Raible Designs

Some CSS Lovin'

Good ol' Zeldman hooks us up with some cool web stuff today. First, you gotta dig these W3C Validator buttons that are purely CSS and Text - no images. Might be a good way to reduce bandwidth. Secondly, adjacent sibling selectors are a neat way to create rules-based layouts in which elements are controlled according to their contexts.

For instance, you can make a general rule where images have no margin at the top; then make another rule that says margins have 15px of white space at the top if they are preceded by an h3 header.

Finally, he inspires us to checkout Fast Company's re-designed all XHTML and CSS site. Very cool! I especially dig the font-size switcher in the top right corner.

Then there's Russ. Could he be on to something here or just blowin' smoke?

Someday soon, people will be judged by the quality of their weblogs like the Greeks once judged a person by the quality of their oration, or in the middle ages a person was judged by their science and art and later in the 1800s by their letters.

I don't know that weblogs will ever the that popular. The problem is that computers aren't even that popular. Sure, there's a lot, but the household penetration is not where it needs to be - and how many of online users have weblogs. Not many. How many of those that have weblogs are interesting - not many. Maybe he's onto something here - and we're already doing it. We are already judging each other in this community - those that have shorter blogrolls are just judging a little more ;-)

9 GB Served Last Month

I have a hard time believing it, but stats don't lie. I got my monthly bill from KGB Internet and discovered that I had 9 GB of traffic in March. At $.01 per extra MB, 4,062 extra megs adds up to $40.62 extra this month! It looks like the biggest bandwidth hogs are the downloads which means I'd better move everything I can over to SourceForge. I'm already up to the Silver plan, and I'm not about to pay $80/month for the Gold plan.

Dial-Up: 28.8

That's right, I'm posting this message on dial-up since my ISP can't fix my internet connection. Today they said they'd send someone out in a week. That sucks - dial-up for a week. Oh well, productivity will rise, blogging and reading of blogs will decline - which can't really hurt. The choke hold will come when one of my friends sends me the 1MB attachments that they're used to sending. The worst part is that I'm doing a WebEx presentation for the Struts Training class this week and I have to go into my office to do it, rather than in the comfort of my own home. Luckily, the guys I work for are letting me use my work computer - thanks gents!

Life without the Internet

Our internet connection at home went down for the first time in two years yesterday. It's still down - which means I had to try to stop the shakes while I sat in front of the computer all night (working on an XDoclet/Remember Me presentation). I couldn't read any blogs, check any e-mail accounts, or talk to any CVS servers. It was miserable. However, I got a lot done and my productivity was much better. The problem is, who knows when it'll come back. Our ISP thinks it's on our end, and I think it's on their's. I suppose it could be my router. Have any of you had a Linksys router go out on you? My LAN still works fine, so I doubt it's the router. I just hope I don't have to resort to dial-up tonight.

To top it all off, when I got into work this morning, I was locked out of the network. In fact, I'm still locked out, but I have internet access, so the shakes have subsided for the moment. I guess my original contract was supposed to expire at the end of March.

I'm curious to know if anyone played an April Fools joke on anyone yet? I did on Julie - running into the bedroom all flustered and pissed, claiming that someone had stolen our car. She said, "which one?" and "well, better call the police." It barely even phased her, but I definitely got her hook, line and sinker. Then she got me back with "Want a quickie?" Of course I said "Sure!" and she retorted with "April Fools!" Damnit.

Saving Sessions in Tomcat

Dominic has provided a great link for storing your user sessions in a database with Tomcat. This could be very helpful in a production Tomcat environment where you need to persist your sessions in case you reboot a server. In most of my apps, I try to keep session-scoped objects to a minimum, so in most cases - I don't need to save the user's session. Good link regardless though - thanks Dominic!

JDK 1.4.1 - Memory Leak Bug in StringBuffer.toString()

I use StringBuffer.toString() a fair amount in my code. Did you know there's a significant memory-leak bug in JDK 1.4.1?! Yikes - if you're experiencing memory issues, you might try back-pedalling to 1.4.0.

[Tomcat 4.1.x] Authentication Best Practices

From the tomcat-user mailing list, John Swapceinski brings us Authentication Best Practices. Lots of scriptlets in his JSPs, but nevertheless, very good information.

Cool TagLib Document

I found this gem on the strut-user list tonight.

* TaglibDoc
    This is a JavaDoc-like set of html and css files for browsing the
    taglib documentation.  Here's what this target does (I ran this
    about 15 minutes ago):

      http://struts.sourceforge.net/struts-atlanta/taglibdoc/

* TaglibReport
    This target will generate a grid-like view of the taglibs and their
    attributes so that you can see every tag in a typical package side
    by side.  This helps when comparing which tags implement a certain
    attribute, by allowing you to view them side by side and not have to
    look up each tag by hand. (also about 15 minutes ago)

      http://struts.sourceforge.net/struts-atlanta/taglibreport/

Project by Mohan Kishore, posting by James Mitchell.

StrutsCX Article

The stats on the bottom right of this site are definitely wrong. At the time of this writing, it says I've had 4,351 hits today. Yeah right. I did, however, discover that I have been linked to in a major article and I'm getting a fair bit of traffic from that. The article is called Generate Web Output in Multiple Formats and Languages with StrutsCX and is hosted by DevX.com.

Why did the author include a link to this site? Because I'm hosting a demo of the StrutsCX application. I hope to use ideas from this app when I develop the XSL/XML rendering of resumes for my struts-resume app that I may/may not ever finish. I do plan on finishing it someday, but since I'm my own client - there's no deadline, no pay, and little motivation. But it is very cool to have my own reference application that I can play with to try new stuff. I definitely dig that. I can guarantee that as soon as I get indexed property validation working, it'll be in there - and that will also motivate adding many child items (i.e. skills, education, etc.) to the resume item.

WebWork Tutorial makes it look easy

I have to admit that this webwork tutorial makes WebWork look easy. In comparing this to Struts, it seems as if the Form and Action are the same thing. I wonder if I could use BeanUtils.copyProperties(wwAction, POJO) like I am with Hibernate/Struts currently.

The funny thing is that XDoclet has made it so easy (IMO) that I don't write ActionForm's anymore. All I really write is Actions, JSPs, DAOs and Services (a.k.a. Managers). So, with my current architecture I'm using, it actually looks like more work to use WebWork's Actions than Struts Actions. Especially since I have to write my validation in my Action. The XDoclet/Validator combo makes this super simple with Struts (and would with WW if they'd adopt it ;-). The only time I've been writing forms lately is when I have a form with indexed properties. Then I create a childForm that extends the generated form and has the appropriate accessors/mutators for the indexed properties.

The one thing the article does bring to light is how much cleaner Velocity is. JSP 2.0 will make JSP's a lot easier, but Velocity looks like it's already there. The one thing that worries me about using Velocity is that, according to their homepage, they haven't had a release in 8 months and their last release was a Release Candidate. What the?! Seems like someone might be dropping the ball on that project.