An oldie but goodie discussion on slashdot about what needs to be done to make sure that application logs are useful to actually troubleshoot problems. At reading level 4 (as linked), the suggestions actually make sense. Try a quick test. If you are developing a software which produces a log file, or better yet many log files, how long would it take to extract all events produced by user X between 2pm and 3pm of July 30th?

Andrew Wulf writes- with feeling - about the clueless operations group in his company and how they manage to damage anything they touch. Great reading, but I have to take an exception with the following passage: As usual they initially blamed the programmers, then blamed the Java VM, BEA Weblogic, and the LDAP classes from Sun. They even called BEA to open a ticket on why Java could delete people from LDAP even though no delete function was even being called.

config.xml is a central piece of Weblogic’s configuration. And for the problems spanning multiple configuration elements, it is often easier to look at the whole configuration file at once. However easier does not mean easy. Reading and searching through XML files is hard, especially when element/attribute meanings need to be looked up. To make it easier, Eugene Kuleshov has come up with a XSLT transformation that will lay out a config.

I was reading a SF book, where due to the End of the World, shops were being looted to the extend where the shopkeeper decided to just give everything away. And that is where it hit me. He could still make money out of it. Nobody’s house is big enough to have everything. The shop owner could give away the goods, but sell the advice on what one needs to survive the longest in relative comfort (toilet paper, can opener, large UPS battery for the computer, etc).

In my previous article on this topic, I had given an scenario which justified the use of the decompiler. I have now remembered a much better example. A customer had problems after upgrading Weblogic 8.1sp2 to 8.1sp3. His JSP - which was rather large - suddenly stoped working with ‘method exceeds 64K’ messages. The JSP itself hasn’t changed between the versions. The obvious suggestion here is that BEA’s JSP compiler started to generate larger code.