Raible Designs

Frances

Julie's Mom lives in West Palm Beach, which is directly in the path of Frances. She's decided to weather it out in Miami. I don't know if Miami is in the path of the hurricane or not, but I'd love to find some blogs from that area. Blogs seem to provide much timelier news than traditional media - and they're usually more pleasant to read.

Michael Levin (of Gainesville I believe) points to buzzmodo, who seems to live in Central Florida and gives a chilling perspective of what's going on there right now.

The streets are empty, stores are boarded up, many gas stations are without gas, having sold out yesterday. Most business are closed including all of the banks.
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I heard friends today sharing tips about where to get battery powered radios, then where to get batteries, and where to get water.

It's almost as if people are preparing for the end times.

Fix Tab to drop-down in Firefox on OS X

Firefox is a great browser as most of you probably already know. I recently switched to using it as my default browser on OS X because Safari is flakey with GMail. One of the annoying things about Firefox on OS X is you can't tab to drop-downs in a web page. No longer my friends - in this month's Macworld there's a solution!

In Firefox (or Mozilla), type about:config in the address bar. Then search for "accessiblity.tabfocus". Change the value to "3" in order to allow tabbing to all form elements, or "7" if you want form elements + links.

Now if I could only get my two favorite Safari features in Firefox: auto-fillin of forms and spell-checking as you type.

No G5 PowerBooks Anytime Soon

Mac Rumors: No G5 PowerBooks Anytime Soon. If I had a vote, I'd say it's time to give up on the G5 for the PowerBook and make OS X run on Intel or AMD chips - then produce an Intel/AMD version of the PowerBook. Apple makes great hardware, but their laptops are much slower than their Intel counterparts (for Java at least). All I want is a PowerBook that can keep up with an Intel-based laptop - is that too much to ask?

Roller goes Professional!

OK, so Roller hasn't gone professional, but Dave will be getting paid to work on it.

It's official. Roller is now my full time job. I just accepted a job with Sun Microsystems to "design, develop, and deploy the primary blogging system for Sun in conjunction with other engineers" and to evangelize blogging both inside and outside of Sun. Needless to say, I'm thrilled.
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What does this mean to Roller? Only good things. Sun wants many of the same things for Roller that other Roller users want including high performance, high availability, great user interface, support for standards, and better support for large communities of bloggers. Thanks to Sun I'll be working full time to help make these things happen.

Congratulations Dave! You're living the open-source developer's dream.

Our Little Boy has Arrived!

We've all make it home safe and sound. This birth was pretty easy compared to Abbie's. We left for the hospital at 8:15 pm and Jack was born shortly after midnight. Julie was a champ - two pushes and he was out! Julie's mom and sister flew in so we've been having a great time with all the family around. Life is great in Denver right now.

The Whole Family

Going to ApacheCon?

Are you heading to ApacheCon this year? I am.

Thank you for your recent session proposals for ApacheCon US 2004.

The following session has been accepted and scheduled.

  (1010) 'Comparing Web Frameworks: Struts, Spring MVC, WebWork, Tapestry & JSF'

You will receive more information about this soon,
if you haven't already.

Vegas baby.

Just to warn you

Julie just walked into my office. She said, "Just to warn you, I've had a few contractions. They aren't bad, but there was one that really hurt." The plot thickens...

Update: 10 minutes apart. We're pretty sure this is it. We've booked her sister's flight. $250 for 6 hours in advance - not bad eh? Will update if there's its a false alarm - otherwise you'll have to wait a few days until we have pictures. Aaaahhh, vacation begins!

MyEclipse VP is blogging

Wayne Parrott, the VP of Product Management at Genuitec (makers of MyEclipse) has started a blog.

For the past 3 years I have been involved with a great team at Genuitec (www.genuitec.com) of which I am a founder. While my title at Genuitec is VP, Product Management, I think of myself more as an Eclipse technologist and product delivery specialist. These days I spend most of my professional time working on Genuitec's MyEclipse Enterprise Workbench product. A quick fly by of my resume looks something like this: several startup failures, numerous consulting engagements, and some really cool work on the Human Genome Project and NASA's AI Section that dates back to the '80s.

Very cool! I love it when companies get closer to their customers via weblogs. Now we just need to get Wayne to start blogging some tips and tricks.

Someone doesn't like the bus

It seems that someone in Denver Parking doesn't like my bus. The day after we got back from San Diego, I had a ticket on my window for expired plates. Granted, they had been expired for a year, but I did have a trip permit. I wrote a letter and got it reduced from $30 to $15. Today, they got me again, this time b/c I didn't have a front license plate on the bus. WTF?! All it's doing is sitting in front of our house! My guess is that whoever is handing out these tickets is actually one of my neighbors and doesn't like VWs. We need to get our house finished so we can move all our crap out of the garage and into the house - then I can move the bus in there and being "the project."

Since our builder's passing, Julie has taken over as General Contractor. It's been pretty nuts around here with me working 80 hour weeks and her interviewing and managing a bunch of different contractors. 7 days and counting. Come on little one - we're ready.

Eclipse tip o' the day

By default, Eclipse expects all its plugins to be in $ECLIPSE_HOME/plugins. This doesn't work too well for upgrading since you have to copy all of your installed plugins to Eclipse everytime you upgrade. To solve this, you can place all your plugins in an external direct and point to them using a link file. To do this, create a links directory in $ECLIPSE_HOME and create a file inside it that points to an alternate location. The name of this file doesn't seem to matter, but it must end with a ".link" extension. In this file, put a path:

path=C:\\Tools\\myplugins

Then in c:\Tools\myplugins, create an Eclipse-like directory structure so you end up with c:\Tools\myplugins\eclipse\plugins. Then drop your plugins in that directory. If you choose to use an alternate workspace as well, upgrading Eclipse will be as easy as copying in your links folder. BTW, here's more information on upgrading Eclipse.