Activating iPad 2 on Ubuntu 11.04 (Natty)

Without to many investigations I recently ordered an iPad 2 for home usage. Upon upstart I to my regret discovered that it requires to be coupled with a iTunes MaC or PC (Windows). After some googling I found that libimobiledevice will do the trick. I have seen many installation guidelines of how to install libimobiledevice, but none solving the error I ran into. Therefore this blog entry.

NB. I am an Ubuntu/Linux newbee and there may be better ways of solving the troubles I had.
 
Here is what I ended up doing.

I found the blog entry Ubuntu - Activate your brand new iPAD without iTunes and followed the guidelines. Upon the step Compile & Install LIBIMOBILEDEVICE library and tools I however ran into troubles. When executing the command

./autogen.sh --prefix=/usr

It stopped in the process with the error message 

checking for libusbmuxd... configure: error: Package requirements (libusbmuxd >= 0.1.4) were not met: 

No package 'libusbmuxd' found 

Consider adjusting the PKG_CONFIG_PATH environment variable if you installed software in a non-standard prefix. 

Alternatively, you may set the environment variables libusbmuxd_CFLAGS and libusbmuxd_LIBS to avoid the need to call pkg-config. 

See the pkg-config man page for more details.

It took me some time and lots of googling to realize what the problem was. I had the libusbmuxd pakcage installed, but not the libusbmuxd-dev package. (Inspiration was found in the forum entry schwierigkeiten mit "libimobiledevise-1.0.4"). I therefore used Synaptic Package Manager to install libusbmuxd-dev package (version 1.0.7-1ubuntu1~natty1 in my case).

This solved the issue but lead to a totally similar error for the libplist package. I therefore also installed libplist-dev (version 1.4-1ubuntu1~natty1).

The rest of the installation was a sweet deal just following the rest of Nicolas Bernaerts excellent guidelines.

Performance optimizing a Hibernate application

A few weeks ago, I was out helping a customer of my company. They suffered from  seriously bad performance on a smaller web application. The web application was build using Hibernate, Wicket, Guice, Warp-persist and more. The architecture of the application was sound. It consisted of 3 layers:

• A (wicket) Web layer
• A service layer (business functionality in Guice POJOs, bypassed if not needed)
• A persistence layer (implemented as Guice/Hibernate DAOs)

The amount of data in the MySql database did not cause any alarms with respect to performance. Well except that performance problems should not be present.


After having been introduced to the domain model I therefore started out using the strategy often recommended by others. I added Hibernate Query Logging by modifying log4j config: org.hibernate.SQL=DEBUG and occasionally also org.hibernate.type=TRACE to se JDBC in- and output parameters.

With Lund&Bendsens Hibernate performance slides in my hand I started searching for problems in prioritized order

1. Wrong Hibernate inheritance strategy
2. N+1 select problems
3. Loading of to big object hierarchies
4. Long query times because of complex dynamic queries
5. No caching of rarely modifying objects

1) I quickly found a couple of object hierarchies mapped into the database using the TABLE_PER_CLASS inheritance strategy. These were replaced by SINGLE_TABLE and JOINED which already improved performance on most pages by a magnitude of ~5.

2) The next problem was the well known N+1 select problem in Hibernate applications. As in most Hibernate application Object relations were often mapped using @OneToOne and @ManyToOne resulting in an eager load of the related entity. E.g. A person is related to his company

@Entity

public class Person{

   @ManyToOne

   Company worksInCompany;

}

Executing the query "from Person p where p.username = :p" will result in one SQL selecting all persons, where after Hibernate will traverse through the list a execute a query to fetch the company for each person.This may result in N extra queries.

The problem was most often solved by

• Marking some relations lazy to prevent Hibernate loading the related objects by default, e.g. @ManyToOne(fetch=LAZY)
• Of these relations fetch some of the eagerly by using fetch join, e.g. instead of "from Person p where p.username = :p" then execute "from Person p fetch join p.worksInCompany where p.username = :p"

2.5) The third problem which we stumbled into was unexpected, but admittedly I should have seen it from the beginning. The warp-persist @Transaction annotation was used on DAO findXXX methods starting and stopping transactions when searching for data. A poor web application architecture resulted in another set of N+1 problems, which could not be solved by tuning Hibernate queries. Re engineering the web application architecture was not an option due to project time constraints. Instead we found that executing findXXX without a transaction resulted in acceptable performance. As always remember to only use transaction when necessary (often only when modifying the database content)!!

3) was solved while working on 2)

4-5) I never got to look at before acceptable performance were reached.


There are also other Hibernate performance tuning techniques, which I haven't even mentioned.

More information :

• JPA performancekiller: N+1 select-problemet  
• Max_fetch_depth in depth 
• The Cartesian Product Problem  
• Hibernate Documenation

Performance optimizing Eclipse Helios 3.6.1 with M2Eclipse plugin

On a recently closed customer project we faced poor performance in an Eclipse Helios 3.6.1 setup with Maven 2 integration. Here is described what we did to solve our problems. Hope some one can use it as inspiration.
Besides other plugins we used M2Eclipse for integration between Eclipse and Maven.

Before diving into the solution I must admit that performance problems could have been solved by removing PointSec (harddisk encryption), McAffe Virus Scan and buying SSD harddisks, but because of corporate standards and politics we never managed to carry out any of these.

The Eclipse Tuning was performed in the eclipse.ini file and the Eclipse workspace setup. First the workspace setup:

Maven configuration 

• Navigate Window -> Preferences -> Maven
• Remove checkmark for Offline
• Remove checkmark for Debug Output
• Remove checkmark for Download repository index updates at startup
• Add checkmark in Hide folders or physically nested modules (experimental)

Performance related settings

A huge project like websystemet results in really bad response times in Eclipse, if default workspace settings are used. The following changes to the workspace settings increase the Eclipse performance and responsiveness.

• Remove automatic build
  • Navigate: Windows -> Preferences -> General -> Workspace
  • Remove checkmark in Build automatically
• Limit local file history
  • Navigate: Windows -> Preferences -> General -> Workspace -> Local History
  • Set Maximum Entries per file to 20
• Disable Usage Data Collector
  • Navigate: Windows -> Preferences -> Usage Data Collector
  • Remove checkmark in Enable capture
• Disable Validations
  • Navigate: Windows -> Preferences -> Validation
  • Remove checkmark Allow projects to override these preference settings
  • Add checkmark Suspend all validators
• Disable automatic Task synchronization
  • Navigate: Windows -> Preferences -> Tasks
  • Remove checkmark Synchronize with repository every …
• Remove plugins from Startup and Shutdown processes
  • Navigate: Windows -> Preferences -> General -> Startup and Shutdown
  • Uncheck Usage Data Gathering Plugin
  • Uncheck Usage Data Recording Plugin
  • Uncheck JBoss Tools Usage Reporting Plugin

eclipse.ini


Replace: 
-Dosgi.requiredJavaVersion=1.5
-Xms40m
-Xmx512m
-XX:MaxGCPauseMillis=10 


With: 

-Dosgi.requiredJavaVersion=1.6
-Declipse.p2.unsignedPolicy=allow
-Xms256m
-Xmx384m
-XX:PermSize=128m
-XX:MaxPermSize=384m
-XX:CompileThreshold=5
-XX:MaxGCPauseMillis=10
-XX:MaxHeapFreeRatio=70
-XX:+UnlockExperimentalVMOptions
-XX:+UseG1GC
-XX:+UseFastAccessorMethods




Some of the places I've found inspiration:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4386119/eclipse-getting-too-slow-workspace-recreation-helped

http://dev.eclipse.org/newslists/news.eclipse.webtools/msg19042.html

https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=277198