This blog has been running for four and a half years now. That's quite a while in internet time, so I've decided to move it to my own domain at http://blog.mafr.de/ (the old URL will be valid indefinitely, though). Since I don't want to host a Wordpress …

Occasionally, it's useful to run multiple JBoss instances on one machine. Like with any network server, this is difficult because only one application can bind to a port at any given time. You have to assign different sets of ports to each instance. JBoss consists of quite a few network …

I'm currently setting up my new Laptop with Ubuntu Natty. Apart from all the things I hate in Unity (the list is long), there's one recurring annoyance: the blinking cursor in Gnome Terminal. There's no menu setting to disable it, but fortunately, there's still a way to fix it.

You …

OpenID is a great concept but what I don't like is that I tie myself to a specific identity provider. Suppose the provider goes out of business or doesn't support OpenID anymore. Of course, I could set up my own private identity provider but I'm lazy and I don't want …

Despite all the problems I had with Ubuntu updates over the last couple of years, I decided to update my work machine to Ubuntu 11.04 ("Natty Narwhal"). I expected problems and I wasn't disappointed, after the upgrade I was left standing in the dark, without X.

Fortunately, the rest …

Java's Servlet spec allows web applications to delegate authentication and authorization to the servlet container, a mechanism known as container-based security. A lot of people use it for in-house applications or web services because it's simple and containers like Tomcat already provide several authentication backends to choose from. There's one …

I think every Java application in production should enable JMX access. Without JMX, there's little chance to debug JVM-level problems, especially those related to out of memory errors. Even if your application doesn't export its own MBeans for monitoring, you can still take advantage of those that come out of …

It's quite common to deploy web applications from a nightly continuous integration job to a testing server. In my case, I want to deploy a Java web application to a remote Tomcat server from a Maven build. Enter Cargo, a collection of tools for controlling Java EE containers like Tomcat …

A colleague asked me to recommend some books on software design. That's a good opportunity to have a look at this particular part of my bookshelf and select a few highlights. As usual, you can't go wrong by reading Fowler, but let's see what we've got.

Ranging on the border …

Previously when you had …