Raible Designs

Bleeehhhh

It's been a week and a half now since I started feeling sick. Don't worry, I'm not dead. We used to live out by the intersection where the accident happened and one of our old neighbors drove a blue Dodge Durango. Hopefully they're OK. Regardless, this is a tragedy that my words surely cannot help.

We did make a trip to the Emergency Room on Thursday night (which also happened to be Julie's birthday). We decided to go to the ER because my fever hit 105 and we figured the ER could tell us something about my affliction. After CAT Scans and a spinal tap (among other things), they came to the same conclusion as my doctor on Monday - "some kind of virus, hopefully you'll get better in a week or two." The good news is it's not Menengitis, Mono or West Nile. Wednesday and Thursday of last week were the worst - where I spent pretty much all day in bed. If I was awake, I had a dull-throbbing headache and a fever.

The pain isn't too bad, but the body aches and brain-cloudiness are enough to keep me from working or wanting to do anything. I'm expecting that I'll simply wake up one day and I'll just feel better. I can't wait - I'm tired of having 2-3 fevers per day. I also feel like my todo list is just getting longer with my lack of productivity. Oh well, I'm sure there are some parts of my body that are enjoying the lack of stress.

What the hell is wrong with me?

Ever since last Tuesday, I've felt like shit. My sickness has mostly been body aches and dizziness. Body aches like you get when you sleep too much. Dizziness like when you stand up too fast. It started shortly after I finished work on Tuesday and resulted in a 7:00 p.m. bedtime for me that night. The next day, I felt good enough to wake up at 4:00 a.m. and knock out a bunch of code. When I went on a bike ride on Wednesday afternoon, the dizziness started again - fading in and out every few minutes. I was still able to climb the mountain, but I was pretty damn slow. Over the next few days, the dizziness has increased from being prevalent in the evenings to disrupting my whole day.

Yesterday, for Mother's Day, we went out to a nice brunch and I downed a few Mimosas. By the time the meal was over, I was holding my stomach in pain. I cured the pain with an afternoon nap - but woke up with a fever. The fever hung around for a few hours, but eventually broke. Today was more of the same: dizziness, pain in my stomach, body pains and loss of appetite. We figured it was about time I went to a Doctor. We had suspicions - everything from an ulcer to colon cancer. Yeah, Julie kept giggling with the though of a Barium Enema for yours truly.

Unfortunately, the doctor did not have a quick and simple diagnosis of my affliction. He said that I have all the symptoms of West Nile, but it's too early and I haven't seen any mosquitos. He came to the conclusion that its some kind of virus and hopefully I'll be better in a week or so. They extracted my fluids for testing - so hopefully they'll have some more information for me tomorrow. In the meantime, I remain slightly feverish, a little dizzy and my body is engulfed in a dull pain. It's not a crippling illness, just annoying - annoying enough to keep me de-motivated for many computer-related activities. Too bad I have two clients that want releases this week, as well as AppFuse 1.5 final.

If you don't hear from me in the next few days, its likely gotten worse.

Update: The doctor called this morning (the day after the above post) and said all my fluids came back normal. Therefore, they just think it's a virus of some sort. Thanks to all who commented - I wish it was just exhaustion. Unfortunately, it seems to be much worse than that since I tend to recover from exhaustion in a couple of days. Now I'm just hoping that I'll recover before Denver's NFJS.

Weekend Releases :: XDoclet 1.2.1, Tomcat 5.0.24 and Cactus 1.6

While many folks were oohing and awwhing over how EJB 3.0 will make their worlds easier and app servers viable again - some folks continued to get things done:

• Tomcat 5.0.24 Stable: Change Log · Download. I'm pumped to see the Ant task declaration get simpler.
• Cactus 1.6: Change Log · Download. It's good to see the Resin support for the <cactus> task. Now if I could just find time to create a <runcontainer> task that allows you to pass in the server name (i.e. tomcat5, resin3).
• XDoclet 1.2.1: Release Notes · Download. I actually became an XDoclet committer last week - so hopefully that will help the Struts and Spring modules stay up-to-date. I'm using the current CVS version of XDoclet and it's working fine. The only problem is I had to hack it so it'd work consistently with Ant 1.6. This resulted in breaking 1.5.x compatibility.

BTW, thanks to all the Symposium Bloggers - with all the good reporting, I felt like I didn't miss a thing.

Being an independent sucks

Richard Monson-Haefel seems to hate being an independent consultant. Personally, I love it - but I've only been doing it for 3 years. He's been independent for 5. I hope when my 5 year anniversary rolls around - I'm not looking for a full-time gig. But you never know. One of the things that I see a lot of independent consultants doing wrong is traveling. Traveling sucks - plain and simple. Being away from your family in the name of a higher hourly rate seems stupid. Then again, I've been fortunate enough to always find work in Denver - half of it where I'm working from home. I do realize that a lot of independents don't live in a tech-rich town like Denver, but why don't you move! Actually, the only reason we're still in Denver over West Palm or San Diego is because the contracts keep flowing. If they dry up - yeah, we'll probably be moving closer to the ocean. But if we move and I'm traveling for gigs - what's the point? I guess Julie's happiness (she loves the ocean) plays a part, eh? ;-)

I traveled a lot in March and April, but I don't plan on doing too many more stints like that. I guess June-July might be a bit rough with JavaOne and OsCon, but after that - I hope to stay put. We'll see - let's hope I get lucky enough to continue finding local contracts.

Glad I'm not in Vegas

Posts like this make me glad I'm not in Vegas for the TheServerSide Symposium. Sure it'd be fun to see a bunch of great speakers and hang out some smart folks - but the lack of sleep would kill a lot of that enthusiasm. I think Vegas is a great place for a bachelor party but not for a conference. At a bachelor party, you're expected to be a vegetable the next day - but at a conference...

To make matters worse, I'd be the guy that was up until 8 a.m. gambling and boozing like a madman. Glad I'm not in Vegas - I'd be like a kid in a candy store.

The real reason I'm not in Vegas? My mom is flying in tonight for the weekend. It is Mother's Day weekend after all.

FYI: Blogs covering the Symposium.

Struts Contract position in DTC

If you're an independent contractor, live in Denver, and know Struts - you might want to checkout this position. Requires: Struts, Tiles, JavaScript, DHTML. Sounds like a fun gig - contact me if you're interested and I'll give you the rate.

In a related note, I might have a contract opportunity for a local developer familiar with AppFuse and its technologies (most important: Struts, Hibernate, Spring and JUnit).

You know you've made it when...

You know you've made it when you've been biled! Sweet - thanks Hani!

Matt "Proud to be an Asshat" Raible

[ANN] AppFuse 1.5 Beta Released!

This release has lots of modifications that I've been meaning to make for quite some time. Specifically (1) removing the dependency on j2ee.jar and (2) removing Struts from the services layer. I also made improvements to Spring and its context file loading so you should be able to run unit tests from your IDE.

Other notables include full i18n support (with translations in Dutch, Brazilian and Chinese), improved setup-tomcat target (no additional JARs needed now), and an option to use Spring's MVC framework instead of Struts. If you'd like, you can read more about my conversion from Struts to Spring. Enjoy!

• Download (~12.2 MB)
• Release Notes
• Mailing Lists
• Demo

BTW, this upload was a little hefty for java.net at 12.5 MB - because of the iBATIS and Spring MVC option. My browsers (Mozilla and IE) kept timing out and I was getting a "Not enough space" error. To fix this, I had to increase the timeout on Mozilla. Here's the steps I went through:

• Type "about:config" in the address bar.
• Type "timeout" in the filter field and hit Enter.
• Change "network.http.keep-alive.timeout" to 600 (10 minutes). The default is 300.

Sucking off my bandwidth

While digging through my stats today, I found a site that's sucking off my bandwidth: http://laptops.inreview.com. Not only are they using one of my pictures from this post, but they're simply linking to my site - rather than copying the image locally. Those bastards! ;-)

I've sent them an e-mail, let's hope they have the courtesy to remove my image. I wonder how many other images of mine are being used on the web? I realize that if I put up an image on this site, it's likely to be copied and used on another site. I don't really care so much about that - but I would appreciate an e-mail asking permission, as well as the decency to copy the image to your local server.

Creating column indexes with Hibernate

One of the best ways to speed up your application's performance is to create or optimize indexes in your database. On my current project, when we created our database on the AS/400 last week, the DBA noticed that there weren't any indexed created. I expected this and said I'd do some research on creating indexes with Hibernate. Thanks to Gavin, it turns out to be quite simple. Let's say you have an XDoclet tag on a column you want to index. Currently it is:

@hibernate.property column="username" not-null="true"

If you're using Hibernate's <schemaexport> task, you can add an index on this column to your mapping file and it'll create the index when creating the database. To add an index, it's as simple as changing the above XDoclet tag to:

@hibernate.property
@hibernate.column name="username" not-null="true" index="index_name"

Now the hard part comes. Which columns should you put indexes on? From what I've heard, it's the ones that you use in where clauses of your queries. I expect one or two per table is sufficient (??). One thing I'm not sure of is: should id columns contain an index?