My Dad's computer has broken down today. He could not start it up! The WinXP always reboots during the start up process. Sometimes it reboots before the log on screen. At other times it reboots right after he enters the password. Seems like it's been infected by a virus!

I told him I will install the latest Ubuntu 11 for him tomorrow. I plan to install it over the old Red Hat partition. This way, he may still retrieve the documents on WinXP drives.

I've completed the map of Taiwan Strait. It took much less time than I expected, thanks to Google Earth. It was a lot of fun as well. I used Google Earth to locate the key strategic locations, such as airfields, ports, cities, roads, etc; then I got their longitudes and latitudes. With longitudes and latitudes, I can easily put them on my game map.

I'm on top of the AI now, I will start from simple. The first AI will be single minded and aggressive. Attack, attack and attack! I come, I see and I conquer!

My toy project is getting close to the phase 1 completion! Lately I'm been trying hard to simplify the rules. My goal for this project is evolving. Now I'm morphing this complicated and realistic simulation into a fun game. Rules implementation, sound effects and animation are all done. It seems working well. The next step is to create an AI opponent. It should not be difficult. I know what to do, I just need the time to do it.

Then I will need to refine the maps and scenarios. First objective is the Taiwan Strait. Afterwords, the bloody battles between Hitler and Stalin in World War II.

When we use DB2 with Websphere Commerce Developer, we sometimes have to face the situation that DB2 password is expired or has to be changed. Because DB2 uses native operating system user accounts, and these accounts have to obey company security regulations.

When this happens, Websphere Commerce Developer breaks down because all of its EJB enterprise beans still reference the old password.

Here's how I fix it.

Installing and configuring a Websphere Commerce Developer environment is not an easy task. It can take from a couple of days to a week to get it fully set up and functioning for project needs. Because of this, nowadays people usually configure it only once in a virtual machine and give the whole VM to new team members.

However, running the Websphere Commerce Developer in a virtual machine can be very very sloowww! Think about this, the Rational Application Developer takes 2GB of memory, the Websphere Commerce Test Server takes another 2GB. Then DB2 takes another 500MB. The VM itself can only have 2GB virtual memory.

I was unhappy about this. I hated watching the hard disk indicator light flashing all the time and the non-responsive mouse driving me nuts. However, to me, changing/upgrading the host machine is not an option at the moment. But I can try to clone the WCS development environment out of the VM into my host machine. To save time, I decided to do a file copy instead of installing the whole thing from ground zero. It worked perfectly! Now I have a much much faster development environment to work on.

Here's what I did.