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20030630 Monday June 30, 2003

Digital Music: Things I want I've come up with a few product ideas. I think these are awesome ideas, and hopefully someone has already come up with them. I doubt I'm the first one to think of these, but if I am, let's hope I get credit. ;-)

1. I want an MP3 Server in my car. Similar to the iPod, in the sense that I can sync from a PC or a Mac while my car sits within 50 feet of my house. How slick would that be to pick your playlist for your roadtrip while you're cutting a new release! It'd have to be fairly inexpensive (~$200) to be profitable I think. Competitors: XM Radio.

2. I want to hook my MP3 collection up to my home stereo. I believe this is already possible, but I want more. I want to be able to sit on my patio and control my home stereo with my iPod. iPod = remote control. Of course, we don't have a home stereo, nor a patio - but I do plan to purchase these luxuries someday, and I'd love to switch from Bare Naked Ladies to Jimmy Buffett when Julie goes to change a diaper. ;-D Posted in Mac OS X at Jun 30 2003, 07:13:05 AM MDT 4 Comments

HowTo: JSP Progress Bars

As web interfaces become ubiquitous, more and more complex back-end processing is necessary. Of course, stateless HTTP leaves few ways to tell users what's going on. Andrei Cioroianu presents a JSP technique to display application "progress bars." [ONJava.com]

It's too bad there's so much scriplet action in this example, but the lesson is good. It'd be even nicer to see a JSTL port of this howto, or an alternate view approach (i.e. using Velocity or XML/XSL). Posted in Java at Jun 30 2003, 06:32:03 AM MDT 4 Comments

[ANNOUNCE] Struts 1.1 Final Released!

The Struts team is proud, and extremely pleased, to announce the Final release of Struts 1.1. This release includes significant new functionality, as well as numerous fixes for bugs which were reported against the previous release, and supersedes the earlier 1.0.2 version as the latest official release of Struts from the Apache Software Foundation.

Download Binary | Download Source | JARs Only | Release Notes 

test-all:                                                                                                               
                                                                                                                        
BUILD SUCCESSFUL                                                                                                        
Total time: 8 minutes 10 seconds                                                                                        
[minime:~/projects/appfuse] matt%

Results look good! Posted in Java at Jun 30 2003, 06:17:31 AM MDT Add a Comment

20030629 Sunday June 29, 2003

Apple Rocks! Actually, the credit probably shouldn't go to Apple, but rather to the guy at "the Bar" that hooked me up. My iPod quit working last week. Zilch, nada. It literally quit showing signs of life - wouldn't start whatsoever. I tried all the tricks on Apple's support site and discussion groups, but nothing helped. I even called Apple Support and a gentleman helped me troubleshoot the thing for a half hour. At the end of the conversation, the guy gave me a URL and said to try all the tips, and if they didn't work - then send it in. I asked if I should stop by the Apple Store and have it looked at? He said, "nope, they can't help you." Not believing him, I visited the Store today with my dead iPod. They verified it was dead and gave me a new one.

That's right - in and out in 15 minutes with a brand spankin' new iPod - now affectionately named "Whitey." Life is good in Apple land. Of course, after hearing all the G5 propaganda in the store, I might need to seek some professional help. Thank God they didn't have any in the store - I might've actually bought one! Posted in Mac OS X at Jun 29 2003, 09:39:46 PM MDT 4 Comments

20030628 Saturday June 28, 2003

Abbie Loo

Pretty in Pink

Abbie Loo - at seven months. Should be a great weekend with the little one.
We might even do some reading - a new nightly tradition.
Posted in General at Jun 28 2003, 09:22:30 AM MDT Add a Comment

20030627 Friday June 27, 2003

Added Google search to this theme The idea hit me like a cold beer pouring down my throat on a hot summer day. Crisp, clean and exciting. I've been wanting to add a search form to this theme, but I didn't want to add another tab, and putting it anywhere in the header would conflict with the background image. And then I spotted the perfect spot. Right under the categories, in the banner of the first entry on this page. With a little love from the DOM, you can now search this site using this theme and Google. Here's the relevant code that I added to the bottom of this theme. 

<div id="search" style="display:none; margin-top: -17px; text-align: right">
    <form id="searchForm" method="get" action="http://www.google.com/search"
        onsubmit="return search()" style="margin: 0; padding: 0">  
        <input type="text" id="q" name="q" size="20" maxlength="255"
            value="search this site" onclick="this.value=''" /> 
</div>
<script type="text/javascript">
    // get the first entry shown in the page and append the
    // hidden 'search' div from above
    document.getElementById("entries")
            .getElementsByTagName("div")[0]
            .appendChild(document.getElementById("search"));
    toggle("search");
    function search() {
        form = document.getElementById("searchForm");
        if (form.q.value == "search this site" || form.q.value == "") {
            alert("Please enter a search term to continue.");
            form.q.focus();
            return false;
        } else {
            form.q.value = form.q.value + " site:www.raibledesigns.com";
            form.submit();
        }
    }
</script>

Boy oh boy does the DOM make it easy to do web sites! Seems to work in all the browsers I use regularly (IE/Moz on Win, Camino/Safari on Mac). It doesn't work in Opera 6, but does in Opera 7. Now back to that cold beer - I'm gettin' thirsty... Posted in Roller at Jun 27 2003, 04:57:58 PM MDT 8 Comments

A Remote Desktop using XUL From the xul-announce mailing list:

Randall Knutson has released the first prototype for a remote desktop using XUL. Point your Mozilla XUL browser (e.g. Firebird) @ http://robin.sourceforge.net to call up a fresh desktop with a startup menu and play XulMine, Mozteroids, Pagman, Snake, Xultris, MozInvaders and more.

What is Robin? Here's the "official" blurb from the sourceforge project site:

Remote Operating System Build in Netscape (Robin) is a window manager using DHTML, Javascript, XUL and some crazy hacks.

Full story @ http://sourceforge.net/projects/robin

This is pretty fricken cool... Posted in The Web at Jun 27 2003, 02:09:54 PM MDT Add a Comment

RE: J2SE 1.4.2 Released! Thanks to Karl for tipping me off that JDK 1.4.2 has been released. [Download, Release Notes] Of course, I never would've known, except java.blogs told me. I downloaded, installed and changed my $JAVA_HOME to point to this sucker, then ran all my unit tests (flawlessly). It looks pretty damn good to me - just like an upgrade should be. Now where's J2EE 1.4?!

It doesn't look like Apple pulled off the simultaneous release it was hoping to. BTW, I've been doing a fair amount of development on my Mac lately with Eclipse 3.0 M1 - it's getting much, much better. Steve - if you release a 2 GHz PowerBook - I'll work overtime to buy that sucker. Posted in Java at Jun 27 2003, 10:00:20 AM MDT 1 Comment

20030626 Thursday June 26, 2003

OWASP ~ The Open Web Application Security Project I'm working on editing my Security Chapter (yet again) and I went to verify that a URL to http://www.owasp.org was still valid. There I found that they've developed an portal (based on Struts) with security as a REQUIREMENT, not an option.

OWASP

Several modules from the OWASP Common Library (OCL) are utilized as well ( OCL can be found in our CVS repository under the module name OCL ). Content is stored in XML format and translated with XSL.

Aside from the obvious need of a site for our own needs, the portal team has approached the design from the perspective that the OWASP portal should be more than a single use web application, but rather a reference implementation of a secure portal, that will rival the likes of any commercially available portal. We are striving to make the portal as extensible as possible, but yet deliver commonly needed feature sets. [http://beta.owasp.org]

Here's the best part: The portal that runs OWASP is open source and available for use in your own sites. Check out the release plan to see the planned and upcoming features for the next releases. It says it has RSS feeds, but I can't seem to find them. Posted in Java at Jun 26 2003, 09:15:31 PM MDT Add a Comment

Windows Explorer Tricks I got this one from Russ's comments on this post. If you use a command prompt in Windows, type "start ." to open Explorer for the current directory. If you're a Cygwin user like me, this won't work - but "explorer ." does work! Even better, create an alias in your .bashrc file (alias open='explorer') and then you can type "open ." Sweet! Posted in General at Jun 26 2003, 02:23:24 PM MDT 2 Comments