Raible Designs

Why Intuit Sucks

Intuit, the maker of QuickBooks and Quicken, does not make good OS X software. Why? Because it can't read the Window's versions of its files. I bought Quicken so we could edit our Quicken files with our Macs, as we currently do with our PCs (data file is stored on Linux). To edit our Quicken files on the Mac, we have to export a QIF file from Quicken/Win and then import on Quicken/Mac. Good thing I wasted my money on a Windows version of Quicken and a Mac version - since I'll obviously only be able to use one.

Same goes for QuickBooks - if you want to edit your Windows-created QuickBooks file on a Mac, you must export/import. That just sucks! Intuit - have you ever heard of this company called Microsoft? They seemed to have no problems making their software read files created by either platform - maybe you should take a lesson from them.

This site isn't doing so well...

Since I upgraded to Roller 0.9.8, this site has crashed twice. Once last night, and once this afternoon. Both appear to be caused by a MySQL failure, followed by an AJP to Tomcat failure. I haven't asked Keith yet, but I do suspect it's a hosting issue, not a software issue.

Update: From Keith:

No problems with the database as far as I can tell from the logs.

Uptime on the server is currently 9939830 seconds or 115 days.  Is it 
possible that you are hitting the 20 connection per user max?

Well at least it stayed up through the night, if it goes again then obviously it's Roller 0.9.8 and I'll be reverting back to the last version (a CVS snapshot) I had running.

What is the fastest way to transfer data between PowerBooks?

In order to be a good husband, now that I've given my old laptop to Julie, I need to transfer all my files, settings, etc. from my old PowerBook to my new one. What's the fastest way to do this? I'm guessing Firewire or something like that. Do the Apple Retail outlets sell anything?

Today's Upgrades

Today's upgrades include Roller (to version 0.9.8) and a new PowerBook. I picked up a 17-incher from my local Apple Store this afternoon. It's big and awesome. As for the Roller upgrade, I've only found one bug so far (related to previewing themes). Hope y'all had a good weekend.

Good Stuff ~ Simpsons

 Just a friendly reminder...

In August of Last Year

I began to learn a whole lot about Ant from Erik Hatcher. Good guy, great words - fun stuff.

Out for sushi

Murphy's Birthday

Vanity URLs in Struts

I figured out a way to make your Struts' app have URLs like the following:

http://raibledesigns.com/weblog?method=edit
http://raibledesigns.com/weblog.jsp?method=edit
http://raibledesigns.com/weblog.html?method=edit
http://raibledesigns.com/weblog.php?method=edit
http://raibledesigns.com/weblog.asp?method=edit

Might be a nifty little trick to try. Pump out a version of Roller with this feature enabled and you could say you made a .NET version! ;-)

Here's how:

1.  I created a RequestFilter that maps to /*
2.  This filter checks to see if request.getServletPath() matches any of the
action paths in struts-config.xml.  If so, it forwards to the action.
3.  As an added feature, I added a set of allowed extensions to this
filter's init parameters.  So far I have .jsp,.html,.asp,.cfm (using .jsp
ensures no one links to them directly, MVC enforced!) - so marketing can
choose what technology they want to convey ;-)

This seems to work great.  For example, I have an "advancedSearch" action
defined as follows:

    <action path="/advancedSearch"
      type="org.apache.struts.actions.ForwardAction" 
      parameter=".advancedSearch"/>

(ForwardAction will eventually be replaced, if necessary, with a real
action).  This allows all of the following URLs to work:

http://site.com/do/advancedSearch (works with Struts by default)
http://site.com/advancedSearch
http://site.com/advancedSearch.html + all other extensions listed.

More information (including source code) can be found on the struts-user mailing list.

AppFuse Refactorings

I did some refactorings of AppFuse yesterday - inspired by an e-mail I received from Jon. I basically de-coupled my Actions from Hibernate - tossing around a connection object in the constructors of my Managers and DAOs (rather than the method signatures). A little more casting, but no noticeable performance difference. I'll upload the source shortly.

Update: - Source has been released.

PowerBook Memory from Crucial.com

Crucial.com always seems to have the best prices on RAM - and today I found its no different for the PowerBook - for 512MB, it's $150 vs. $300 from Apple. That's Apple for you - trying to make a buck where ever they can - not a bad business practice when you have so many cult-like followers.