Raible Designs

Monday November 18, 2002

JSTL and Cookies Something I learned today about JSTL - you can use {cookie.cookieName.value}* to get the String value of a cookie. Cool stuff, I found it by looking in the JSTL In Action book I bought about a month ago. BTW, if you're going to buy the book, you can get if for $12 cheaper from Amazon.

Here's an example of how I used this new-found syntax in my project.

<c:if test="{cookie.style.value == 'widescreen'}">
  body {
    background-image: url(/images/bg-wide.gif);
  }
</c:if>*

I also implemented the stylesheet switcher from A List Apart today. Very cool stuff - although I did have to add an extra line in the setActiveStyleSheet function to create a cookie for title. The following code block is supposed to do this for me, but didn't seem to work on XP with the latest browsers.

window.onunload = function(e) {
  var title = getActiveStyleSheet();
  createCookie("style", title, 365);
}

Oh well, at least I got it to work and learned some more JSTL in the process!

* I tried using the real syntax with a preceeding $, but that didn't work too well, and Velocity puked with:

[VELOCITY ERROR: parsing weblog entry] 
  org.apache.velocity.exception.ParseErrorException: 
  Encountered ".cookieName.value}

Any ideas why? It brings up another question I've been meaning to ask - is it possible to use Velocity syntax that's similar to JSP to get parameters and such in my roller templates? Posted in The Web at Nov 18 2002, 02:11:06 PM MST 1 Comment

Apple Store in Cherry Creek A new Apple Store is opening in Cherry Creek (Denver) this weekend! It's actually further away from us than the Aspen Grove store, but it's in a cool part of town. Cherry Creek is both an area of town and a mall - and the store will be in the mall. The good part, now we can go "shopping" and I can attend all their cool iPhoto and iMovie sessions while Julie and Abbie pal around. Other than the iApps sessions, the Apple stores don't do much for me - while it's cool to look at the new Apples, it gets old after 2 or 3 drool-sessions. Posted in Mac OS X at Nov 18 2002, 01:38:07 PM MST Add a Comment

Beautiful Denver Sunset As I coded past the light of day tonight - I looked out my office window and the front yard and neighbors house was glowing orange. So I leapt out of my chair and scrambled for the back yard. What I saw there was breathtaking. This is one of the best parts about living in Denver, the sunsets are amazing - and we get them a lot! I don't know if it's the pollution or the altitude, but they sure are impressive. Posted in General at Nov 18 2002, 12:40:36 PM MST 1 Comment

Good Job Mailing List If you live in Colorado, or you want to move here, I suggest you subscribe to the rmiug-jobs mailing list. I subscribed about a week ago, and I've seen 1-2 good developer-type jobs in my Inbox per day! That's excellent during these times. The best part, they seem to come from actual employers more often than recruiters. Posted in General at Nov 18 2002, 11:50:53 AM MST Add a Comment

XDoclet and the Matrix I got a list of the XDoclet Team Member's Weblogs this morning from the xdoclet-devel mailing list.

• Random thoughts (Rickard)
• Memory Dump (Ara)
• :: rinkrank :: (Aslak)
• :: mabo :: (Mathias)

So I visited them (first two I already knew about) and on Mathias's blog I found some interesting, and slightly disturbing stuff. There is a post from Tuesday, November 5th called Ara Again, that links to this article that Rickard wrote. Rickard's article points to this article about the movie Signs. Both of them discuss a theory of two races, which includes the presence of a "Matrix Control System" (MCS), not too different from the one found in the popular movie, which if true would provide us with a profoundly different take of what reality is and why it works the way it does.

Needless to say, I read them both, and it's a little heavy and disturbing for a Monday morning and a reader with a possible concussion (I've had a headache since yesterday morning). Posted in General at Nov 18 2002, 04:40:45 AM MST Add a Comment

Chimera Gets Faster If you use Chimera as your web browser on OSX (and there is every reason to) you might be interested in a little speed boost reported recently by MacOSXHints.

It's called HTTP/1.1 Pipelining and you can enable it by adding the following lines to the preferences file ( ~/Library -> Application Support -> Chimera -> Profiles -> default -> [random].slt -> prefs.js ):

user_pref("network.http.pipelining", true); 
user_pref("network.http.proxy.pipelining", true);

There should be a noticeable speed increase, especially news heavy sites such as Slashdot or Metafilter.

{ via xlab via pixelised }

Very cool - my fastest and favorite browser gets even faster! What more could you ask for on a Monday morning? Posted in Mac OS X at Nov 18 2002, 01:16:09 AM MST Add a Comment