Raible Designs

My Next Gig?

I don't know what my next gig will be yet, but my current one is about over. They gave us a roll off date of August 15th and it looks to be pretty firm. They're trying to get a budget approved until Q1 of next year, but it's a slow process and politics-oriented place. So if you know of anything in Denver, or via telecommuting, let me know. You can also check out my resume [MS Word - updated version]. Damn, I wish I had struts-resume done so I could use that. If I'm out of a gig on August 15th, that might be some good motivation to finish it.

Out with the old, in with the older

We (finally) sold our house today. We've been waiting for an appraisal for the last couple of weeks - the appraiser did his work and went on vacation for two weeks - and everything got finalized today. We close on our old house on Tuesday, which means we have to move to the new one (which is actually 60 years older) this weekend. Aaahhhh, moving, how I missed it. It's been 4 years since the last move, which was from our one-bedroom apartment into our first house. This weekend will likely be a reminder of how much shit I can accumulate in a few short years. Julie will try to throw most of it away, and I will fight to keep a bunch of worthless junk. Should be a fun weekend! Here's the old and the new - old is on top.

Container Managed Authentication enhancements in Tomcat 5.0.4

When playing around with Tomcat 5.0.4 today, I noticed a couple improvements. I use container-managed security on all my apps, and there were a couple of things that annoyed me about 4.1.x:

• When the user is routed to the form-login-page, the URL (i.e. "/login.jsp") appears in their browser's address bar. Therefore, when you try to do request.getRequestURL() (to find the URL they originally requested), you're SOL - you get "/login.jsp" instead.
• I have a 400 (invalid reference to login page) error-page routing to index.jsp (which redirects to /do/mainMenu). This should allow a user to bookmark "/login.jsp" and, once authenticated, they will be routed to the mainMenu. In Tomcat 4.1.x, I get routed back to the login page, and the user has to login again to get to the mainMenu.

I'm happy to report that both of these bugs are fixed in Tomcat 5.0.4. When I'm routed to the login page, the browser's address bar says the URL I requested (/do/mainMenu), rather than "/login.jsp". Also, request.getRequestURL() does return the URL I originally requested, not the login page. This is awesome IMO b/c now users will not bookmark "/login.jsp". And even if they do type it in, my 400 error page routes them to "index.jsp" which goes to the main menu. All of this did not work in 4.1.24 and now it does in 5.0.4. I'm going to start using 5.0.4 for my dev environment. Oh yeah, Roller runs fine on it too. ;0)

Roller Searching - Powered by Lucene

Thanks to Min, we now have searching in Roller. He wrote a wicked-ass Lucene implementation using the util.concurrent package from Doug Lea. Here's how it works:

• When Roller starts, it checks to see if the index is OK, and if not, rebuilds it. The index then goes into RAM and stays there until you destroy the servlet context - then it's written to disk. The location is configurable, but defaults to $(user.home} + File.separator + "roller-index".
• A user's index is updated when they add/delete weblog entries.
• A user can rebuild their own index via a button on the Website Settings page.
• An Admin can rebuild a user's index from the "Admin" page and rebuild all users' indexes from the Config page.
• The IndexManager is the central entry point, and it lives in RollerContext.getIndexManager(). For indexing, searching, etc. you use one of the following operations:
  
  - AddWeblogOperation
  - RebuildUserIndexOperation
  - RemoveWeblogOperation
  - SearchOperation
  
  After creating these ops, set any op-specific configuration options and then pass it to the IndexManager.executeIndexOperation() method.
• Behind the scenes, there is an background thread running. This thread only performs one operation at a time. If an op is added when the thread it busy, the op will be queued. The way Lucene works is that most operations can be threaded. Lucene supports the concept of add, delete, read, query, and optimize. The only methods that cannot be active at the same time are IndexReader::delete() and IndexWriter::add(). Therefore, the operations that perform these operations are put into the background thread queue that garantees that these ops wont be performed at the same time. Searching doesn't interfere with these ops, so it can be run in any thread.

I created a #showSearchForm macro that renders a <form> with a textbox (size=20) and a "Search" submit button. I also added this to all the current themes - so if you developed a theme for Roller - you might want to check it out (username: test, passwd: roller). You can edit it right on the site if you want, then copy/send me the adjusted files. CSS seems to need the most tweaking for these to look right.

Please enter any bugs/enhancements in Roller's JIRA instance. The only one I've seen so far is that a user has to build their index manually before they get any search results. I don't know that this is a bug, just wanted to mention it. Doesn't get comments yet either - a NPE from weblogMgr.getComments() (when adding a new post) kept me banging my head against the wall for an hour - so I commented it out.

Try it, you might like it. ;-)

2 minutes later: Here's a bug - if you update an entry numerous times, it will get presented as numerous times (should be deleted and re-indexed).

RE: The Door Is Ajar

Tim Bray (founder of XML) has posted a blog story titled "The Door Is Ajar" that is a call to arms for building a better browser and leaving the Internet Exploder era behind us. Down with IE. I support this even thought Mozilla Firebird just crashed as I was trying to write this. Now I'm using IE because it doesn't crash nearly as much as Firebird. Can't anyone fix the "I crash when I give you remembered drop-down choices" bug? It's been crashing my Phoenix/Firebird installations since the beginning (on different machines, all Windows boxes)!

Luke - Lucene Index Browser

If you're working with Lucene, and you need an easy way to inspect your index, checkout Luke.

Luke is a handy development and diagnostic tool, which accesses already existing Lucene indexes and allows you to display their contents in several ways:

• browse by document number, or by term
• view documents / copy to clipboard
• retrieve a ranked list of most frequent terms
• execute a search, and browse the results
• selectively delete documents from the index

RE: Which new laptop would you buy?

Thanks to all who left comments about my (possible) new laptop purchase. I did some more tests today, and I'm going to have to go with a Windows machine, especially since I hope to replicate the performance I get from my machine at work (Dell Optiplex GX260: 2 GHz, 512 MB RAM, Windows 2000 SP4):

• Opening Photoshop (7.0): 3 seconds
• Starting Eclipse (3.0 M2): 6 seconds
• Running "ant clean package-web" on AppFuse: 18 seconds
• Running "ant rebuild" on Roller: 36 seconds

Yep, that's right, my (work) desktop is twice as fast when opening Eclipse and 4 times faster opening Photoshop (than the Powerbook). So if I get a 3 GHz laptop with 1 GB RAM, it should be even faster than that right?

Right now, I'm looking at the Alienware Area-51m or the Hibersonic Aviator ZX7. At first glance, I'm leaning towards Area-51m, although the Bluetooth USB Adapter (vs. integrated Bluetooth) is disappointing. The Hibersonice has a 17" screen, but that doesn't seem to be that big of deal (after hearing y'all speak up). Also the Hibersonic has a 802.11b NIC, where the Alienware one has a 802.11g.

Which new laptop would you buy?

If you could pick between a new Dell Laptop or a new Powerbook, which would you choose? If performance was your top priority? If you were going to buy a Windows-based laptop, which would you buy (doesn't have to be a Dell)?

Update: OK, I'm at the Apple Store, on a 17" Powerbook with 512 MB of RAM. Let's do some performance numbers. If you have a laptop that you think I should get, post your numbers as a comment.

• Opening Photoshop (7.0.1): 13 seconds
• Starting Eclipse (3.0 M2): 12.5 seconds

Forest Lakes

Forest Lake - nice fishing, didn't catch anything.

Jenny Lake

Near Rollins Pass