Raible Designs

Recovered iPhoto Pictures

I managed to recover my iPhoto pictures by holding down Shift+Option while opening iPhoto, and then rebuilding the library. Unfortunately, my Album information was not repaired so I don't know what's up there. I'm thinking about blowing away my ~/Library/iApps/iPhoto folder and seeing if that helps. I also lost all my subscriptions in NetNewsWire. Damn. I'm glad I don't use a Mac to do my critical dev work on - I don't know if I could handle losing stuff so much.

Happy Easter Everyone!

Abbie wanted me to tell you all Happy Easter, so here's a big smile for y'all!

Upgrading to Roller 0.9.7

I'm starting the upgrade to Roller 0.9.7. Don't stand by with too much earnest - if I get interrupted by Julie and Abbie - they have priority. I'll let you know when I'm done.

Later: I might as well keep a record of what I do to upgrade so it'll be easier next time - and maybe I'll eventually write a script to do it all.

1. I dumped the mysql database from this site using mysqldump. I then created a database locally and imported it.

2. I ran the 0.9.6 to 0.9.7 upgrade script for mysql. I encountered a few errors as I was partially on 0.9.7 already.

3. I edited the log4j.properties file to e-mail me errors and to cut down on Velocity and Hibernate logging. I also got rid of the "R" appender, as that was writing a roller.log file that is essentially the same as Tomcat's log file. I also added timestamping to the log messages.

# Properties for configuring Log4j for this application
# This is the configuring for logging displayed in the Application Server
log4j.rootCategory=INFO, stdout, mail

log4j.appender.stdout=org.apache.log4j.ConsoleAppender
log4j.appender.stdout.layout=org.apache.log4j.PatternLayout

# Pattern to output the caller's file name and line number.
log4j.appender.stdout.layout.ConversionPattern=%d %C{1}.%M(%L) | %m%n

# Configuration for receiving e-mails when ERROR messages occur.
log4j.appender.mail=org.apache.log4j.net.SMTPAppender
[email protected]
[email protected]
log4j.appender.mail.SMTPHost=localhost
log4j.appender.mail.Threshold=ERROR
log4j.appender.mail.BufferSize=1
log4j.appender.mail.Subject=[www] Roller Application Error

log4j.appender.mail.layout=org.apache.log4j.PatternLayout
log4j.appender.mail.layout.ConversionPattern=%d [%t] %c %x - %m%n

# If programmed properly the most messages would be at DEBUG 
# and the least at FATAL.

# Options are: DEBUG, INFO, WARN, ERROR, FATAL
log4j.logger.org.roller=ERROR
log4j.logger.org.apache.velocity=ERROR
log4j.logger.org.apache.commons=ERROR
log4j.logger.org.apache.struts=ERROR

# All hibernate log output of "info" level or higher goes to stdout.
# For more verbose logging, change the "info" to "debug" on the last line.
log4j.logger.net.sf.hibernate.ps.PreparedStatementCache=ERROR
log4j.logger.net.sf.hibernate=ERROR

4. Whoa! There's a new look to the index.jsp page. I corrected a small bug in the link around the combined rss badge.

5. I changed oscache.properties to have a "cache.path" that was prudent for my installation.

6. Added home.jsp and changed "main" forward in struts-config.xml to have a path="/home.jsp" so users will be directed to this page, rather than the index.jsp.

7. Onto synchronizing my current web.xml with the new one. Added <welcome-file-list>, <error-page>'s and security settings for my private weblog. Sweet, JSTL has been added so I don't have to add these taglibs or jars. I changed the <form-error-page> to "/login.jsp?error=true". Funny thing is, I never see the login page anymore since I'm using the "Remember Me" feature.

8. Added all custom images from my about page to the "images" directory. Also moved my custom favicon.ico from backed up directory to new roller installation directory.

9. Next, I synched up the settings from my roller-config.xml file with the new one. FYI, e-mailing comments is off by default.

10. Now I guess I need to convert all my pages to use the new macros. I'll do this after upgrading the codebase here. It's kindof a pain to upgrade the codebase, as you've already seen. One of my problems is I have symlinks all over the place in my "roller" directory, so rather than re-creating them, I just upload a .jar of roller, unzip it, and cp -r roller/* webapps/roller/. over my last installation. Crossing my fingers now.

After upgrading code: It looks like I changed the wrong forward, rather than "main", I should've changed "home.page" to home.jsp. I'll let you know if I spot anything crazy while attempting to do my macro migration.

Update: After the macro migration, the only issue I've found (so far) is that #showWebsiteTitle() adds spaces on both ends, and since I'm writing this using JavaScript (for the title image), it's screwing things up. I reverted back to $macros.showWebsiteTitle() and everything works as expected. Now I just have to figure out how to get trackback setup. I tried this, but it didn't work for me. Also, I can't seem to get #showAllNewsfeeds(true 1) to work.

Broadband is back!

Finally, my internet connection is fixed. They replaced all the equipment yesterday (bridge, antenna on roof) and now everything is humming along like lightning. Sweet - good to see you again my friend.

A Good Job vs. Good Pay

I did the interview with the University of Miami this morning. I was interviewed by a roundtable of folks and the questions weren't too bad - there were some fun ones and some technical ones (i.e. the classic, "what's the difference b/w an interface and an abstract class"). The people sounded very cool and it'd probably be a great team to work on. The pay, however, is not very good at all. However, they said they'd try to work on that. The itneresting thing I've learned is that the best paying jobs are usually the worst jobs. At least that's how it's been for me. I don't know if people just expect more from you, and portray this in the form of micro-management or what, but it sucks to have a job you don't like.

My current job? I love it. Not only because we're using all the cool technologies I like (Ant, Struts, Hibernate, XDoclet, etc.), but also because the people are very cool. Our 8:30 a.m. meetings are actually fun to attend. We poke fun at each other and there's lots of laughter in the room. Today has been an especially good day - I got club level seats to the Rockies Game (baseball) tonight, and also got invited to a pre-release viewing of Matrix Reloaded. Now those are what I call benefits! And, unfortunately, I'm also making the same rate I made six months after I graduated from college. Back then, I couldn't believe how much I was making, and now it's enough to support Julie, Abbie and I (and I'm the only one who works), so it's not too bad.

The problem is the gig at U of M pays around 1/2 of what I'm making now. It'd be an awesome job though. It sounds like they have great people and I'm sure the perks are good (maybe free tuition for my masters?). Look at me talking like I already got the job - I probably just jinxed myself - especially since I gave them the URL to this site. Oh well, if you guys are reading - it sounds like an awesome position, but I don't know if I can support my family on that salary. In fact, I've had such little luck finding a decent paying job in Florida, Julie has started considering a non-move. That is, we might stay in Denver. Jobs here seem to be picking up, and my current contract doesn't seem to have any end in site. They're even talking about putting us on a project developing mobile apps in Java.

Miami is calling though, especially on this cold April afternoon. Now I'm off to freeze my ass off at the Rockies' game. Good thing they're club level seats so we can just sit inside if it's too cold.

No Dice on Comments

I tried Dave's suggestion for comments, but no dice. Here's what I have:

   #set( $comments = $entry.comments )
   <comments>
   #foreach( $comment in $comments )
   <comment id="$comment.id">
      <author>$comment.name</author> 
      <email />
      <url />
      <timestamp>$comment.postTime</timestamp>
      <body>
         $comment.content
      </body>
   </comment>
   #end
   </comments>

It looks like this Velocity template expects to be a part of something great that exposes the $entry variable. Is it possible to simply pass in an entryid and have the XML generated for that. That's what I really want.

BTW, isn't it lovely how it tries to process the template above? Doesn't seem to for Dave - oh well.

Cool Java Certification Site

Are you thinking about getting your Java Programmer 1.4 Certification? I am. I found JavaCertificate.com today via java.blogs. Definitely looks like a great resource for strudying. I don't know when I'll do it - probably when I get a few days to cram. I took the beta without studying and almost passed, so the "real thing" shouldn't be too bad.

What's coming in XHTML 2.0

Mark Pilgrim has written an excellent introductory tutorial -- the first of several to come -- that is ostensibly about elements dropped from XHTML 2 (and what replaces them). But the piece works equally well as a general primer on how to make the transition from old-school presentational markup to modern, structural stuff. We've bookmarked this piece and look forward to reading next month's follow-up. [Zeldman]

From the article...

There are several key elements and attributes that are slated to be dropped from XHTML 2.

1. <br /> has been dropped, replaced by <l>...</l>.
2. The inline style attribute has been dropped, but there are still plenty of ways to define styles.
3. <img /> has been dropped, replaced by <object>...</object>. As we'll see in next month's article, this may present some serious migration difficulties.
4. HTML forms have been dropped, replaced by XForms. This is such a major change that it also deserves its own article.

Joe Hewitt Comments

I did a bit of research today and it looks fairly simple to incorporate Joe Hewitt-style comments into Roller. The hard part will be figuring out a way to convert an entry's comments into XML. For instance, Joe loads an XML document (sample) that contains all the comments for a given post. This document has a DTD which will hopefully make things easier. Here's what a sample XML-based comment entry looks like:

<comment id="000178">
  <author>Joe Hewitt</author> 
  <email />
  <url />
  <timestamp>April 3, 2003 04:14 PM</timestamp>
  <body>
  <p>I have readers??</p>
  </body>
</comment>

Looks pretty simple eh? So how do we convert comments to XML? Since they're already (or supposed to be) XHTML, should we just use a JSP and JSTL's "x" tag to do a little XSL? That sounds like an easy solution. Or should we figure out a way that we can hit the RSS feed (which could be enhanced to include comments)? Once we've done this, there's some JavaScript to load this document.

  // Make url unique to prevent loading it from cache
  var cacheKiller = new Date().getTime(); 
  // replace this with a link to a JSP or something
  var url = "/content/blog/comments/" + aEntryId + ".xml?" + cacheKiller; 
  loadXMLDocument(url, onCommentsLoaded);

Please comment with any ideas for the comments-to-XML conversion.

[T68i] Connecting to the Internet

I got a response for how to connect to the internet via my phone.

Yes it is possible, just download the modem driver from www.sonyericsson.com and you should be all set. As for the speed, the connection from your laptop to the phone (modem) is always reported as 115Kilobit/sec however the real speed is 33K if you are lucky! I have tested on many different location and I can never get the effective speed more than 28Kilobits/sec. Over a wireless link, this is very good.

Cool - I can't wait to try it!