Drools won the bossie awards!

Congratulations to the drools team for the hard work!

If you want to make a buck in your spare time

Sign up at GetAFreelancer! There's always some interesting projects to work on. This benefits a lot to Argentinians due to the difference in money exchange. You'll find Java, PHP and C projects along with anything non information system related such as virtual assistants, etc.

Dumping threads for debugging pourposes

If you don't have a profiler application in production environments you can check out the thread stack on the fly by using this JBoss JMX console MBean to do a very verbose thread dump.
It's a JVM feature, you can do it using jconsole too.

Multicore programming on .NET

One of the guys in my team handled me this article. It's definitely worth sharing. You can obtain huge amounts of performance from using this simple framework into your applications. It's very similar to the util.concurrent package from the Java language.

FAQ: Should I synchronize the access to the HttpSession object?

No, from the Servlet spec 2.5 and upper but you should take care of the objects put on the session in a thread safe manner.

BPM Certification

I've been invited by a friend to take the new OMG's OCEB certification beta test exam. This new certification is exciting for BPM professionals all around the world. It'll set a baseline for every BPM professional. The exam's contents are challenging, from business objetives of process improvements, to the BPMN modelling notation and some process improvement frameworks such as APQC.

New performance tool for IBM JVM

(Un)Fortunately I have to work with a IBM Java environment (PPC64 hardware), and I have to say that the big blue provides several tools to diagnose problems. One of those tools is the Java Lock Analyzer. It allows a developer to detect and diagnose lock and monitor problems such as deadlocks or unnecessary wait states.
BTW, it only works with IBM JVMs AFAIK.
Hope it helps.

As real time as you can get

The people from Orbitz (the popular travel site) open sourced their real time monitoring application called Graphite.

It uses an specialized database to store the time series data. This allows to quickly retrieve the monitoring information. Other approaches like storing directly to a SQL database are slower because of the engine´s overhead.

Graphite has a very slick and elegant UI to browse the monitored metrics and a CLI for faster administration.

I´m currently using Zabbix at the office, but it needs lots of maintainance from the operations people and has some glitches when it comes to gather the metrics. It also interpolates data when it's inexistent. A critical flaw for a monitoring application. We are planning to replace it with another tool ASAP.

Documental increible sobre los tiempos que vivimos

JavaOne 2008

This is my third year attending JavaOne. I'm so excited to hear the news about Sun! Keep you posted, this time I promise!

JBoss World 2008

I'm attending the JBoss World 2008 conference in Orlando, FL. Great news from our friends at Redhat, very interesting products and innovations. Keep you posted.

Crazy Enough

I'm crazy enough to buy ALL the 65 books of the Personal MBA collection from Amazon. I can't wait for them to arrive!