Maaaany bugs fixed in Drools...

The Drools-team just published their maintenance release 4.0.1 with loads of bugfixes (described here).

Thanx for your good support, guys :-)

Sponsoring Internet-Radio!

Today I donated a few bucks to my favorite internet radio station (Whisperings). Although it's tempting to just consume streaming audio, the artists of out-of-mainstream-stations surely have more problems earning a decent income than we IT-people... and I'd like stations like that to be available for long!

Want to understand the REST architecture pattern?

For you guys who never heard of REST - it might be time to have a deeper look...

Via Pete Lacey I found a cute presentation on REST resources (some are "behind a registration wall", but at least free).

Really great: The audio-enhanced REST Take 5:

A Take 5 is an audio enhanced five minute PowerPoint show on a pertinent topic. The REST Take 5 is really 15 minutes, but gives a good 40,000 foot, managerial overview of REST.

(the registration at Burtongroup DID suck, but their support fixed it within the hour... why don't they support OpenID or the like??)

Good News for Security-aware Internet-Shoppers...

Maybe I'm the last one to notice - but PayPal offers a smart password-generating
device called "Security Key". It's one of those cute one-time password generators - and (currently) works for both EBay and PayPal accounts.

Why don't the banks offer those devices for free??

I'm actually using PayPal only for a few transactions per year - but that's likely to increase - as their device (which costs only 5Euro / 5 USDollars) drastically increases security...

Anybody out there already owns one? They are currently (in 2007) sold in US, Germany and Australia, with many more countries to be included soon...

Rules-Programming-Contest, Round 2

Round 2 of the JBoss-Drools puzzle contest just started...
(this time it was *me* who had to post the puzzle...)

Deadline for submissions is September 14th, 2007.
You can send your solutions to droolspuzzle@gmail.com

=====================================

• Three men, Abel, Locker and Snyder are married to Edith, Doris and Luisa, but not necessarily in this order.


• Each couple has one son.


• The sons are called Albert, Henry and Victor.


• Snyder is nor married to Luisa, neither is he Henry's father.


• Edit is not married to Locker and not Albert's mother.


• If Alberts father is either Locker or Snyder, then Luisa is Victor's mother.


• If Luisa is married to Locker, then Doris is not Albert's mother.

Who is married to whom and what are their sons called?

Taken from the German book "Denken als Spiel" by Willy Hochkeppel, 1973 (Thinking as a Game).
=====================================

The Rules of the Contest

More info on the contest.

We're looking forward to your contributions -
let the rules rule...

"Lock-Screen" on Mac

Working with *really* sensible data recently, I needed a quick way to lock my Mac... unlike Windows-XP, there's no predefined hotkey, even the beatiful Dockables did not provide a solution :-(

A little research revealed the following helpful command


/System/Library/CoreServices/"Menu Extras"/User.menu/Contents/Resources/CGSession -suspend

Paste into an Automator workflow, save that (with file-type "application"), drag into the dock (and your application folder) - and you're all done!! You can even drag this to your finders' toolbar - cool!

(I know - there's an entry in the menu bar - but that's too hidden - and I needed a Quicksilver-enabled solution).

Intelligent backup solution

At least I found a backup solution which suits my needs: CrashPlan can either backup to a central server, but (really cool!) also to your other machines... (Mac, PC, Linux!!)

I had it up and running in a few minutes - tried their support (reactive, competent) and had 50GBytes backed up from my Mac to our family-PC (yes, we're still using it...) within a few hours...

Elegant UT - a cool addition to my backup strategy... (20-50 Euro).




Update (Sept 07): I verified the following things to make sure it works as expected:

• Simple restore of a file or a previous version. Crashplan can keep arbitrary versions :-)


• Restore from a different machine, so I can restore files even if the original machine is stolen, burnt down, drowned or otherwise unavailable.


• Asking support questions: The CrashPlan support guys are responsive, friendly and competent. Excellent marks here!

Finally: Lisp-plugin for Eclipse

We had to wait awfully long for a Eclipse-Lisp plugin (named Dandelion) to appear...

Version 1.0.5 even comes with support for Eclipse 3.3 (Europa) and with SBCL bundled (at least for MacOS and Linux).

I'm sure to blog some experiences one day (when my current customer projects will give me some time...)