Raible Designs

Friday January 31, 2003

.Mac Address Book Synchronization Sweet! Apple has turned on Address Book synchronization with .Mac. I'm pumped - 258 addresses/numbers online - accessible at any time. This will help the next time I lose my phone... Posted in Mac OS X at Jan 31 2003, 09:25:25 PM MST Add a Comment

iMovie 3.0.1 and iPhoto 2.0 Released! I was pleased to find iMovie and iPhoto in Software Update this evening. These suckers are huge - 84.5MB and 33.3MB respectively! Thank goodness for broadband.

In other news, I found my phone tonight. It was at the gym where I played racquetball a couple of nights ago. I thought I left it there, but when I called them yesterday - they didn't have it. I tried calling them again tonight when picking up my seesta from the airport - and YAAHHHOOOO!! I think I'll take it in and get my name engraved in the plastic. I have my wedding ring engraved with "If found call...", so why not my phone? I lost my wedding ring only a year after we got married - that's the cause for the engraving. Posted in Mac OS X at Jan 31 2003, 08:54:25 PM MST Add a Comment

[HTML] Fieldset and Legend I was reminded today of the <fieldset> and <legend> tags in HTML (BTW, they also work in XHTML). Basically, they are used to draw and label a box around input elements. Here's an example:

<form action="">
<div>
    <fieldset>
        <legend>Name Information</legend>
        <label for="firstName">First Name:</label>
        <input type="text" name="firstName" id="firstName" value="" /><br />
        <label for="lastName">Last Name:</label>
        <input type="text" name="lastName" id="lastName" value="" /><br />
    </fieldset>
    
    <fieldset>
        <legend>Address Information</legend>
        <label for="address">Address:</label>
        <input type="text" name="address" id="address" value="" /><br />
        <label for="city">City:</label>
        <input type="text" name="city" id="city" value="" /><br />
    </fieldset>
</div>
</form>

I added a little CSS for the fieldset and legend tags, and you end up with this:

Pretty cool eh? The labels end up in the text boxes (on some browsers) courtesy of the the label.js script. Posted in The Web at Jan 31 2003, 11:47:45 AM MST 1 Comment

RE: No Clock and Unplugged Mark shares his frustration with the fact that he can get away from work in his No Clock post:

There is only one long continuous 24-hour day that is always work, always office, and I never punch in and I never punch out.

I hear him loud and clear. Lately, I've been working ~40 hour weeks and not doing any moonlighting - so I actually feel like I get to punch out. Except for my I-want-to-work-on-Roller (but evenings with Abbie and Julie are much more fun) syndrome, my life is completely and utterly enjoyable again. I don't even feel the need to unplug. But I probably should, as we all should. I challenge you all to follow in Mark's footsteps and unplug when you get a chance. I will be attempting to unplug this weekend when my parents are in town - but everyone is very computer-literate in my family, so I'm sure my mom, dad, sister and wife will all be checking e-mail and surfing all weekend, so it'll be difficult to restrain myself. It'd help a lot if all of you quit writing interesting stuff on you blogs. ;-) Next weekend I will be for sure unplugging as a few college buddies and I will be renting a condo in the hills and skiing all weekend. Posted in General at Jan 31 2003, 10:47:00 AM MST Add a Comment

RE: CVS, SSH and Passwords In regards to my post on January 6th, I still haven't been able to get public/private key authentication to work b/w my Cygwin client and the BSD box where our CVS repository lives. Even after following these super simple instructions. For the past few weeks, I've been using the easy hack to remembering passwords with TortoiseCVS.

I'm revisiting this issue because I think public/private key authentication is necessary for Anthill to work. BTW, it was super easy to setup, but now it just hangs when trying to do a checkout from CVS. Damn security - sometimes it seems to hurt more than it helps... Posted in Java at Jan 31 2003, 07:15:05 AM MST 1 Comment

iMovie, iPhoto, iCurve and Zeldman Redesigns Apparently, Apple is going to release iMovie 3 and iPhoto 2 today. Thanks to Erik for the tip. Hopefully, I'll be downloading later today.

James recommends buying iCurve. After looking at their site, you can see that it would look nicely next to your new 23" display. Couple that with a 17" PowerBook and you've just spend a whole lotta money. For me, it's a waste of money as my Mac is really nothing more than iCandy and a nice Jukebox. I'll still trying and rationalize buying the 23 and the 17 though...

Zeldman has redesigned again, and I actually like it better than the last design. It almost inspired me to come up with some new themes for Roller. I really like James's Plain Jane approach. Maybe I'll replicate his and Zeldman's... someday.

Finally, the good/bad in my life. The Good: it was in the 60s yesterday and it's supposed to be even nicer today. I'm taking my bike to work and I hope to take a ride around lunchtime. Also, my sister and parents are flying in for the weekend. It'll be the first time that Abbie and Aunt Kalin have met. The Bad: I lost my phone. And I lost my sunglasses a couple of weeks ago. Damn. Posted in Mac OS X at Jan 31 2003, 05:32:36 AM MST 2 Comments

Thursday January 30, 2003

[ANNOUNCE] Hibernate 1.2.3 Released! Apparently the Hibernate folks don't advertise releases to the mailing lists, cause I never knew about this release (happened yesterday) - until I read Erik's blog today. Anyway, there's nothing new to this release, mostly bugfixes. I'll still be updating my projects that use Hibernate, as it's much easier to upgrade often than to try to migrate b/w releases. I've discovered this the hard way with XDoclet and Roller.

Trying to keep up with all these projects, and my affinity for nightly builds begs for me to implement Maven ASAP. I keep checking in JARS to CVS and removing them a week later! Posted in Java at Jan 30 2003, 03:34:26 PM MST 1 Comment

[SOLVED] Connection Timeout using Oracle with Tomcat I finally solved the problem I was having where the DBCP Connection Pool in Tomcat kept getting closed. At first, I thought it was happening every 24 hours. After we configured connection logging in Oracle, we discovered it was happening every 2 hours. After posting numerous (likely annoying) messages to tomcat-user and struts-user (with no resolution), I looked up my local Oracle user-group mailing list and fired off a message.

The first (and only) response solved my problem. It said I should check and see if there is a connection timeout on the firewall. Sure 'nuff, 90 minutes. So I wrote a DBPingServlet, coupled with an Ant task to make an HTTP Request to get the servlet, and scheduled it as a cron job. Whalla - the problem is fixed! Thank God - it was annoying to restart Tomcat every 2 hours! Of course, if folks where actually using our application - this would've never been an issue... ;-) Posted in Java at Jan 30 2003, 03:17:35 PM MST 1 Comment

New Product from Google - "Froogle" Google has a new service in beta called Froogle. I might just have to use it to find out where to purchase my next online item.

Froogle is a new service from Google that makes it easy to find information about products for sale online. By focusing entirely on product search, Froogle applies the power of Google's search technology to a very specific task: locating stores that sell the item you want to find and pointing you directly to the place where you can make a purchase.

Posted in The Web at Jan 30 2003, 07:19:58 AM MST 1 Comment

How To: Configure Log4j to notify you of errors A couple of weeks ago, I mentioned that I was interested in using Log4j's SMTPAppender to e-mail me messages when errors occured in my webapp. I discovered how easy it is a couple of days ago. Here's how to configure it.

1. Add mail to the log4j.rootCategory in log4j.properties: log4j.rootCategory=INFO, stdout, mail
2. Add the following configuration settings to log4j.properties:

# Configuration for receiving e-mails when ERROR messages occur.
log4j.appender.mail=org.apache.log4j.net.SMTPAppender
log4j.appender.mail.To=@ERROR-MAILTO@
log4j.appender.mail.From=@ERROR-MAILFROM@
log4j.appender.mail.SMTPHost=@ERROR-MAILHOST@
log4j.appender.mail.Threshold=ERROR
log4j.appender.mail.BufferSize=1
log4j.appender.mail.Subject=CCT Application Error

log4j.appender.mail.layout=org.apache.log4j.PatternLayout
log4j.appender.mail.layout.ConversionPattern=%p [%t] %C{1}.%M(%L) | %m%n

One question I have is that the ConversionPattern is kinda funky - where the line breaks don't seem to be carried into the e-mail (from exception.printStackTrace()). Any suggestions for a better configuration are appreciated. The To, From, and SMTPHost are all replaced with values from Ant during the build process. Posted in Java at Jan 30 2003, 06:25:43 AM MST 2 Comments