Musings of a Trained Monkey

People have trying installs of BEA WLS on OS X out for awhile. I remember installing WLS 9.2 back in 2005. I recently ran across a blog entry about installing WLS 10.0. I’m still using a PPC Mac with not nearly enough RAM, so I thought I would try to see how the 10.0 performance would be compared to my 9.2 experience.

Surprisingly 10.0 is much slower to start up. I appreciate that OS X and Apple’s JVM aren’t a supported platform, but still it took almost 7 minutes for the MedRec sample domain to start up! Under 9.2 it was only 2 minutes. Back when I installed 9.2 Apple’s JVM was 1.5 and I have 1.6 running now.

I wanted to do a fair comparison, but apparently installing 10.0 with Apple’s 1.6 JVM overwrites the PointBase configuration such that 9.2 won’t even start up the MedRec sample domain (incompatible serial uids for javax.xml.namespace.QName if anyone cares). Also Apple says that uninstalling their 1.6 beta is a bad idea?!? I’m sure I could probably clean it up and get it running, but that would exceed my ten minute or so attention span for working on Java stuff at home.

Recently I have gained an appreciation for the concept of a micro break. Mostly due to the fact I work with computers both at the office and at home, as well as pain I have been experiencing in my hands. I stay in front of my Apple Powerbook once I get home for hours at a time.

Long story short, if you use OS X there is a program you should use called Time Out! It has tons of options to specify how frequently and for what duration breaks should occur. The breaks are hard to ignore with the screen gently fading out informing that it is break time. Time Out! is truly a great program to use if you spend a lot of time in front of a computer and want to avoid carpal tunnel!