Torsten Curdt’s weblog

Before I forget all the details and this vacation just turns into one of these blurry beautiful memories let’s give a short review off the stay at the Treasure Island Resort on Fiji.

So we got to Nadi (speak Nandi) with Pacifcblue which was by far the cheapest airline from Australia. The resort had arranged a pickup at the airport and a speed boat transfer as we were too late for the catamaran.

The island truely is beautiful. It has about 60 bures and the main resort facilites plus the staff quarters. All the bures are a few meters (20-30m) from the ocean. (Make sure you don’t get one too near at the water pump). It takes you about 10 minutes to walk all around the island. The water is awesome! 30°C and cristal clear. You just step a few meters into the water and you have fish all around you. Just mind the tides and snorkel away for hours. (Better watch out for sunburns!) As a diver I was surprised about the quality of their snorkeling gear. And they actually provide it for free! There is also a dive shop on that island. Before the start of the season (1st of April) they had a half-price special. I think I ended up paying about 40 EUR for a two-tank dive! I’ve never payed less for a dive! …and the equipment was good (even including a decent dive computer) ….I just could not find the catch! (Divesite recommendation: “Supermarket” …lot’s of sharks. I had about 4 (at least!) 2 meter ones around me – awesome!) …what else… For the ones who really cannot let go for a few days there is also computer at the reception with free internet access! Not the fastest broadband but still dsl. But be aware it’s like in a sauna in there! Noone should expect long emails from there.

Being more a backpacker kind of guy being at a restort felt really strange. It is one of the smaller ones so it might be not as badly touristy – but still. You always had your entertainment program at dinner time. Dinner was one of the gotchas btw. Being such a small island you naturally have to eat at the resort’s restaurant. The food was definitely not spectacular – but alright. The big catch here – as you probably would expect it’s way too expensive. Dinner just wasn’t worth 25 EUR. When you go for the meal plan it might be a little cheaper. But still! Also watch out when you buy e.g. water. Surprisingly the cheapest you can buy water is through your minibar. Otherwise buy a bottle at the restaurant/bar. Most expensive one seems to be shop. We found out about that at the end of our stay. Another rip-off was the transport back to the airport. Before we came to Treasure I asked them whether I need any cash – they said “no”. In the end they wanted to have 15% surcharge to cash some money we obviously needed to get to the airport. Not cool!

We got a pretty good off-season deal booking direclty on the website. Goind through a travel agent was meant to cost heaps more! So we ended paying about 120 EUR per night (60 EUR per person) …which was alright. (I don’t think it’s worth the full price!) Still I would have expected properly cleaned towels for that amount of money.

In the end it was pretty nice vaction but you would not want to stay on treasure for more than a week. The program and meal plan repeats and the island feels smaller by the day. Although it’s even smaller we should probably have better stayed at Beachcomber Island (which is just a swim away). It has a slighty younger crowd. Treasure is more a family place. But both island are well worth a visit.

Wow! Both of my sessions got accepted for the ApacheCon EU 2006 in Dublin. I will be talking about java bytecode engineering in the real world (don’t be scared – I will not bore you with an introduction to the jvm spec!) and give an overview about jakarta commons. In case that’s nothing for you – again there are plenty of interesting sessions to choose from. Hope to see you there!

Last time it took me about a hour to get to the ApacheCon EU …I fear this time it will be a slighly longer trip ;)

You know clirr? It can be used to generate a report of what has changed in between two releases by directly comparing the jars. Unfortunately it is under LGPL/GPL license (and the maven support was never really good). A while ago I came across an alternative jardiff which is under BSD license …but it was missing support for maven2.

Well, that’s fixed now :) I’ve just submitted the plugin to the mojo project on codehaus.

All you have to do is to define the plugin and the version number of the previous release in your pom.

  <build>
    <pluginManagement>
      <plugins>
        <plugin>
          <groupId>org.codehaus.mojo</groupId>
          <artifactId>maven-jardiff-plugin</artifactId>
          <configuration>
            <oldVersion>5.1</oldVersion>
          </configuration>
        </plugin>
      </plugins>
    </pluginManagement>
  </build>

Last month I announced I got a working build of Thunderbird with Addressbook integration. Unfortunately it was just a shared library version only working on my machine. It was refering to all the libraries on my machine – so no luck for other people. So I had to look into how the guys from mozilla do their releases. After harassing them on IRC I was able to fix a little bug in the static build and create the dmg. Their tinderbox build logs turned out to be very helpful for figuring out how. So basically what I ended up doing is to look up the mozconfig of the official builds. You can do that by specifying “about:buildconfig” in the location for the startup page.

mk_add_options MOZ_CO_PROJECT=mail
mk_add_options MOZ_OBJDIR=@TOPSRCDIR@/obj-@CONFIG_GUESS@

ac_add_options --with-macos-sdk=/Developer/SDKs/MacOSX10.4u.sdk
ac_add_options --enable-application=mail

ac_add_options '--enable-optimize=-O2 -g'
ac_add_options --disable-debug
ac_add_options --disable-tests
ac_add_options --enable-static
ac_add_options --disable-shared
ac_add_options --enable-prebinding
ac_add_options --enable-update-packaging
ac_add_options --enable-update-channel=release
ac_add_options --enable-official-branding

Once you have the code base on your machine building is quite simple – it does take a while though. After doing a clean build with the patch applied you should end up with a Thunderbird.app folder in the dist directory that is about 450MB!! Packaging does the trick and strips down the binary so the final application is about 17MB. (Please note that a “make -f client.mk build” did not work as expected. You have to call the default target “make -f client.mk” as it fetches some more code from cvs)

make -f client.mk clean
make -f client.mk
make -C obj-powerpc-apple-darwin8.6.0/mail/installer

You should end up with a dmg in the dist folder. For convenience I’ve provided a copy of my build here. (This copy might go away at some stage) But be aware – this patch has not even been committed to trunk yet. Although it is now marked as a “maybe blocker” for Thunderbird 2.0 (hurray!). It’s a developer build – not a stable release. So better backup your profiles and addressbook before you give it a go. (Actually starting with a new profile might be a good idea to get the proper settings into your prefs.js)

If you like it – please provide feedback in bugzilla and continue to vote for the bug.

On the way back from Fiji we stopped by in Sydney and had some beautiful days. Was really good to catch up with Michael and enjoy the city …after being on that small island (although it was great!) it really felt good to see a few more people again. Being in city – having all the options.
We did quite bit of walking and the path from Bondi to Bronte Beach is really nice. We had beautiful weather and the swell was just amazing that weekend!