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Imagine with me for a few moments that we’re on a leisurely gander on some lush mountain forest path, sidestepping and navigating easily through woven tentacle-like roots belonging to a beautiful array of trees and colorful undergrowth. Here and there you see and hear small animals darting through their home territories into burrows and nests. Fresh air flows through your lungs and you are constantly taking in sights and sounds new to your senses.

Slightly off the path you see a curious object. There seems to be a small sculpture erupting from what is otherwise soft pinestraw and leaves forming some sort of natural carpet in the forest. You gander over to the formation and find it is a mound of soil surrounding a sappling. The mound has small trails weaving down it and thousands of small openings that serve as tiny entrances into the catacombs carved within. You pick up a small twig and carefully drive it into the mound expecting the strange artifact to come to life with angry ants or some sort of termite. To your suprise and some small disappointment the stick simply rests in the new hole you have created. Nothing else has moved or manifested itself.

You turn in place to resume your walk and suddenly feel stick fibers surround your face and at the same time something scampers up your forehead around your head to the back of your neck. You instintively begin flailing your arms and batting at the unseen hijacker on your neck. BLAH! WHREBLAH!! ARRRRRR!! and other gutteral sounds spill from your lips as you come completely unglued at such a sudden invasion of creepiness.

Kinda ruined your walk in the forest, didn’t I?

Welcome to the last few weeks of my life as I have been constantly absorbing lots of new things in my technical world. You see, recently a very accomplished and insightful developer left the company where I work. He has been kind enough to mentor and help me as I have transitioned from many years of Lotus Notes development into some more advanced technologies. I’ve been more and more exposed to Java, JavaScript, ruby (and jruby), rails, grails/groovy. Peripheral exposure to git, gradle, maven, nexus blah blah blah. In the void left by what I consider a friend and ally there has been a rather steep learning curve for me. I went to being the least common denominator on our team of 2 developers to the only denominator.

So here I’ve been on a nice (albeit tiring) walk through the proverbial forest of technical challenges and victories and I encounter this “little” application we have called a Scheduler. Initially I poke around trying to figure out how to get this thing running and I’m getting nowhere, so I begin listing the stuff that drives this app so I can do a quick study. I see this thing called JMX. This is where I plant my face in the spider web.

JMX is a spec. JMX is agents. JMX is … my eyes blur. C’mon Sun, I don’t need to know all this gruelling crap about JMX. Just tell me how to make it work so I can figure out what is going on in Scheduler. Pouring through pages of documentation on JMX (JSR 3) I began to experience feelings of irritation akin to that I also endured watching cspan as the Dems touted a healthcare bill that no one in this world but a handful of partisan pundits want. MBeans and JMX Agents and JMXMP and the JVM and Agent services and Adapters and Connectors… holy cow I’ve gotta have this thing running in hours, not days. I decided to just start mowing through specific errors rather than trying to really understand what’s happening with our scheduler.

I try to run the .bat file we created for Windows to “cron” the scheduler when I ran across an error saying port 1099 is already in use, Google time. I found few posts reporting the same error as I did and most simply said to reconfigure the port, but since my environments were supposed to all be the same I chose to try figuring out what was consuming the port. Nothing in Windows was telling me anything helpful and I muttered to myself /(out loud/) “What could be taking port 1099?”.

“1099?” a voice muttered back, “That’s Java’s RMI port… dedicated. Tomcat is probably hogging it up.”

“What?” I replied.

“Tomcat is a port hog, It won’t release it”

I brought Tomcat down and ran the .bat startup for Scheduler and voila! Scheduler started with no more errors or issues. I rolled my eyes and then started Tomcat again… no conflicts and scheduler continued without errors. I guess I’m thankful the fix was that easy, and I now know that precedence is important when launching the scheduler application.

I pulled up my queue and started on my next issue. A grails app that is breaking on one-to-one relationships that don’t always have auto-generated primary keys. I’ll be hitting meagle’s blog on this one.

Looks around for a spider web