the corner office : tech blog

cpulimit (via) allows you to throttle specific processes and applications. Just the thing for my stupid-ass laptop which is overheating, partly because the fan needs cleaning but mainly because (as I've come to conclude), Acer laptops are crap.

When life's a little busy for me as it currently is, I battle to write a blog post a week. Microsoft blogger Raymond Chen averages more than a blog a day and as of Feb this year, had nearly 15 months' worth of blog posts stored up.

Spring AOP auto-proxying uses CGLIB to generate proxies when necessary. Traditional singletons, easily turned into beans with private constructors and factory-methods, can't be proxied though. Bit of a bother, really.

• Apache HttpClient 4.0 has been released (via). v3 is so ubiquitous (and solid), I wonder whether people will rush to upgrade.

• Telegraph blogs: Britain should apologise for the shameful way it treated Alan Turing. Damned straight.

JVM timers, in particular what you can expect from System.currentTimeMillis() and System.nanoTime().

• Inside the Hotspot VM clocks
• StackOverflow: Accurate sleep for java on Windows

Stupid Windows.

Caucho Blog: Why OSGi is cool, but not for most enterprise apps... (via TSS, with some interesting discussion in the comments).

Dependency clashes and incompatibilities can be a real pain, but I'm not convinced (yet) that OSGi's overhead is worth it. Also relevant that 'enterprise' architectures are more likely to get you into dependency trouble - in distributed environments with lots of small, highly modular components, the risk of dependency clashes is lower. Which isn't to say you don't have them, and it's not like you can't benefit from the modularity that OSGi gives you, but I just don't think that the benefits outweigh the costs for many applications.

At the very least, I think tooling would need to progress much further. Stuffing around with manifests and trouble-shooting classpath issues is a drain on productivity. You can afford to take an optimistic approach with something like Maven2, which enables tools which can give you enough information to resolve many problems when they do arise.

The new bogey man.

• Alex Tabarrok: High Speed Trading Swimming
• Tyler Cowen: Further points on high-frequency trading

Tabarrok's distribution vs efficiency view is interesting. Still, I think technology will win.

A few weeks ago, the C++ standards committee decided to remove 'concepts' from C++0x. This Artima article discusses and has links to opinions from all the important people.

• maven-license-plugin - haven't tried it, but think I might need it soon.

A colleague is playing around with GWT, it looks slick and the possibilities intrigue me, but I'm still sceptical about whether web apps can achieve parity with native toolkits. The safe answer looks like 'yes' until I look at the CPU usage on my machine when using Flex or Flash and some JS-heavy apps. Related, some e4 links:

• Eclipse has a future (bit of an e4 overview and rationale).
• Doug Schaefer: My biggest fear for e4, What is the vision for Eclipse?, Oh yeah, and here's my vision.

Until an hour ago this blog was accessible via http://www.thecorneroffice.org/links/. I did the magic Apache and Tomcat tweakery and voila, links/ is now permanently redirected to tech/, and a neglected link blog has become a hopefully-not-to-be-neglected tech blog.

I said I was going to do it, then promptly put it off. I realised this evening while googling for an entry on my own link blog tonight and finding nothing, that Google had been visiting my site when I briefly played around with permanent redirects two weeks ago. The permanent redirect was enough for Google to decide that the old blog was gone, but since there wasn't a new blog (yet), it got itself a bit stuck. Hopefully now that everything's nicely re-jigged, I'll be able to start searching this blog again. Hellooo, Google!