As the worst possible time my harddrive died again. Well it didn’t quite die 100%, but it seems to overheat after about 10 minutes of use at which time it just halts the computer. I’m guessing it gets over heated.
Now, I’m due to travel to Europe for job interviews this weekend and I’ve been trying to finish a client project as well as one of my own. I did manage to recover most important stuff, but I’m not quite sure how I’m going to work as I haven’t got the dough for a new drive right now. Currently I’m running Knoppix (a bootable linux cd) sans hard drive. It even does come with blackdown java installed.
So now I need to get myself a flash drive and use that as my home directory. At least that will be cheaper than any other solution. I do need to get a new notebook the moment I have any spare cash. This one is ancient. It will be 4 years old in November. I think that is a record for me. But that is what happens when you give up regular income an attempt to bootstrap.
My XML Signature library NeuClear XMLSig has been pretty stable for a while now. But with the new Dom4j 1.5 and the upcoming JDK5 release, I felt it was time for an upgrade to support the new technology. This release is certified to run with both.
The real news though is that I have also added a Dom4j reader which uses the latest XPP3 MXP1 parser. For those of you who don’t know this, it is a blindingly fast XML Pull parser, which also has a very low memory overhead. Using the reader drastically speeds up Dom 4J parsing and therefor my XML Sig library.
The next step, which I hope to have ready for the next version is a pure XPP3 based verifier. This would cut the relatively high memory overhead that dom4j has. In digital signatures the signing and verification always is the major performance overhead, however for large scale webapps it does help if you can lower the memory overhead.
With this it should also be possible for me to do a J2ME implementation of the xmlsig library.