It assumes a sed which supports the -i option – NetBSD’s doesn’t, so I used perl -i -p -e instead (I could also have installed textproc/gsed from pkgsrc, but I already had perl installed).

My initial impressions of version 1.5 are good – it had no problem importing the WSDL file for the project I’m currently working on (consuming a custom .NET web service) and allowing me to test it.

One small installation issue – if you have problems running bin/soapui.sh, it may be because the file contains carriage returns. Strip them out and it should work fine.

Yesterday I installed Tag List, a plugin that displays and allows navigation to the various tags in the currently edited file(s). It seems to work very well, and supports most languages, thanks to Exuberant ctags.

The screenshot below shows it in action editing some Python source.

459×530 pixels 58.7 kB

• concatenate – Louis Armstrong’s We have all the time in the World
• condense – Leonard Cohen’s Suzanne
• find – Neil Young and Crazy Horse’s Everybody Knows this is Nowhere
• replace and shift- Lyle Lovett’s I Know You Know
• search – Chuck Berry’s Roll Over Beethoven
• split – The Rolling Stones’ Mother’s Little Helper
• translate – Pink Floyd’s Careful with that Axe, Eugene

There are probably some other little gems in the documentation, but I’ll leave those for someone else to find

After the conversion, the variable text contains “CAREFUL WITH THAT AXE, EUGENE”.
DATA text TYPE string.
text = `Careful with that Axe, Eugene`.
TRANSLATE text TO UPPER CASE.


I guess someone in Walldorf likes Pink Floyd

There is a package in pkgsrc-wip. It didn’t compile cleanly on my -current system (it includes <frame .h> rather than <machine/frame.h>), but I’ll submit a patch to the maintainer to fix that.

For a while I’ve been getting strange error messages when trying to view manual pages or when running certain shell scripts on my NetBSD machines. Errors like the following:

Syntax error: word unexpected (expecting ")")

I couldn’t find anything in Google, but thought it must have something to do with one of my environment variables interacting badly with man(1). After clearing pretty much all of them and hacking /etc/man.conf without luck, I realised it was NetBSD’s sh(1) that was causing the problem – with $ENV set, it was running my standard set of scripts and dying when encountering some zsh’isms (hint: “/bin/sh -v” is very useful).

Solution: clear $ENV and all is well. The problem was masked on Linux systems because almost all of them use bash as /bin/sh…

(Apologies to Tom Christiansen for the title ).

The most interesting talk for me was Simon Ritter’s coverage of the Sun JVM Garbage Collector, which included a nice overview of the different approaches to garbage collection and some tips on tuning the JVM for different types of applications and server enviroments.

No freebies unfortunately – all I left with was a Sun pen and notepad. Bah! They also skipped the session on the Java Desktop System (Sun’s SuSE-based Linux distribution), but all three presenters delivered their presentations using StarOffice and were running JDS.

Haven’t had a chance to read much of the book, but it should hopefully motivate me to work on a few DBI apps I’ve had on the backburner for a while.

Hmmm… Methinks I have way too many computer books, but what geek doesn’t?