Facebook or blog?

Blog Bloke has 15 Good Reasons Why Blogs Still Matter and it is may not be all correct, at least from my own opinion that Facebook actually has bigger and faster impact toward others that blog.

However, since Facebook has try to co-own everything you posted on it recently, read here, the trend might be reversed as of today.  Blog is more attractive than ever as it is below to you and no own will come and claim it right on the material you posted. 

Beside, we always has Google+ as the alternative to Facebook, but still there are no good way to migrate all your friends from on social network side to the other.  I actually has totally different group of friends on Facebook, Google+ and Twitter.

What is your favorite as of today?

Why you should use OpenOffice for your business

OpenOffice is a great alternative to Microsoft Office. It can perform everything you can do in Microsoft Office and best of all it is FREE.  Yes, I said FREE, you don't have to pay single cent for even commercial use and you can install on as many computer as you like.

For people new to OpenOffice, you may find it difficult to navigate or finding the features you are familiar no longer where it suppose to be (as in MS Office).  However, once you use it for couple of time, you will be as productive as you are in MS Office. Just remember that Help is your friend.

If you wonder why you should go through the hassle to use OpenOffice, just think about the money you save.  For example, MS Office Home Edition going about RM500, while Professional Edition is about RM1400.a  Let say you have 10 units of computers in the office, you can easily save from RM5000 to RM14,000 just by using OpenOffice.

OpenOffice Programs

• Writer a word processor you can use for anything from writing a quick letter to producing an entire book. Alternative to Word. 

• Calc a powerful spreadsheet with all the tools you need to calculate, analyse, and present your data in numerical reports or sizzling graphics. Alternative to Excel. 

• Impress the fastest, most powerful way to create effective multimedia presentations. Alternative to Powerpoint.

• Draw lets you produce everything from simple diagrams to dynamic 3D illustrations.

• Base lets you manipulate databases seamlessly. Create and modify tables, forms, queries, and reports, all from within Apache OpenOffice. Alternative to Access

• Math lets you create mathematical equations with a graphic user interface or by directly typing your formulas into the equation editor.

Anniversary of Facebook break off with blog

22th Nov is the anniversary of Facebook stop support blog post import in Note. Tragic date for the bloggers

http://www.zdnet.com/blog/facebook/facebook-to-kill-rss-support-for-notes/5181

Opensource LDAP

LDAP has been around for decades and openldap is the only opensource ldap in town until few years ago.

I think openldap is great but it is just too complicated & operationally inconvenience to implement. Along, I have discovered 2 alternative opensource ldap that possible to fit our project requirements.


Alternative 1:-
389 Directory Server aka RedHat Directory Server is available for linux distro but it also work on HPUX, Solaris, etc. It share the common root with openldap with base branch from University of Michigan. It has all the features that openldap offered & it has we admin interface that make the administration easy


Alternative 2:-
OpenDJ/OpenDS is Java based ldap that started by SUN. It probably is the most effortless to setup. On performance, it has reported it can handle millions of search requests per second.

Verdict:-
My choice of opensource ldap is 389 Directory Server as our server farm is mostly RedHat Linux based & our administrators are very much comfortable with it

Setup MySQL on OpenSUSE 11.1

This is the guide to setup mysql on OpenSUSE 11.1, the steps will be slightly different if you are using other Linux distros, It also assuming you are using KDE 

1. Application Launcher → Applications → System → Configuration → Install Software
2. search “mysql”
3. click on “mysql” and “mysql-gui-tools”, click Accept to install
4. Open “Terminal”
5. su -
6. cp /usr/share/mysql/mysql.servera mysql
7. chkconfig --add mysql
8. You should see this:
   mysql 0:off 1:off 2:on 3:on 4:on 5:on 6:off
9. if not, the run the command below to make mysql run on runlevel 2,4,5:
   chkconfig --level 245 mysql on
10. chown mysql:mysql mysql
11. ls -al mysql
12. You should see the below:
    -rwxr-xr-x 1 mysql mysql 11960 Aug 18 17:42 mysql
13. cd /etc/
14. cp my.cnf my.cnf.bak
15. vim my.cnf
16. Add in new lines under the
    [mysqld]:
    datadir=/home/mysql
    user=mysql
17. cd /home/
18. mkdir mysql
19. chown mysql:mysql mysql
20. mysql_install_db --datadir=/home/mysql/ --user=mysql
21. cd /home/mysql/
22. chown mysql:mysql -R *
23. mysqladmin -u root password 'password'
24. Now, you should able to log on via MySql Database Administrator gui to create new users & database.
25. In the, Database Administrator gui, creatre schema; then create user and password “ermpassword”. Assigned all privileges in new schema to the user created
26. Now you are goto go

Lift web framework and Scala programming language talk

Slideshow on Liftweb, not the best presentation but it is good place to start.

Lift web framework and Scala programming language talk

View more presentations from clive boulton.

Introduction to Scala for Java Developers

For people from Java and thinking about trying Scala

Introduction to Scala for Java Developers

View more documents from michael.galpin.

Pragmatic Real-World Scala

Scala Programming for the Real-World

Pragmatic Real-World Scala (short version)

View more documents from jboner.

Free Accounting Software

I have found totally free accounting software and it called Free Accounting. (Obviously)

Anyway, you can click at the link here to download the software directly.

However, to make sure it is full functional after the 30 days trial period, you have to do the following. The built-in registration function is not longer working, so don't use it.

1. Click on one of the following links in order to download updated Free Accounting in zip file (2,8 MB) or executable FreeAccounting.exe file. (6,9 MB)

2. Save the file to your Desktop.

3. If you have downloaded FreeAccounting.exe.zip, first, extract the file to your Desktop (if you use operating system under Windows XP, please, download and install archiver for this).

4. Copy FreeAccounting.exe from your Desktop to the location where Free Accounting is installed (usually it is C:\Program Files\FreeAccounting\).

5. Once the file is extracted, right click on your Desktop and select New -> Shortcut from the context menu.

6. Click the Browse button on the first step of the Create Shortcut wizard.

7. On the Browse for Folder window navigate to the location where you copied FreeAccounting.exe file (which is usually C:\Program Files\FreeAccounting\FreeAccounting.exe) and select the FreeAccounting.exe file.

8. Once the FreeAccounting.exe file is selected, click the OK button.

9. Click Next on the step of the Create Shortcut wizard.

10. Give name to the Free Accounting shortcut (for example, 'FreeAccounting') and click the Finish button.

11. Double click on the FreeAccounting shortcut on your desktop in order to run Free Accounting version which will not require registration.

Then you are done and enjoy.

Using PostgreSQL in JBoss AS as default database

In refer to the document on jboss.org, ChangeDefaultDataSource. Here is the simplified version.

By default, JBoss AS is using Hypersonic as the database. Although Hypersonic is good for development purpose but in the production environment, it is way more stable to use the enterprise level database, such as PostgreSQL. In this posting, we will discussing switching to PostgreSQL as the default database for JBoss.

To get started, first download and installed both JBoss AS and PostgreSQL. In our example, we are using JBoss AS 4.2.3 and PostgreSQL 8.2.

On PostgreSQL

1. In PostgreSQL, login as postgres and create new user "jboss" with password "jbossrul3"
2. Create new database "jbossdb" and assign owner to "jboss"

On JBoss AS

1. Delete hsqldb-ds.xml on <JBOSS_ROOT>\server\default
   
   
2. Copy postgres-ds.xml into <JBOSS_ROOT>\server\default\deploy\ from <JBOSS_ROOT>\docs\examples\jca
   
   
3. Edit postgres-ds.xml to put in the appropriate value
   <datasources>
   <local-tx-datasource>
   <jndi-name>DefaultDS</jndi-name>
   <connection-url>jdbc:postgresql://localhost:5432/jbossdb</connection-url>
   <driver-class>org.postgresql.Driver</driver-class>
   <user-name>jboss</user-name>
   <password>jbossrul3</password>
   <new-connection-sql>select 1</new-connection-sql>
   <check-valid-connection-sql>select 1</check-valid-connection-sql>
   <metadata>
   <type-mapping>PostgreSQL</type-mapping>
   </metadata>
   </local-tx-datasource>
   </datasources>
   
   
4. Add the following entry into <JBOSS_ROOT>\server\default\deploy\jms\jbossmq-destinations-service.xml, if you are planning use custom queue. You can named your queue to the appropriate name, I am naming it as mpgateQueue
   <mbean code="org.jboss.mq.server.jmx.Queue" name="jboss.mq.destination:service=Queue,name=mpgateQueue">
   <depends optional-attribute-name="DestinationManager"> jboss.mq:service=DestinationManager
   </depends>
   <depends optional-attribute-name="SecurityManager">
   jboss.mq:service=SecurityManager
   </depends>
   <attribute name="MessageCounterHistoryDayLimit">-1</attribute>
   <attribute name="SecurityConf">
   <security>
   <role name="guest" read="true" write="true"/>
   <role name="publisher" read="true" write="true" create="false"/>
   <role name="noacc" read="false" write="false" create="false"/>
   </security>
   </attribute>
   </mbean>
   
   
5. Delete <JBOSS_ROOT>\server\default\deploy\jms\hsqldb-jdbc2-service.xml
   
   
6. Copy <JBOSS_ROOT>\docs\examples\jms\postgres-jdbc2-service.xml into <JBOSS_ROOT>\server\default\deploy\jms\
   
   
7. Now, startup the JBoss AS, it should automatic create the required schema in PostgreSQL under jboss user and everything should be good to go.
   

Good Luck.