I chose Roller as my blog software simplely because I already had one of its runtime environment installed in my system.  I already installed  the Sun Java Application Server, known as the Glassfish now, when I started working on my EJB application some years ago. 

It took me some time to install and configure Roller 3.0 for it requried some dependent packages from some third-party.  Overall, it wasn't too bad and it's up and running finally.  I aslo installed some other additional Rolloer Themes.  It's nice to have so many themes available.

As I upgraded my system to an Ubuntu system, I decided to also upgrade Roller to Roller 4.0.   Roller 4.0 was quite easier to install or upgrade than Roller 3.0.   I just edited the roller-custom.properties and place it in /glassfishv2/domains/domain1/lib/classes and I was ready to go.  Here is the contents:

installation.type=auto database.configurationType=jdbc database.jdbc.driverClass=com.mysql.jdbc.Driver database.jdbc.connectionURL=jdbc:mysql://localhost:3306/rollerdb?autoReconnect=true& useUnicode=true&characterEncoding=utf-8&mysqlEncoding=utf8 database.jdbc.username=sqluser database.jdbc.password=tsqlpassword mail.configurationType=properties mail.hostname=localhost

If you blog in languages other than English, you need to set the character set of your MYSQL server to be unicode utf8.  Edit the your my.cnf and add the following:

[client] default-character-set=utf8 [mysqld] character-set-server=utf8 default-collation=utf8_unicode_ci default-character-set=utf8

Also you need to change the JDBC connection string as follow to support utf8:

jdbc:mysql://localhost:3306/rollerdb?autoReconnect=true& useUnicode=true&characterEncoding=utf-8&mysqlEncoding=utf8

One thing I am not happy about Roller 4.0 is that the Roller Themes from 3.0 don't work for Roller 4.0 any more.  There aren't any additional themes available for dowonload from the Roller Support Project.  Hope more themes are available soon.

I just downloaded the Ubuntu 9.04, a free Linux operating system distribution from Ubuntu.  I installed the server version into my old machine purchased almost ten years ago.  This machine has a Intel II 400Mhz CPU, 1Gb memory, and a 12Gb hard disk.  I didn't installed the desktop system because it will be used mainly as a server.  I hope it's sufficient to serve this site.  Everything seems fine so far. 

I have had positive feelings about this operating system.  It made my life much more easier to install and configure my system.  I especially like the 'sudo apt-get install ' command used to install packages available online.  This is a big deal for me, who spent a lot of hours to install and configure my previous Solaris system on the same machine.  I used to download the source codes such as Send Mail, Cryrus, etc. I would compile and configure them step by step according to their instructions.  Those were very time-consuming operations. With 'sudo apt-get install ' from Ubuntu, I was able to installed all my packages online in minutes without any problems.  Thank to people working on this and making this possible!

I remember that I wrote my first Enterprice Java Application about 10 years ago, when the first EJB(1.0)specification back then was not fully developed.  That applaction used the Weblogic application server.  It was quite complicated to deploy the EJB to the server.  I wrote the EJB codes, remote, home interface, the bean it.  I also wrote the descriptor.   Using Java EE's utilities to compile the bean and generate the stub, etc.  I then converted the application to EBJ2.0 when EBJ2.0 became available.  It converted it and tried in on Weblogic server 8.x and Sun's Application 8.x.  The application worked on both servers.  It was easier to work with EBJ2.0. 

Reference:

http://today.java.net/pub/a/today/2007/01.23/migrating-from-ejb2x-to-ejb30.html

Last week,  I got an email message from a high school classmate Zhujun  He told me that one of his colleagues, Ms. Liu, would be in San Francisco for a training program.  Both of them are teachers in China.  Zhujun is a physics teacher and Ms. Liu is an English teacher.  Zhujun gave her email address to me and ask me if I could contact her while she was in San Francisco.  Almost at the same time,  I received a greeting from Ms. Liu.  In her email, she told me that, she had already been in San Francisco and her trainning program would end soon.  She would leave San Francisco and would fly to LA for a few days.  She then would come back to San Francisco, from which she would fly back to China.  I was sorry to let her know that I couldn't greet her in person in the State because of my different schedule.

What amazes me is the changes that have been taken place in China.  It would be impossible for teachers in a typical middle school to have a chance to study abroad twenty years ago when I was still a student in China.  China was poor and the resources allocated for higer education was quite limited.   Many students had to struggle through the collage entrance exam.  Only those on top had a chance to college.   In a typical graduating class, there only a few students could make it.  The competition was so severe that student needed to spend a year to prepare the exam.   Back then, it was a privilege for a student just to finish the regular college in the country, let alone studying abroad.  It is amazing to see Ms. Liu studying in San Francisco.