Raible Designs

Free Wireless, Good Beer

I stumbled upon an excellent "virtual office" this afternoon. While riding my bike downtown for JUG meeting tonight, I decided to stop at a local restaurant: The HandleBar & Grill. While driving by a few months ago, I noticed a "free wireless" sign, so I figured I'd stop in and check it out. Sure 'nuff - I'm on it right now! Not only is this a good burger joint, but they have some good microbrews too. Better yet, I just noticed it's happy hour. So here I am, sipping on a Fat Tire and working on open source. Life doesn't get much better than this!

[DJUG] Rhythm and Developing a Successful Open Source Strategy

Tonight looks like it's going to be a good Denver JUG meeting. The Basic Concepts speaker (Brian Boelsterli) is an old friend of mine and one of my mentors from way back in 2001. He taught me a lot about independent consulting, open-source and software development processes. I expect his talk on his Rhythm: an Agile Execution Framework to be excellent. Here's the summary:

Wouldn't it be nice if you could bring to the table a simplified list of practices that you can plug-into your 'Ecosystem' with tremendously successful results? Say, for example, 169 successfully completed iterations! When you think about spinning iterations, once you complete 10-12 of them, you reach your pace, your hearbeat, your Rhythm. This has been our experience!

Come see how you can plug-in 'Rhythm' into your organization and immediately impact your organization with achievements and successes you've never imagined your team could accomplish.

Following Brian is Lajos Moczar talking about Creating A Successful Open Source Strategy. With my new venture at Virtuas, this talk will definitely be interesting since it aligns with what we're doing for organizations.

In recent years, we have seen not only an explosion in the quality and quantity of open source software (OSS), but also a dramatic rise in its usage. These trends bring new challenges to adopters and evangelists of open source software as OSS is proving to be true alternative to traditional commercial software. As developers, many of us have the unique chance to demonstrate to our organizations that OSS is indeed mature enough to power an enterprise. What is important, however, is to have a solid foundation of principles to guide us through the maze of OSS choices. In this talk, I'll present my own set of guidelines that can help you make sense of the field, avoid common pitfalls, and create a successful OSS strategy.

Of course, the best part of these meetings is the networking afterwards at Rock Bottom.

Using IP over FireWire

This afternoon, I received my 1.33 GHz PowerBook back from Apple (the one that blew up on the way to Norway). Everything is back in working order and no data loss. Good ol' Apple - their support is excellent, even if you do lose your laptop for a week. As part of the transition back to this machine, I've decided to format it and copy everything from my new one. Installing Tiger and doing the "copy settings from other PowerBook" works so well, I might as well do it again. Suspecting the worst, I spent a few hours today backing up everything.

I started by tarballing /Applications (5 GB), /Downloads (5 GB) and /Users/mraible (25.5 GB). I wasn't able to do them all b/c I ran out of disk space, so I had to do the first two and then the last one. As I started to copy this from my PowerBook to my Windows box, it began to look like a long day. Estimated time for 10 GB: 5 hours. So I did some research and figured out how to enable IP over FireWire. On Windows, it was pretty easy - I just had to create a "Network Bridge" by selecting both my 1394 Connection and the Local Area Connection. After bridging them, I added a new Network port on OS X utilizing the FireWire port, mapped an IP address manually, and connected to my Windows share the usually way (SMB). OS X took a while to connect, but then it did and I was able to copy 10 GB in 20 minutes, and 25 GB in an hour. Not bad.

Updated Presentations: Spring, AppFuse and Comparing Web Frameworks

As part of my trip to Norway last month, I had an opportunity to update many of the presentations I've delivered at JUG meetings and conferences. Of course, there's not a whole lot to these slides because I believe the real value is seeing them delivered.

The presentation on Test-Driven Development with Spring and Hibernate (a.k.a. AppFuse) will serve as the basis for my AppFuse Tutorial at OSCON. If you're planning on attending that tutorial and would like to see any enhancements, please let me know. All of these are downloadable in PDF format.

• Comparing Java Web Frameworks
• Test-Driven Development with Spring and Hibernate
• The Spring Framework

Enjoy!

NOTE: I updated this site to the latest code from Roller's CVS this morning, so please let me know if you see any issues.

What's in Apple's Transition Kit?

I wonder what's in the new Developer Transition Kit from Apple. The biggest thing is you get a 3.6 GHz P4 that runs OS X for $999. I wonder if this sucker is faster than a dual processor G5? I wonder how much RAM it comes with? Is it worth spending $1500 ($500 to join Apple as a developer + the cost of the package). It'll be interesting to see what these machines look like.

AppFuse Tutorials in Chinese

A guy named "Rocksun" has done a tremendous service to the AppFuse community. He volunteered and took on the task of translating all of AppFuse's Tutorials to Chinese. If you understand Chinese better than English, I encourage you to take a look at Rocksun's translations:

• Creating DAOs
• Creating Managers
• Creating Struts Actions and JSPs
• Creating List Screen and adding Validation

Some people might say your open source project has hit the big time when someone translates your documentation to another language. I don't see it this way. I think the reality is that Rocksun is a super-nice guy and has done a great service to the community. Thanks Rocksun!

NOTE: Rocksun also publishes two blogs, one in English and one in Chinese. And I thought I was busy!

New Phone - Motorola V330

After getting harassed by my new co-workers, and went out and got a new phone today. I lost mine a month ago in California and have been (happily) living without one ever since. Since I'm a T-Mobile subscriber (and much happier with them vs. AT&T), I went to their local store and asked to see their Bluetooth phones (for iSync, presentations and connecting to the internet on my PowerBook). They only had a couple and I decided to get the Motorola V330. I did some research briefly at the Apple Store before buying it and it seems good enough for me. It has the things I care about, but isn't too fancy or expensive. Since I didn't qualify for an upgrade (1 month before my last contract is up), I had to pay $170 (vs. 150 for the upgrade), which isn't that bad compared to the $300 I paid for my Sony Ericsson T637 I got last summer.

The phone seems pretty good so far, and there's been only one minor hiccup. When I first tried to use iSync, it said "device not supported". Thanks to Google and this post, it was easy to fix.

The best part about T-Mobile is I get unlimited data for $19.99/month. Supposedly, this phone works with EDGE networks, which should be available in Denver early next year. This means data transfer rates of up to 384KB/sec. Very cool.

OS X on Intel Chips

There's a lot of rumors flying around now about Apple switching to Intel chips. Somewhat credible sources: Scoble, Gizmodo and CNET. The rumor I like even better is the (less credible) PowerBook G5s. IMO, Apple should switch to Intel, but stay in the hardware business. I'm still willing to pay for a kick-ass aluminum PowerBook - but I'd love it to be twice as fast as my current one (this is where Intel comes in).

Speaking of PowerBooks, it looks like I've got a buyer for the one I bought in Norway. I'm going to lose about $500 on the deal, but it's better than having two PowerBooks when I only need one.

Tapestry 4.0 almost done

Howard on Tapestry 4.0:

Now is the time is to get everything left in 4.0 wrapped up and finalized. Time for a beta, and then a goodly amount of bug fixing and documentation ... and a very tight schedule for 4.1.

Excellent, I'd love to have a beta to play with. Hopefully it's good enough for development. I'd love to get starting using Tapestry 4.0 with annotations.

Porting existing applications to AppFuse with Tapestry+Spring+Hibernate

Mark Dillon has a nice writeup of how he ported an existing application to use AppFuse 1.8 with Tapestry+Spring+Hibernate.