Mountain Lion has just been released. The announcement was accompanied by the usual rants from various delirious individuals... And frankly, after years and years of these rants I am getting really upset. Why? Because people have changed into demanding, scrutinising, hard to satisfy freaks.
Here we have a company called Apple. They make computer systems and software. So customers go and buy a MacBook Pro Retina. With it comes Mac OS X Lion. They spent something like $2500 and get a computing device that works better than most other computing platforms. They get software called Mac OS X Lion that allows applications to be hosted and executed on this platform.
Lets make an analogy. I went out to buy a car. I paid my $52000 and away I drive with my Ford Mustang GT 2011 cabriolet. Why did I buy it? I read up on its specifications, and I took a test drive. That is what satisfy 99% of all people when they decide which car to purchase. I have had my GT now for more than 1 year. Every 6 months I take it in for a service where they refill the oil, check the tires etc. Basic maintenance. when I get my car back it is in no better condition than when I bought it.
If you ever get this:
waldo@waldonbma Home $ ./bin/java -version
Bus error: 10
after having followed this article, it is most likely because an Apple update messed up the symbolic links. Regardless of where your 1.5.0 installation is, the 1.5.0 and 1.5 symlinks need to be as follow:
The leap second that just passed on midnight GMT on 30 June 2012 caused some of my servers to experience a significant spike in CPU utilisation. In specific, a MySQL server and JBoss Java servers were pretty much messed up.
I tried to restart MySQL - did restart but immediately went back to 92% CPU usage. Tried killing JBoss and restarting that - it would not shut down cleanly and it would not even begin to start up again. So I bounced the box - it seems fine now.
The workaround seems to be to set the date like this:
I have heard endless wailing and howling from students when they were asked to write a computer program on paper. They always claim that it is ridiculous as you will never need to write a program without a computer, that it is too hard and that they cannot debug their code that way.
I've always liked doing that. In fact, about 6 months before I received my computer I wrote a 3000 line application on paper for some graphics software I wanted to create. Now do take note that I have never really programmed before, so when I finally managed to implement the code on the computer, it was only about 60% accurate.
I like doing that because it forces you to stop and think about what you are doing. It forces you to do manual code review, to play through algorithms and state tables in your head. Programming that way, even when done on a computer, consistently produces better quality applications.