Raible Designs

Keystone

Heading to the Summit

In a couple of hours (after my fraternity's annual Alumni vs. Actives softball game), I'll be heading up to Keystone to attend the Colorado Software Summit. I'm pretty excited about going; it's at one of my favorite places to ski, and it's the first time I'll be attending. I've heard great things about this conference, and I'm sure it'll live up to its reputation.

On the other hand, I have a good case of the "it figures". I caught a nasty cold from the kids a couple of days ago and it's sure to be in full force by tomorrow. With any luck, I'll lose my voice sometime before a talk this week - or perhaps cough my way through one of them. Do you have a good story about speaking when you're sick? If so, please share.

Pennies in the Radio

Julie took her car in to the stereo shop today b/c the radio was cutting out every once in a while. Actually, it was better than that - it'd quit working when she'd drive over a bump, and then start working again when she hit the next bump. The stereo shop called a few minutes ago to tell us what the problem was: someone has stuffed pennies into the radio, and they'd somehow fallen down and were shorting out the wiring below. I wonder who that someone was?

If you have a good "my life as a parent" story, I'd love to hear it.

What's a good DVI KVM?

I'm looking to get a KVM Switch for my home office. I used to have one when I had 2 19" Dell Monitors and it worked quite well. However, since I got a 23" Cinema Display, I haven't had one. This means that if I ever work on my PowerBook, I don't get to enjoy the comfort of a keyboard, mouse and huge monitor. This needs to change.

I bought a DVI KVM switch when I first got the monitor a year ago, and it didn't work. Apple's DVI connector was too big and didn't fit in the switch. So now I'm looking again - do you know of any that work well with a Cinema Display?

MySQLDialect vs. MySQLInnoDBDialect

I've used Hibernate's MySQLDialect ever since I started using Hibernate and MySQL. However, I noticed with Hibernate 3 there's a couple of new MySQL Dialects in town: MySQLInnoDBDialect and MySQLMyISAMDialect. Using MySQLDialect still seems to work fine for me - and it handles transaction rollbacks when I'm using InnoDB types.

What's the point of these fine-grained dialects? Should they be used when possible, or does MySQLDialect default to one of these based on MySQL metadata? IMO, Hibernate's javadocs could stand to have a little more "doc" action. Maybe I'm just not looking in the right place for the answer to this question.

What's the best way to integrate Ajax into a Java webapp?

I received an e-mail over the weekend asking how to integrating Ajax into into the various web frameworks covered in my Java Web Framework Comparison Whitepaper. Below is my reply:

The best thing that I've seen is to use DWR, Prototype and Scriptaculous.
These will work with all web frameworks, and if you're using Spring on the backend -
DWR makes it easy to expose your beans as JavaScript objects.

Also, there's a number of tag library solutions that greatly simplify things:

  http://javawebparts.sf.net
  http://ajaxanywhere.sf.net
  http://ajaxtags.sf.net

I haven't used the first one, but I have used AjaxAnywhere and saw a demo of
AjaxTags from its developers.  They both look like they could be very useful.

For those of you using Ajax in your Java webapps - what's your advice? Do you use these same libraries or other ones?

This post was partially motivated by my desire to reiterate things that are so obvious.

Roller gets some respect

From A Baggins Under the Hill (nice looking theme BTW):

There's a surprising (or perhaps not so surprising) number of PHP programs, intricate ones at that, that have developers who didn't bother to abstract away the database layer, and wrote DB-vendor-dependent queries. That's a pretty horrible thing to do, since it ties you quite firmly down to one DB (in many cases MySQL). The SQL code is often very tightly integrate with the display code; it's bad enough in the business layer, but the view layer as well? Good gods.
...
Roller, on the other hand, uses things like Hibernate to abstract away queries from the underlying DB implementations, and Velocity to separate out the display logic from the business logic. And blogging software does have business logic, or a model; blog entries and categories and tags and authentication and the manipulation thereof are not simple. As a result, I see features being added to Roller that I'm surprised to see happening so quickly.

As far as solving the issue with Tomcat 5.5, that's just a matter of updating your $CATALINA_HOME/conf/Catalina/localhost/roller.xml file. Here's what I use for Roller on PostgreSQL:

<Context path="/roller" docBase="roller" debug="99" reloadable="false"
    antiJARLocking="true" antiResourceLocking="false">

    <Realm className="org.apache.catalina.realm.JDBCRealm" debug="99"
          driverName="org.postgresql.Driver"
       connectionURL="jdbc:postgresql://localhost/roller"
      connectionName="postgres" connectionPassword="postgres"
           userTable="rolleruser" userNameCol="username" userCredCol="passphrase"
       userRoleTable="userrole" roleNameCol="rolename" />

    <Resource name="jdbc/rollerdb" auth="Container" type="javax.sql.DataSource"
              maxActive="20" maxIdle="10" maxWait="100"
              driverClassName="org.postgresql.Driver"
              username="postgres" password="postgres"
              url="jdbc:postgresql://localhost/roller"/>

    <Resource name="mail/Session" auth="Container" type="javax.mail.Session"
              mail.smtp.host="localhost" />
</Context>

The Bus Project Begins

About 2 months ago, I sat down and started calling local body shops to see about starting my "Daddy's Bus" project. I called about 5 of them, left messages, and waited. A week later no one had returned my call. Then I got a call from Mike Lopez of Twins Auto Body and Paint. He told me to bring my bus in and he'd take a look at it. I drove to his shop in North Denver the next day.

The first 1/2 hour with Mike was somewhat mesmerizing - we talked about the bus, how I got it, what I wanted to do, etc. The whole time, he was running his hands all over it - almost caressing it in a sense. Mike and I had a great conversation and it ended with him saying it was in great shape and he'd love to work on it. I asked him how much - and he gave me a quote of $4800 - $5500. I thought this was just for the body work, and it sounded pretty reasonable. He then proceeded to tell me that this was for the whole ball of wax: body work and paint. I was expecting to spend 5K on body, 5K on paint, and 5 on interior, so this was music to my ears.

At this point, I got bold. "How much for show quality?", I asked. 8-9K was his answer. I was very excited at this point because he was telling me the prices I wanted to hear. The major difference b/w "show quality" and "regular" is that they do everything for show quality - including smoothing/painting the interior and bottom of the rig. Mike had me sold at this point, but I still didn't trust that he might be the guy to help me restore the bus. At that point, he invited me into his shop, where my gaze fell upon a plethora of beautiful VWs: a Carman Gia, 3 Bugs and an old Bus (same year as mine) with a truck bed. All were in various stages of restoration, but it was obvious that Mike knew what he was doing. We discussed getting my bus ready, and our conversation ended with me saying I'd call him when I had it stripped and ready for sandblasting.

It's been hard finding time and motivation to start working on the bus - but I managed to do it today. I started by ripping out the interior, and managed to get most of it done. I still need to drop the engine and remove all the windows - but I think I can do both of those in a couple of days. With any luck, I'll have the bus in Mike's shop by December. Estimated time to complete body work and paint: 6 months to a year. Once he's done with the body work and paint, I expect it'll take me another year to finish the interior, mechanical and electrical. With any luck, I'll have a brand new '66 bus before the New Bus is available.

Here's a bunch of before and after pictures from what I did today.

Before

After Interior Removal

Family Picture at Disney

It's been a while since I posted a family picture - here's one from last week at Disney.

Integrating Axis into AppFuse

Via Technorati, I found Integrate Axis and Appfuse Part1. Good stuff - I'm looking forward to Part 2.