Wednesday - May 31, 2006

In 1999, I moved to Seattle Washington from Washington D.C. to work for one of Paul Allen's "Wired World" ventures (Mercata, Inc.) - which intended to provide a service that would allow aggregated groups of customers (shopping online via the mercata.com store) - to collectively work together to drive the price of an item down - via a reverse-auction type process.

As I read this story tonight - about shoppers in China effectively doing the same thing - albeit without the benefit of an automated agent like Mercata's online store - I smiled at the similiar reaction the merchant in the story seemed to have...which was probably the same less-than-thrilling reaction Mercata's suppliers/distributors probably had as well about such approaches to new ways of increasing sales.

Mercata was quite an adventure - the thrill of the dot.com pace of change - and the tremendous talent of the assembled team.

Monday - May 29, 2006

I've been updating my development environment today...preparing to dive into some new releases of Open Source code:

The Apache Tomcat 5.5 Servlet/JSP Container

Eclipse 3.1.2

Java Web Services Developer Pack 2.0

PostgreSQL 8.1 (contains more than 120 new features)

I downloaded the latest version of EMS Database Management Solutions, Inc. SQL Manager 2005 for PostgreSQL Lite (3.2.0.4) - which supports PostgreSQL 8.1

I'm using Sun's Java(TM) 2 Runtime Environment, Standard Edition (build 1.5.0_05-b05) - but may look at updating to the latest release later this week.


Issues Discovered

1) Apparently, the /bin/javaw.exe reserved port 8005 - which the default installation of Tomcat 5.5 wants to use. I changed Tomcat's port to use 8010.

2) The latest distribution of Tomcat 5.5 doesn't include the Admin interface - you have to download and install it separately.