Raible Designs

AppFuse won't work with J2EE 1.4 Final

I don't know why, but AppFuse's MailUtilTest won't run with J2EE 1.4 Final. It works fine with 1.4 Beta 2.

Upgraded to Roller 0.9.9

I upgraded this site to Roller 0.9.9-dev about an hour ago. Seems to be humming along quite nicely - and the GZip Filter is back in action (wasn't working before I upgraded). There looks to be a few issues to iron out still, but since I was able to figure them all out - I'm pretty darn happy with this release.

• oscache.properties is missing from CVS
• a bunch of the editors had leftover (?) taglib declarations - I replaced them with an include to /theme/taglibs.jsp
• the value in Website > Config > Site Name shows up where "Home" used to - I had to rename my site to "Home" to maintain my same menu selections
• there's a lot of SQL (or HQL) logging going on that I can't turn off
• bookmark display macros are broken - you'll need to change the name of your bookmark names (in the macros) to have a /root/ prefix. For example, #showBookmarks("Articles" true true) -> #showBookmarks("/root/Articles" true true)

Hope this helps any early adopters...

My Favorite Eclipse Plugins (Download v1.0)

When I go to new clients, I either have to install Eclipse, or help others configure Eclipse with cool plugins. So I made my own download of my favorite Eclipse plugins. If you want it, download version 1.0 from SourceForge. It includes the following:

• XMLBuddy (http://www.xmlbuddy.com) - XML Editor
• Colorer (http://colorer.sourceforge.net) - General Syntax Highlighter - for JSPs, HTML, CSS, etc.
• Jalopy (http://jalopy.sourceforge.net) - Source Code Formatter
• Lomboz (http://www.objectlearn.com) - JSP Editor
• JSEditor (http://jseditor.sourceforge.net) - JavaScript Editor
• Easy Explorer (http://easystruts.sourceforge.net) - Open Explorer/Finder
• Tomcat Launcher (http://www.sysdeo.com/eclipse/tomcatPlugin.html) - run and debug Tomcat

Installation: Unzip to where ever you have Eclipse installed. I use c:\Tools\eclipse on Windows.

I don't really use XMLBuddy because it doesn't allow spaces (only tabs), but I suppose it's better than nothing. The built-in Ant Editor has the same behavior (tabs only). I'd love to find a plugin that gives code-completion for XDoclet when typing JavaDocs, but I couldn't find one. Sure, there's JBoss-IDE (which is just a bunch of Eclipse plugins), but that only has jboss-specific tags - no @hibernate, no @struts.

NOTE: Many of these plugins didn't work on Eclipse 3.0 M5, so I reverted back to M4.

OS X Users: Jalopy and Colorer don't seem to work at all for me (M4). You'll need to change Easy Explorer from "explorer.exe {0}" to "open {0}" in Window > Preferences > Easy Explorer.

These are all the latest versions as of November 26, 2003.

Unix Utils for Windows

If you develop on Windows, and you use Microsoft's "cmd" to run Ant or compile your classes - you really should install Cygwin - it's much easier and provides the same functionality as cmd. Even better, Dan sent me an e-mail (can't find it now) about UnxUtils - Native Win32 ports of some GNU Utilities. You can even download an executable to install it. I dig it - symlinks that actually work on Windows.

Fedora like OS X?

Is Fedora like OS X? It almost seems like it - everything "just works." Well, at least after my 2nd format-and-install it does. Last Wednesday, I tried to upgrade from Red Hat 9 to Fedora Core 1. It didn't go very smoothly and the upgrade wasn't possible (installer said not enough disk space - I know there's enough). I ended up doing a format and clean, and got most things working but my USB Printer. I spent hours trying to get the damn thing working on Friday night (until 3 a.m.). I spent more time compiling things and trying to get it to work on Saturday (insert picture of me banging my head against the wall). Finally, I gave up on Saturday night and reverted back to Red Hat 9 (it worked before). Formatted and installed. Then I spent all day Sunday trying to get DNS/DHCP and HPOJ (Printing) working. It worked before - what the hell?!

And then on Monday morning, I found the simple-ass solution that was staring me in the face the whole fucking time: Turn off the printer and turn it back on. I found it on a mailing list or something. So, since I knew the solution, and I still hadn't gotten DNS/DHCP/Samba working on RH 9, I decided to upgrade to Fedora (again) last night. Again, same error - on a new 30 GB hard drive - not enough space to upgrade. So I formatted and installed. Lo and behold, I power cycled the printer and everything worked! I installed Dynamic DNS (I did have to run rndc-confgen) and configured Samba to recognize my printer. Viola - in under 20 minutes after I installed Fedora - everything worked. I spent 15 hours trying to fix something that eventually took 1 hour to fix. While setting this stuff up, and everything "just working" - I thought "Fedora is just like OS X - everything just works." Now if I could only get a Ximian Desktop for Fedora.

Notes to self: You're a Linux rookie. Don't mess with the default config. Don't bang your head against the wall for more than an hour. Don't try to upgrade Red Hat 9 to Fedora.

[Hibernate] Generating composite-id code using XDoclet

It's been a while since I dug into the guts of XDoclet and Hibernate. Now I'm digging in on my new project to figure out the best way to generate a <composite-id> entry in my .hbm.xml files. If you know something about Hibernate and XDoclet, please read my questions on the Hibernate Forums.

Doubling the size of our house

We love where we live in Denver right now. We originally bought this house because we wanted a rental property and it's close to the University of Denver (where I went to college). After living here for a couple of months, we discovered that the location absolutely rocks. It's 2 blocks from Safeway (grocery store), 2 blocks from Porter Hospital, 3 blocks from our bank. It has a couple liquor stores within a couple blocks and many restaurants within walking distance. The house is small, 675 square feet, but the lot is huge - 2.5 times the normal lot size. So we decided to investigate the idea of adding an addition onto the house. After talking with a few builders, we decided on one and the project starts one week from tomorrow. We're going to gut the current house and make it into 3 bedrooms. The new additional will be the same size as our current house and it's going to be one big open room - with a great room and kitchen. We're also tearing down our 1-car garage and building a 2-car garage in the alley. Exciting times - should be done by mid-summer next year. I'll make sure and take lots of pictures (and post them) as the project progresses.

User-Mode Linux ~ should I switch my ISP?

This User-Mode Linux sounds like a great opportunity for hosting this site. I currently pay around $50/month to host this site, and there's two things that are frustrating:

• I only get 5 GB of bandwidth, and I pay the same as my provider for any extra - I usually pay $30 extra per month for bandwidth.
• I get a max of 20 connections per mysql instance. While this should be plenty, it does seem to cause this site to crash, and I'm not motivated enough to dig into Roller/Tomcat and figure out why.

I do have a cable internet connection, so I could host this site myself, but my upload speed is only 241 KB. For you folks that do use UML, does anyone have experience with running Java (i.e. Tomcat or Roller) and MySQL?

1.5 GB of RAM in Windows XP

I added another 1 GB of RAM to my new Windows XP box (2.6 GHz Dell Dimension 8300) last week - to 1.5 GB. At first, I wasn't impressed, mainly because Ant/Java didn't seem to have much of a performance increase. I have noticed a *huge* improvement in the opening of apps and Windows Explorer. Everything just snaps, no waiting - click and it's open - very nice. Browsers (IE and Firebird) seem to be a lot faster as well.

First Snow in Denver

It's really coming down right now - I wouldn't be surprised if we had 6 inches by nightfall. Click on the images below to zoom in.

First Snow 2003

View down our Street (near DU)