Raible Designs

Hibernate wins Jolt Award!

I'm at the Jolt Awards as part of the SD West conference. We're jacked right now on Jolt gum and just watched Hibernate win the Jolt Award for the Libraries, Frameworks and Components category. Congrats guys - that rocks!

I want one...

If this is true, and it looks like the artists rendering below - I want one.

In reality, I hope they just lower the prices on the existing ones. I'm eyeing a 23 incher, but the wife thinks it's a waste of money. Unfortunately, she's right - but that doesn't change the fact that I want one.

Sunny California

I'm sitting in sunny Santa Clara, CA right now - getting ready to join the rest of the SourceBeat crew at SD West. The best part so far? Besides the weather, there's a rumor they're servin' good ol' Colorado Beer at tonight's event. Coors Light. Certainly not my favorite, but a cold beer and tech talk always go well together. ;-)

Also very cool is the high speed wireless internet throughout the hotel.

You gotta admit...

You gotta admit that Pebble's front page on JavaRanch looks pretty nice. It's definitely prettier than JRoller's and there's something about it that makes me like it even more than Roller's new front page. Kudos to Simon - nice work!

Maybe Roller's front page doesn't have to look like the rest of the editor UI (which most never see). If anyone out there wants to put together a slick-looking design for Roller's front page, I'll turn it into the real deal (with Dave and Lance's approval of course).

One Year Ago - Wrox goes under

I was on vacation at my sister's when I found out. I'd just finished the final edits on my chapters and it was time to party. But then, one year ago today, I read (via weblogs) that Wrox was going under. Today, it's nice to look back and see that Pro JSP did get published.

You'd think after 6 months, we'd start to see some royalties. Nope. Nothing. Maybe it's not selling enough copies for the authors to get our $5/year cut. ;-)

[Construction] Swimming Pool almost done

This last week, Bob the Builder has been digging our new foundation like a madman with his little Bobcat. It's been quite humorous at times - this little machine struggling to crawl the mounds of dirt in our backyard. One time, I saw him take 8 or 9 runs to get to the top and dump the dirt. We have no more lawn (front or back) and there's large mountains of earth everywhere. Here are a couple of shots - we've been telling the neighbors we're "putting in a swimming pool." ;-)

Bob and the Bobcat

The Swimming Pool

iChat, AIM and Skype

Ever since the latest version of iChat came out, I've been looking forward to video-conferencing with my Dad. So much, in fact, that I went out and bought an iSight. So far, it's been pretty disappointing. We can't do audio between his Windows/AIM client and my Mac/iChat client - and the video doesn't work either. It might be on his end, except that I am able to do audio on my XP machine. I hope it's just because iChat is beta software. So far, it seems like the iSight is a waste of money.

Tonight, we chatted for a few minutes using AIM and it worked - but it was pretty bad. For some reason, our machines only supported half-duplex and we both had to click a button to talk, and then again when we wanted to listen. Kinda like using CB radios. There was no two-way talk like you get on a regular telephone.

Fortunately, a friend sent me an e-mail about Skype last week - so we downloaded and tried that. I must say - Skype is very nice software and the quality was as good as my home phone, if not better. Unfortunately, it doesn't look like it supports video. However, it does have an IM client built-in. Oh well - at least we got somewhere on this whole video-conferencing thing. Next step: get the video going. After that, I'll concentrate on getting the whole Windows <-> Mac thing working.

[Struts Menu] Building Dynamic Menus from a database table

I spent a few hours this weekend and did some work on Struts Menu. At the very least, I made it easier to build dynamic menus programmatically and put together an example of doing it from a database table. I also added support for Expression Language (EL) syntax in all the tag's attributes. For the EL implementation, I simply copied what was implemented in the DisplayTag. I don't know that it's the best way (two TLDs, subclassing tag classes), but it works and it is good enough for now. The main reason I copied the implementation in the DisplayTag is that we've been talking about adding support for OGNL. I figure if I copy the implementation, it should be easy enough to copy the refactorying if/when it happens.

Back to the point of this post - how do you build dynamic menus? So without further ado, here's how to build and display database-driven menus with Struts Menu.

Keynote is a Monster

I bought Apple's Keynote for my upcoming presentations. As I began to install it - the System Requirements caught my eye:

• Power Mac G3 or G4, PowerBook G4, eMac, iMac or iBook with 500 MHz or faster processor (Power PC G4 recommended)
• Mac OS X v 10.2 or later (Mac OS X version 10.2.6 recommended)
• 128 MB of RAM (512 MB recommended)
• 8 MB of video memory (32 MB recommended)
• 1 GB of available disk space

1 GB of disk space?! Jeez - this sucker is huge! There's really no reason to complain since I have plenty of space - this is just the largest install I've seen in quite some time.

Another nice design - Phono Phunk

I'm going to have to save this one for later. It's definitely one of the cleanest and prettiest blogs I've seen in a long time. Well done! Thanks to Wouter for the link.