Mark your Calendars for Aug 27th

Mars Closest To Earth in 50,000 Years

Never again in our lifetimes will the Red Planet be so spectacular.

This month and next Earth is catching up with Mars, an encounter that will culminate in the closest approach between the two planets in recorded history. The next time Mars may come this close is in 2287. Due to the way Jupiter's gravity tugs on Mars and perturbs its orbit, astronomers can only be certain that Mars has not come this close to Earth in the last 5,000 years but it may be as long as 60,000 years. The encounter will culminate on August 27th when Mars comes to within 34,649,589 miles and will be (next to the moon) the brightest object in the night sky. It will attain a magnitude of -2.9 and will appear 25.11 arc seconds wide. At a modest 75-power magnification Mars will look as large as the full moon to the naked eye. Mars will be easy to spot. At the beginning of August Mars will rise in the east at 10 p.m. and reach its azimuth at about 3 a.m. But by the end of August when the two planets are closest, Mars will rise at nightfall and reach its highest point in the sky at 12:30 a.m. That's pretty convenient when it comes to seeing something that no human has seen in recordedhistory.

So, mark your calendar at the beginning of August to see Mars grow progressively brighter and brighter throughout the month.

I will be getting a new Telescope for better view.

Killing all servers

Every once in a while(while upgrading to new version, testing new versions), we need to kill all the servers(Weblogic AdminServer, nodemanager, managed server). Here is the simple command I use:
ps -e | grep [j]ava | awk '{print $1}' | xargs -l kill

Ofcourse this works fine for dedicated servers where no other java instance is running.

So why is [j]ava used instead of java? If the pattern had been written without the square brackets, it would have matched not only the ps output line for java, but also the ps output line for grep. Note that some platforms ps limit the ouput to the width of the screen, grep does not have any limit on the length of a line except the available memory.

You can find more of these tricks here with grep.

Fun: Ascii Matrix

Came thru this ascii-movie. Pretty interesting one.

What Matrix Persona Are You? - Quizilla

I took What Matrix Persona Are You? - Quizilla and here is my result.


You are Tank, from "The Matrix." Loyal
till the end, you spare no expense in ensuring
the well-being of others.


What Matrix Persona Are You?
brought to you by Quizilla

Google: new Toolbar

The new Google Toolbar2.0 Beta is really cool. Since I started using it I am free from Popup windows. BlogThis is another important feature for user who use Blogger like me. But the integration of a "BlogThis" feature isn't sitting well with some blog software firms according to Internetnews.

J2SE: Dear SecureRandom why do you do Full GC?

The first time you invoke a random number genareation method on SecureRandom it does about 20 Full GC's. Doesn't Sun know better than this?

The following example code:

import java.security.SecureRandom; public class SecureRandomTest{ public static void main(String args[]) { SecureRandom s = new SecureRandom(); System.out.println("Before First SecureRandom Call"); (new SecureRandom()).nextInt(); System.out.println("Before Second SecureRandom Call"); (new SecureRandom()).nextInt(); System.out.println("After Second SecureRandom Call"); } }

When executed with Verbose GC options (java -verbose:gc SecureRandomTest) produces the following output:
Before First SecureRandom Call
[Full GC 232K->102K(1984K), 0.0095414 secs]
[Full GC 103K->103K(1984K), 0.0083893 secs]
[Full GC 103K->103K(1984K), 0.0084910 secs]
[Full GC 103K->102K(1984K), 0.0096741 secs]
[Full GC 102K->102K(1984K), 0.0083740 secs]
[Full GC 103K->103K(1984K), 0.0083477 secs]
[Full GC 103K->103K(1984K), 0.0082608 secs]
[Full GC 103K->102K(1984K), 0.0084743 secs]
[Full GC 102K->102K(1984K), 0.0085553 secs]
[Full GC 102K->102K(1984K), 0.0083935 secs]
[Full GC 103K->103K(1984K), 0.0083734 secs]
[Full GC 103K->102K(1984K), 0.0082784 secs]
[Full GC 102K->102K(1984K), 0.0085028 secs]
[Full GC 103K->103K(1984K), 0.0083488 secs]
[Full GC 103K->103K(1984K), 0.0083399 secs]
[Full GC 103K->102K(1984K), 0.0084595 secs]
[Full GC 102K->102K(1984K), 0.0084740 secs]
[Full GC 103K->103K(1984K), 0.0083002 secs]
[Full GC 103K->103K(1984K), 0.0084044 secs]
Before Second SecureRandom Call
After Second SecureRandom Call.

Update 1:
Steven Pozarycki at BEA reponded:

I saw your WebLog and your question about SecureRandom and GC. I recently
had the same issue but I was using a JSP with the same SecureRandom class.
Anyway this is a known issue with Sun and they said it will be addressed in
1.3.1_09 (available in a couple of weeks). The Sun Bug number is 4298667
although you can't view it on java.sun.com.

I also tried this on 1.4.1_02 and there is no problem, so Sun addressed
this issue there as well.

I hope that helps!


Update 2:
I had a change to test this with Weblogic8.1Sp1 (With J2SE1.4.1_03). This seems to be fixed as mentioned by Steven Pozarycki.

General: Google Viewer from Google Labs

The Google Viewer displays the pages found as a result of your Google search as a continuous scrolling slide show. You can view your search results without using your keyboard or mouse and you can adjust the speed with which the images move across your screen. Each image of a page's contents is accompanied by a short "snippet" describing that page.

A simple a innovative way to provide search results. Here is the link.