Raible Designs

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

Backup your Powerbook on your iPod

Did you know you can install OS X on your iPod and use it as your hard drive? Makes me wish I'd bought the 30 GB version.

backing up and restoring on my box were really simple. i plugged in my 30GB ipod and installed os x on it (which went smoothly, i just selected it as the drive to install to when the installer asked me). then with a few points and clicks, i got disk copy to create an image of my powerbook's drive and save it to my ipod. click, click, reboot while holding down "T" (to boot firewire target mode) -- instead of your laptop's drive whirring you'll hear the ipod happily clicking away. perfect. when booted, format your laptop's drive, then expand out the image onto the notebook's drive, and voila.

[Forwarding Address: OS X]

Good to know - now if I could just figure out how to use Apple's "Backup" program to backup to a network drive.

Weekend with Dad

My pappy is flying in this afternoon, and it's looking to be a great weekend. Julie and Abbie headed to Florida yesterday for a friend's baby shower, so it's a "guys weekend." For Father's Day this year, I got us tickets to the Mile High Nationals (top fuel dragsters) on Sunday. It's a nice WT event, and being from Montana - we'll fit right in! ;-)

I'm picking him up from the airport this afternoon, and we're heading for the hills shortly after. We'll be camping and fishing tonight and tomorrow and I can't friggen wait. Like Dave and his Dad, both my dad and I can sit in front of our laptops for hours on end - so we're leaving them behind and getting out of dodge. Don't expect any updates until Sunday or Monday.

Bear Creek Trail

Awesome trail, saw an Elk.

An XForms Tutorial

On the xul-announce mailing list, I found Mike Dubinko's XForms Tutorial presentation (from the O'Reilly Open Source Conference (OSCON) 2003 in Portland). Mike is author of the upcoming O'Reilly XForms Essentials book (August 2003) and W3C XForms spec co-author.

Good stuff - I definitely enjoyed viewing the slides and can't wait for the browsers to support XForms.