PAE kernel

I use virtual machines a lot and really need more memory (more than 3.7GiB.)

Unfortunately I'm still running 32 bit Fedora 14.  I tried the 64 bit version, but had some problems with Firefox and Eclipse.



I've put off upgrading because of Gnome 3.  I tried out the Live Disc for 15.  It didn't convince me.

Since then I've heard enough good things about Gnome Shell that I'm willing to bite the bullet.  But just to play it safe I've been waiting until I have a few days with no meetings.  So meanwhile...

I added memory and installed the PAE kernel.

sudo yum install kernel-PAE

Pretty simple and my machine immediately recognized the extra memory.

SELinux and WebEx playback

While trying to watch a WebEx recording I got only sound and an SELinux alert.

I had to set SELinux to "Permissive" :

# setenforce Permissive 

A small price to pay.

The WebEx, btw, was Kris Verlaen's presentation on jBPM5.

JBUG ATL or Atlanta JBoss Users Group

The Atlanta JBug kicks off December 14.

The meeting will be held at :
Shadow-Soft
8200 Roberts Drive, Suite 201, Atlanta, GA

How to change the ports that JBoss uses

The easiest way is to simply pass a command line argument. This takes care of any desktop/laptop/development purposes.

run -Djboss.service.binding.set=ports-01
run -Djboss.service.binding.set=ports-02

 For more complete changes check out the official docs under, 1.7 The Service Binding Manager .

Where did the drools-api.jar go?

JBoss BRMS 5.2 is out so naturally I started a new project in it.

The first thing I noticed after updating my pom.xml was that there was no drools-api-version.jar.

All of the api classes are now in knowledge-api-version.jar.  Be sure to update your pom!

Architecting Solutions

Yesterday was my one year anniversary with Red Hat specifically with the JBoss the middleware division.  I am a Middleware Solutions Architect or "SA."

I haven't blogged much since joining Red Hat.  The drop in output is partially due to time constraints.  In the past year I have been in
Atlanta, Boston, Canton, GA, Franklin, TN, Ft. Lauderdale, Knoxville, Memphis, Miami, Mt. View, Nashville, Orlando, Pittsburgh, Raleigh, San Francisco, Tampa, and Washington D.C. 

Another reason for the reduced output is that I had not written my disclaimer post either.  This is the disclaimer post.

I have largely avoided opinionated posts focusing instead on solutions to real problems.  However, I don't get my hands dirty in code on a daily basis any more.  I still plan to focus on real solutions, but I might add some opinion, observations and predictions.  So be forewarned, the opinions that you read here belong to a Red Hat employee.

Red Hat is a great place to work, btw.

Rubykoans.com

A few years ago I decided to follow the Pragmatic Programmer's suggestion to learn a new language each year.

I started with Groovy. I make my living coding Java. I figured that I would get the most bang for my buck with Groovy. Groovy's XML utilities alone have saved me tons of time. I've also done a project in Grails, and I would gladly do another one.

I picked up Python next. I like Python, and I have had some fun monkeying with Google AppEngine. I have not had the chance to use it professionally.

I had intended to pick up Ruby last year. Several of the best people I've worked with, one of whom is a best selling Java author, have extolled Ruby's virtues to me. Hectic schedules and a job change threw a wrench into my plans so I'm picking up Ruby this year.

I have been enjoying rubykoans for the past couple of days. The koans consist of a handful of ruby files full of assertions that don't pass. By correcting and filling them in the files of course begin to work.

Simply running "rake" in the directory tells you how many you have completed. You are even rewarded with ASCII art upon completing a koan.

KVM : disabled by BIOS

I had no idea what Intel AMT was before I tried to fire up libvirt.

While working through the Fedora virtualization quick start, I ran :

$ lsmod | grep kvm

which should have returned :

$ lsmod | grep kvm
kvm
kvm_intel

Unfortunately I had only, "kvm." The troubleshooting guide suggested running :

$ dmesg | grep -i kvm

Which returned,

$ dmesg | grep -i kvm
KVM: disabled by BIOS

Happy day. I booted into the BIOS ("Press the blue, ThinkVantage button!") and disabled AMT. Unfortunately that didn't do it either. I rebooted again, pressed "the blue, ThinkVantage button," chose "CPU" and enabled the two settings for virtualization,"Intel Virtualization Technology" and "Intel VT-d Feature."

After the next reboot all was well.

SOAPui

This post is a shameless plug for soapUI.

I came across soapUI while running through the Self-Paced Workshop for the JBoss SOA Platform (pdf download.) It is incredibly simple to create a test for a web service. There is even an Eclipse plugin, but I haven't tried that yet.

Happy coding.