Happy new what ?

I've been tasked with making a web search and notification system work. However this system (which shall go unnamed) is the epitome of unnecessary bloat: it spawns 16 JVMs (yes, sixteen), each taking at least 120 MB of RAM, and on some occasions reaching 700MB. It's based on a so-called agent platform, having at any one time at least 100 agents fetching pages, filtering and categorizing content, generating web pages (!) and evaluating performance.

I've almost made it work, by rewriting the whole thing into a more manageable platform (Lucene is the workhorse now), which will run easily on a PC - we have a trimmed down installation runs a bit slow on a quad Xeon, the original installation required four Sun machines and a separate database server. That the system has been built by a small legion of students from a university did not surprise me; it was apparent from the code which has cute idioms such as hardcoding JDBC connection URLs as constants in classes, which often are more than fifteen thousand lines long. But enough with the thing...

My contract(s) with the Aristotle University seem to come slowly to an end, and I've been searching for a job with less-than-stellar success so far. It doesn't help that most software development jobs are in Athens - here in Thessaloniki it's mostly sysadmin or HTML/Flash design positions.

Blogentis has been put on hold until I've finished the contract, with some improvements in the pipeline on the preferences handling, with the mind on generalizing the infrastructure to make life easier for plugin writers (that's me). I've also been pondering on using OSGi as a plugin platform, and it certainly looks doable but will set back development for at least two to three months and is currently on the blye sky pile of ideas.

Enough now, I'm going to celebrate new years, and so should you...
Happy New Year!