some” of little gems of the island. They’ve promised to show me a few more next year. Can’t wait.

The beginning of the summer wasn’t too shabby either, having gone to Festi Neuch, Montreux Jazz Festival, Gurten Festival and Paleo Festival. Moderat’s tripped-glitch-tech show @ Montreux was highlight here. I feel addicted to their unique down tempo sound and their live show exceeded my expectations.

Add to this attending a charming wedding in Charmey, located in the Fribourg pre-alps region, and a friend’s newly born baby party in Bristol, both held on sun blessed days and you can’t help but smile remembering all this.

And it’s not totally over yet either even though the strong winds, rain and drop of temperatures make it feel like autumn is here. My brother’s coming to visit in a couple of weeks time and while he’s here, we’ve got plans to go to Munich’s Oktober Fest and of course, Fete de Vendanges in Neuchatel before autumn finally settles in.

• Free entrance to the festival the days you’re working shifts (*)
• A free t-shirt
• A free meal every day you work
• A free massage during the festival
• Free soft drinks for volunteers and beer for only CHF 2.- !
• Free access to the volunteer party on Sunday night, after the festival closes

(*) If helping out with pre/post festival tasks, you get a free pass for the entire festival duration.

On top of all these freebies, volunteering sounds like a fantastic opportunity to meet other people living in the region and to practices my french! So, this year I decided to give it a go and it was much better than I expected! I signed up to work as part of the surveillance team and although the work could be at times a bit tedious and the weather was not soo great, I met a good bunch of people, enjoyed the music, partied on Sunday night and improved my french :)

If you live close to where a music festival is being held, do not hesitate in trying volunteering out, it’s well worth it!

During this time, I’ve contributed features and provided fixes forJBoss Cache and JBoss Application Server projects. All the time I’ve invested contributing to these projects has finally paid off and as of 1st of June, I’m joining the Infinispan and JBoss Cache teams as Core Developer. I’m absolutely over the moon about joining one of the most forward thinking and innovative software development teams.

For those of you that are no familiar with it, Infinispan is the new extremely scalable and highly available data grid platform that is being built based on the lessons learned with JBoss Cache. Infinispan exposes a a JSR-107 (JCACHE) compatible Cache interface (which in turn extends java.util.Map) which from a usability perspective, developers are simply gonna love it. Based on personal experience and what I saw on the field, the previous tree structure was hard to get it right, and consumed a lot of memory. There’s a host of other features already available in Infinispan and new ones coming up. To find out more check out the Infinispan blog and online wiki.

Other unsung features in IPod Nanos include the inspection of lyrics section of an mp3 while listening to it. This is the place where people put tracklistings of dance music mixes, making it really handy to figure out what track you’re listening to.

These days, apart from sites like Mercury Server or New Mixes where you can download plenty of dance mixes, there’re tons of dance music podcasts released by clubs, labels,…etc so, more and more, my IPod’s getting filled by these. Now, iPods won’t allow you to read the lyrics section of an mp3 marked as a podcast where the broadcaster added some description to the podcast. Let me explain this in further detail:

If you load a simple mp3 into your IPod player and you put something in the lyrics section, when playing it in the IPod, click the centre button 4 times and the lyrics section will appear. Now, if you do the same with a podcast episode that has the podcast description tag populated, the podcast description will appear instead of the lyrics section, no matter what the contents of the lyrics section is.

This is extremely annoying in cases where a dance mix podcast description contains something other than the trakcklisting because iTunes does not give a way to modify the ITunes Podcast Description tag. After hours of searching, I eventually found one of Doug’s AppleScripts for iTunes that allow you to modify ITunes Podcast Description tag. So, how do you use it? Simple :)

1. Download script from this link
2. Put the Show Description.scpt script in your iTunes Scripts folder. This is located in User Name > Library > iTunes. If there is no folder named Scripts there, create one and put the script in it.
3. Open ITunes and a new command will appear in the the Script menu with the name of Show Description:
   
   
4. Finally, select the desired podcast episode whose description tag you want to modify and click on Script/Show Description. A new window will be opened allowing you to modify this tag. Once modified, click on Update and then on Close.

Hope this instructions were as useful to you as it was to me and keep the feedback coming! :)

Did I care whether I hosted the pictures or not? Ideally I wanted to host them but the key thing was for anyone to be able to see them, not only people with Facebook accounts ;). With this in mind, and the excellent feedback friends gave me on Picasa, I decided to upload my pictures there and use a Wordpress plugin called Shashin that would display Picasa pictures on my blog.

After a few weeks using Shashin, I’m delighted with it. Uploading pictures is even easier with Picasa’s desktop client and afterwards, you just need to refresh Shashin to pick the latest galleries from Picasa and that’s it! The only downside I’ve seen about the Picasa+Shashin combo is the following warning message appearing on Shashin’s site:

Note that With album thumbnails, the size is fixed by Picasa at 160×160, so adjusting the size is not an option. Shashin automatically displays the album title below the thumbnail.

This is slightly annoying because the centre column of my blog is a bit too narrow to fit 3 galleries in each row, so for the time being, I’m sticking to only 2 per row. Due to this and taking in account my blog is primarily technical, I’m thinking of revisiting the theme at some point to make it wider.

Finally, there’s one more thing in favour of Shashin: the thumbnail viewer. Shashin uses Highslide whereas NextGen uses JW Image Rotator. The first is much more neat and intuitive than the latter.

Put it this way: I simply couldn’t do my job without a tool like Emacs that provided grep-like functionality.. Other tools have tried to do this, but they’re pretty poor. One such example is jEdit, which is dead slow and can’t cope with big files.

A few months ago when I upgraded from Fedora 7 to Fedora 9, I encountered a bitter-sweet surprise. The sweet part was that Emacs 23 was finally shipped by Fedora which meant that you’d get both the nice look and feel and the anti aliased fonts, wicked!. Fedora 7 didn’t had any of that, so I was building my own Emacs from CVS head source tree to get these features. The bitter part came from the fact that Emacs 23 had changed the default way in which windows were split. In the past, the split used to be vertical so that you had windows above and below. However in Emacs 23, they changed the split to be horizontal so that you’d have windows left and right. This was very annoying since I used the secondary window to check log lines and hence, a vertical split where I had an upper part and lower part would suit me much more!

I looked around and none of the suggestions I found would work, so I ended up asking help to Takayoshi Kimura, who’s a colleague of mine at work and incidentally, happens to be an emacs guru! So, to get Emacs back to splitting windows vertically add the following to your ~/.emacs:

(setq split-width-threshold most-positive-fixnum)
Someone called this a truly appalling hack but it works! Taking in account that I encountered this issue around 5-6 months ago, Emacs might already have gone back to old default of splitting windows vertically but I haven’t verified that yet.

The Phoenix is a mythical bird that dies in flames and is reborn from the ashes. This mix has a lot in common with this feathered creature. Back in November, just as I was starting to work on this mix, my laptop’s hard drive crashed and lost the work I had done on the mix and many of the tracks featured in it. Thankfully, nothing too important was lost (i.e. pictures) and thanks to previous backups and Beatport, who allowed me to re-download those tracks I lost, within a couple of a months I was back where I had left the this mix.

With this incident in mind and taking in account the long period since I last published a mix, I decided to make this resurrected mix longer than the ones I had done previously. The mix, which is around 1 hour and 45 minutes long, is also a departure from my last few mixes which had been greatly influenced by disco and electro sounds. This time around, it’s the time of techno and progressive music in its different variants which had a huge influence in me over the last few years.

The mix is dedicated to a good friend of mine who helped me through those panic moments that one goes through when you realise that your hard drive is gone! Hope you like the Ladytron tracks :)

Tracklisting:

01. Adam Kroll – Cael
02. SCSI-9 – Senorita Tristeza
03. M.A.N.D.Y & Booka Shade – O Superman feat. Laurie Anderson
04. Kohlbecker & Eilmes – Tabasco
05. SCSI-9 – Boys Away
06. R-Play – Mini
07. King Roc – Discovery #1
08. Rone – Bora feat. Alain Damasio (Vocal Mix)
09. Let’s Go Outside – I Can’t Sleep
10. Sebo K – Far Out
11. SCSI-9 – Blue Wolf From North
12. Joe Mull – The Walk
13. Petar Dundov – Oasis
14. Ladytron – Destroy Everything You Touch (Sasha Invol2ver Remix)
15. Ladytron – Ghosts (Toxi Avenger Remix)
16. Tits & Clits – She Likes Gasoline
17. Klute – Machine Gun Etiquette
18. Fairmont – Fade And Saturate
19. Timo Maas – Subtellite
20. Scan X – Midnight (Laurent Garnier edit, special Trax version)
21. Slagmalsklubben – Sponsored By Destiny
22. Mile Caro & Franck Garcia – Mon Ange

Links:

• Subscribe to Podcast
• Subscribe via iTunes
• Direct Download

Enjoy :)