Raible Designs

Forest Fires Hit Home

I'm the only person in my family that isn't a professional Forest Fire Fighter. Kalin (my sister) fought fires in Montana and Washington for a number of years before she opened Chelan Cider Company. My mom and dad have over 20 years worth of experience. However, this year, they decided to take a break. But that break will be short lived. A fricken fire is threatening the cabin! Well, not yet - but it's getting pretty fucking close!!

• Yesterday: Crazy Horse fire hits 5,500 acres; evacuations ordered
• Today: Condon-area residents prepare to flee

Residents in Kraft Creek, Glacier Creek and along Guest Ranch Road have been under an evacuation warning since Sunday, when Crazy Horse first blew up and ran across national forest and Plum Creek Timber Co. lands. It jumped Kraft Creek Road on Tuesday, heading toward homes a short two miles distant.

I used to catch the school bus at the end of Guest Ranch Road.

"It's disconcerting," said Christian Wohlfeil, owner of Holland Lake Lodge. "But we are not in panic mode yet - the fire hasn't crossed the highway."

We are (luckily) on the side of the highway that it hasn't crossed. I can tell my parents are professionals - they knew this was coming. They booked flights to the cabin a couple of weeks ago - but they're scheduled to arrive next Friday. My dad is ready to hammer their Subaru 11 hours to Montana at a moments notice - so stories like these might be the trigger.

I know they'll stop the fires if they get that close - but I might have to join them. It's like a loved one's life being threatened - you'll do anything to stop the attacker.

JavaScript Exception Handling

Did you know you can use try/catch blocks in JavaScript? It's pretty slick and makes it easy to hide those ugly JavaScript errors. There is an article over at Dev Shed that explains how you can use the new Error object and the "try-catch" constructs to trap and resolve errors. Good stuff!

AppFuse 0.9.1 Released

AppFuse 0.9.1 is a small bug-fixing release. I introduced some errors in the upload module by using <fmt:message> in my baseLayout.jsp, rather than <bean:message>. Not a big deal if you're not using sub-modules. I've never used them in the real-world, only in my example projects.

• Download

My Blunder of the Day

I woke up early this morning and put in a days work before noon. This afternoon, a friend and I drove to Cheyenne, Wyoming (1.5 hours north) to meet a friend from Nebraska for an afternoon of golf. Golf was great and we had a fun time. When my buddy dropped me off at my car (in Denver), I realized I left my keys in the golf cart. The problem? We only have one set of keys for the car I was driving.

Damn, I missed the DJUG tonight. Tomorrow should be a fun day driving to Cheyenne and back...

Using the T68i as a GRPS Modem

I got inspired by Russ's post and decided to try once again to connect my PowerBook to the Internet using Bluetooth/GRPS. I found an OS X GRPS HowTo on AT&T's site, and whaddya know - I'm connected 10 minutes later. Very cool - 29.8 KB per second (according to http://bandwidthplace.com/speedtest). Hopefully, I'll never need to use this, but it's nifty to know it's there.

New Gig starts Monday

After searching and interviewing for the last few weeks, I finally decided on my next gig this morning. Phew - I'm glad that process is over with.

I've accepted a position with ResortQuest [quote] in Lafayette, CO (about 30 miles north of my house). They run a high traffic (I think) website for booking vacation rentals and own many local property management companies. Currently, it's written in Cold Fusion and I'll be helping them migrate it to a Struts-based architecture. They've already done their Smoky Mountain site in Tennessee, and now there's a big push to get the mountain resort properties done for the ski season.

I'm pretty pumped about the position - there's a team of about 10 and also a Graphics Design group. I've never been on a team with a Graphics Design group - so that should be awesome - no more worrying about look and feel, just coding. The commute might kinda suck, but most traffic is going the other way. Not being able to ride my bike to work will be a bummer, but none of my other opportunities had that either - so I can't fault them for that. One of the biggest perks is that they don't have a BYOL policy, and they've already got the machines in house, so I can hit the ground running.

Because I don't need to bring my own laptop, I will be returning the ZX7 today. Who knows if I'll get a new computer anytime soon - I don't really need one now. My newly installed XP box is humming along just fine, and all I really need is a DVD burner. Does anyone know if it's possible to buy/connect an external DVD burner to a PowerBook? Julie has recently got into iMovie video-editing and we'd like to burn these to DVD w/o buying a whole new computer.

Cool JSP Tag: State Tag

I found a cool State Tag this morning that I'm using in my project this week. It works very nice and just like I'd expect. Here's how I'm using it:

<%@ taglib uri="http://www.servletsuite.com/servlets/statetag" 
    prefix="state" %>
...
<bean:define id="state" name="userFormEx" 
    property="state" type="java.lang.String" />
<state:state name="state" default="<%=state%>" />

Tomcat 5.0.7 Alpha

Since java.blogs has already seen an announcement for Tomcat 5.0.7, there's no reason for me to do it as well. But, there is a very cool enhancement added to this release. From the changelog:

~ Allow putting a /META-INF/context.xml inside any WAR file

This allows much easier deployment IMO. Now you only need to deploy/upload one file, instead of the WAR file and a config (context.xml) file. However, this isn't part of the J2EE 1.4 spec, and other appservers have their own means of configuring - so this is not a portable solution. It would be very cool if there was a common way of doing this for Resin, Orion and Tomcat. I don't know how it would work, but maybe something like META-INF/tomcat-config.xml, META-INF/orion-config.xml, etc.

AppFuse 0.9 Released!

This release contains all kinds of goodies - including a new password hint feature, a compression filter, and a JSP 2.0-syntax option (when deploying). It also fixes a bug in persisting roles and includes many upgrades of dependent packages (Hibernate, PMD, Checkstyle, DBUnit and WebTest).

• Download (~10.7 MB for src, ~3.4 MB for bin)
• Release Notes
• API Documentation and Source
• Mailing List

Enjoy!

It figures - SourceForge still sucks!

I finally find some time to release the next version of [AppFuse] and SourceForge fucks me once again.

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