Raible Designs

Roller from CVS

The site is now running the latest and greatest version of Roller from CVS. Let me know if you see any issues, and as always, feel free to play around with my demo user (user: test, pw: roller).

Very Fricken Cool!

Dave made some CSS improvements to Roller's Wiki - and I must say it looks very nice! Nice work Dave - I dig it! It's cool to see how the Roller Wiki has quickly become a great documentation engine for this project. Especially with Dave's recent screenshots and user guide enhancements.

What do you want to be doing a year from today?

One year from today (April 25th, 2004), what do you want to be doing. I don't care if it's career or life related, I'm just curious. Why? Because I think it's important to set goals and realize what you were thinking last year. So here's mine:

• I'd like to teach at least one technical training course in a classroom environment. I loved doing this for Sun.
• I'd like to get my Java 1.4 Certification and possibly one more, don't know which one yet, something that'll inspire and challenge me to learn something new.
• Be a good husband for my (possibly) pregnant wife.
• Spending LOTS of time with Abbie and Julie - hopefully only working 40 hours/week at a higher paying job.
• Attempt to figure out what I want to do for the next 5 years. Do I really want to be a code monkey for the rest of my life - or get into management?
• Read Abbie at least one book from the Chronicles of Narnia.
• Sell our house and move into a new one in either Colorado, Florida or California (in order of personal preference). Julie's preference is Florida, Colorado or California (her sister lives in San Diego).

Why don't we get drunk and ...

Sunset at Buffett.

Tailgaiting at Jimmy. ;-)

Matrix on IMAX

This is huge (via Erik)! The second Matrix movie sequel is to open on giant Imax film screens in the US at the same time as standard cinemas. Fricken SWEEEEEETTTTTTT!!!! I'm so pumped to see this movie - and now it's going to be shown on IMAX?!! Man that's cool! I'm going to have to motivate a skip work day so a bunch of us can get together and see it when no else is there.

RE: This site's performance

I tried to switch my JVM to BEA's JRockit last night, but had no luck - Tomcat wouldn't start, so I switched back to Sun's JVM. However, I was running 1.4 and I switched to 1.4.1. Performance seems to be better, and there aren't very many errors in my catalina.out file (this is a symlink to the file) since last night. I guess we'll have to see how the site holds up throughout the day. I didn't install Jikes because it's an RPM and I believe Keith has to install those. Also, after Chris's comments, I'm a little less inclined to make the change.

I also have a few questions for Dave regarding both #showTrackbackURL($entry) and #showLinkbacks( $day ). First, how is the Trackback URL supposed to be used? Are folks expected to use this to link to an entry of mine (vs. a permalink), or what? Why should I display it like Lance does? Secondly, the showLinkbacks($day) macro is not present in any of my local *.vm files. Maybe I deleted it by accident. Which template should it be in?

Later: So if I understand this correctly, a Trackback is basically a way of telling someone you've referred to them, and your entry will show up in their comments. Whereas as a Linkback is a feature that checks referrers for URLs linking back to your site? Now I just need to find out where my #showLinkbacks() macro disappeared to.

Snow in Denver

Glad I'm not riding to work today!

Later: Yeah - that's snow! We only got a little bit in Denver last night, but Loveland Ski Area got 25 inches in the last 24 hours! Wow!! Oh yeah, that's my wireless internet antenna on our roof.

Wanna hear about the stupid move I did yesterday? Sure you do ... come on... OK, so I signed up (and paid) for the Rocky Mountain Software Symposium next month. Julie has been planning a trip to Florida in May for the past few weeks. She bought her plane ticket a couple weeks ago, but never bought mine because our internet service stopped working in the middle of her 2nd transaction. So she waited until yesterday, found a good price, and called me to ask if she could buy my tickets. She bought them, I approved it at work, and all is peachy keen. Right? Wrong - I received an e-mail from from Jay Zimmerman last night (via a mailing list I'm subscribed to), and doh! - Julie bought tickets leaving the Thursday before the conference. So I had to call and change my flight and pay the $100 change fee. Damn - hope the conference is worth it - there goes my early bird discount rate!

This site's performance

This site crashes more than a 16-year old trying to pick up the ladies. You can check out all the errors in my catalina.out (3+ MB) file (snapshot from last night). Mostly OutOfMemory errors causing the issues. I'm going to try and configure jikes to run as my JSP compiler, we'll see if that helps. I'd like to try it locally first (on my Win2K machine), but it looks like I have to compile it with the -encoding option to make it work. Ughhh. Why don't they have an encoding-enabled download!?