I visit Carlos E. Perez's Manageability blog about once a week because he occasionally posts useful list of open source Java projects along with terse yet revealing comments.  I thought it might be useful to list the lists.

• Portal Servers (most recent)
• Workflow Engines
• Rule-based Engines
• Regular Expression Engines (benchmark)
• Two Fast XML Parsers

Carlos is a bit heavy on the Java cheerleading, but these gems are worth the visit.

Since I got Google AdSense, I enjoyed watching a small pile of money build up.  It wasn't much but it was enough to offset my webhosting expenses.  Thanks to the Gag clause recently added to AdSense T&C by Google, I removed AdSense from this blog.  According to AdSense FAQ, this effectively cancels the account.

Dave wrote:

Google ad bar is a huge disclaimer saying "I can't talk about Google."

I agree.

Thanks to James for reminding me that today is Hangul Day, the day Hangul was invented by Sejong-Daewang (King Sejong) in 1446.  Hangul is an awesome language from an engineer's point of view.  More on the history of Hangul can be found at the Sigma Instutude.

Thanks to the Internet, Hangul is changing today.  Young Koreans are morphing and evolving the language to fit the their needs and taste as they communicate in Hangul online.  Some say they are destroy the language, I think otherwise.  I believe some characters from English and other languages should be added to Hangul so one could write like this:

Otherwise, Hangul version of Very Much end up sounding like Berry Match.

Addition of the new characters to Hangul will start a chain reaction of exciting/frightening changes, starting with the spoken language (Korean), brain that uses the language to think and dream in (Korean mind), and the society that uses it (Korea).

Yes, I am saying that brains of people who speak different languages are wired differently.  What I think and feel in Korean is different from what I think and feel in English.  If this is not true in general, at least it is true with me.

Update #1 - 10/11/2003 10:25AM PST

What I like about Hangul is the neat design.  Each Hangul 'word' has exactly one vowel.  A word consists of starting consonant (), a vowel (), and optional ending/connecting consonants ().  To stress a consonant, double up (i.e. vs. ).   means Flesh and means Rice.  Vowels can also be combined to get the sound made with mouth shaped somewhere between the mouth shapes of the two vowels used in combination like this:.

Hangul keyboard has consonants grouped on the left side and vowels on the right side so that Hangul typing alternates between hands.  It's the end sound complicates things a bit.  End sound of a Hangul word can use up to two consonents to represent a wide variety of sounds.  Since the end sound is followed by the starting sound of the next word, one can get confused about how to divide up the consonants.  I often mess up this part.

Isn't Hangul neat?  King Sejong is my favorite geek.

I spent a good part of today trying to setup mail server on my remote Red Hat 9 machine.  It came with sendmail which everyone agrees is a bloated sloth so I replaced it with Postfix using the instruction given in this document which probably represents the daily life of a Linux user.  No problem there.  I have heard that Maildrop and Courier IMAP combo was a good match for Postfix, so I looked for the RPMs via Red Hat's up2date.  Nothing.

I managed to find the source for Maildrop and tried to configure the build.  Nope.  cpp, C preprocessor, was not installed.  Again, not available via up2date.  Got it via rpmfind.com and installed OK.  Back to configuring Maildrop.  OK again.  Now build fails because g++ is missing.

Earlier, I had to install gcc-compat package because my server came without gcc installed.  Funny.  Apparently, that gcc-compat package didn't include g++.  Latest gcc-compat available on RH9 was an old version of gcc also.  So I considered whether to replace gcc-compat with the latest gcc package from gnu.org.  gcc-compat is an ominous name.  It implies that regular version of gcc is not compatible for some reason.  I punted and rigged Postfix to forward mail to my personal e-mail account with my ISP [1].  Urgh.  I didn't even get to Courier IMAP.

Red Hat distributions seems to have, in general, oddities that cause problems with many packages out there despite being the most popular Linux distribution.  Versions of packages bundled in Red Hat distributions or available for download via up2date are often much older than the latest.  Sometimes this can be dangerous.  For example, latest OpenSSL package available by up2date was 0.9.7a which has serious bus including the ASN.1 bug.  Red Hat 9, in particular, is a bundle of trouble because it uses NPTL library unlike other versions and distributions.

Stay away from Red Hat 9 everyone.  If possible, stay away from other versions as well.  Whatever performance NPTL brings, I can make it up more than enough by getting another cheap Linux box.

PS: Only bright spot in all this is the joy of using Webmin.  It really is great although documentation sucks.  There are so many great Webmin modules out there that one can only smile with satisfaction.

[1] One stupid Linux trick I learned was that in order for 'luser_relay' setting to work, you have to define 'local_recipient_maps' to be nothing.  Leaving it commented out is not the same.  What kind of talented idiots write sh*t like this?