JMS Error ‘ctor’

August 25th, 2004 in Perplexed | No Comments

I’m trying out the Spring JMS support in the 1.1 RC2 release. So far I’m pretty impressed, but that’s something I’ll delve into another time. While I was running my tests from the Eclipse JUnit test runner, I got the following exception: 

org.springframework.jms.UncategorizedJmsException:
Uncategorized exception occured during JMS processing; nested exception is javax.jms.JMSException: ctor
javax.jms.JMSException: ctor
	at com.evermind.server.jms.JMSUtils.makeJMSException(JMSUtils.java:1829)
	at com.evermind.server.jms.JMSUtils.toJMSException(JMSUtils.java:1845)
	at com.evermind.server.jms.EvermindObjectMessage.(EvermindObjectMessage.java:64)
	at com.evermind.server.jms.EvermindSession.makeMessage(EvermindSession.java:1405)
	at com.evermind.server.jms.EvermindSession.createObjectMessage(EvermindSession.java:276)
	at com.example.myproject.JmsSender$1.createMessage(JmsSender.java:59)
	at org.springframework.jms.core.JmsTemplate.doSend(JmsTemplate.java:566)
	at org.springframework.jms.core.JmsTemplate$2.doInJms(JmsTemplate.java:547)
	at org.springframework.jms.core.JmsTemplate.execute(JmsTemplate.java:512)
	at org.springframework.jms.core.JmsTemplate.execute(JmsTemplate.java:524)
	at org.springframework.jms.core.JmsTemplate.send(JmsTemplate.java:545)
        [...]

The original message (not from Spring) ctor was incredibly vague, so I decided to follow a hunch. I applied the serialization testing advice from one of my recent posts to this new project, et voilà, my error was immediately uncovered. One of the two items in my Message object was not Serializable. A quick update and I was happily sending JMS messages using the Spring template.

The Mysterious “IPM.Microsoft Mail.Note” File

August 10th, 2004 in Perplexed | No Comments

My wife has been doing some work for a friend, which has involved some mailing lists and merging. This friend isn’t very computer savvy, and has obtained these lists from other people lacking in computer knowledge. We have received files in various formats, all with poor field design for this type of work, but tonight was the one that topped them all.

We received a disk with a file named something like mailing_list.dat. All attempts to open the file failed. Opening the file in Notepad showed that the file began with this information, including non-printable chars not listed here.

xŸ>"

ä  è
€ IPM.Microsoft Mail.Note

When I got back from work I did some Google digging, and came up with a few potential sites, including one where Eudora claimed:

This TNEF information [winmail.dat] is unopenable and irrelevant outside of Outlook.

But I persisted, annoyed again at Microsoft’s snub of standards, this time causing my wife’s confused friend to be unable to open her list file.

Then I hit the jackpot. A post at Google Answers pointed out that while the file was an annoying side effect of the MS Outlook, it could be decoded using a shareware time-limited program available for free download.

I ran the program and out popped a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet, which I happily opened with OpenOffice.

Google really does have all the answers to the messes Microsoft creates. :-)

Pebble 1.5

June 29th, 2004 in Perplexed | No Comments

I’ve just tried to checkout Pebble’s source, and build the evolving version of 1.5. I couldn’t do it. There weren’t any instructions on building that I saw, so I tried a few things.

  • Run the setenv.bat file. This seemed to mess up my ANT_HOME.
  • Run ant -projecthelp. This gave me a NullPointerException.
  • Run ant. This gives me TagUnitTask cannot be found.

I don’t have the time or energy to dig in and figure out how the build system works, so for now I’ll wait. It’s hard to have all of the Prime Directives right all of the time.