Raible Designs

[ANNOUNCEMENT] Struts 1.1 Release Candidate 1 Released!

The Struts team is proud to announce the release of Struts 1.1 Release Candidate 1. This release includes some new functionality, as well as fixes for a number of bugs which were reported against earlier versions. The Struts Team believes that this release is ready for prime time, hence its designation as a release candidate.

The binary distribution is available at:

http://www.apache.org/dist/jakarta/struts/binaries/

and the source distribution is available at:

http://www.apache.org/dist/jakarta/struts/source/

In addition, the library distribution, which contains updated binaries without the sample applications, is available at:

http://www.apache.org/dist/jakarta/struts/library/

Details of the changes in this release are available in the Release Notes, which can be found here:

http://jakarta.apache.org/struts/userGuide/release-notes-1.1-rc1.html

Get it while it's hot!

Skiing Yesterday

Yesterday was an epic day of skiing at Breckenridge. Knee-deep powder, no lift lines and skiing with a good friend made the day perfect. The two hour drive up there and the 45 wait for a bus in the parking lot wasn't even too bad. I left my house at 8:30 and was on a lift at 11:30. Keep in mind, this is usually a 1 hour, 15 minute drive. My buddy, also named Matt, talked me into skiing all the way until 4. I was beat, but I'm glad I did it 'cause the snow was awesome.

The way home was a whole different story. We knew traffic was going to be bad, since it was awful on the way up. So we stopped and had some dinner and left Frisco (near Breckenridge) at 7:00 p.m. The freeway (I-70) seemed pretty good until I hit Loveland pass, about 10 miles from Frisco. There, traffic ground to a halt. It was the worst traffic jam I have ever seen - it took me 3 hours to go 15 miles! By the time I got home last night it was 11:00!! Yikes - so I'm going to skip skiing today even though they got 16 inches at Vail. [Colorado Web Cams]

The good news is that I have tomorrow off, so I hope to go again. The reason I'm off is because Comcast hasn't paid my contracting company since we started there. Supposedly, the check is in the mail, but my contracting company is tired of floating our paychecks (can't blame them), so they've asked us to stay home until they receive the check. I don't mind, but I will if I'm still not working my mid-week. Now would be the perfect time to find a job in Florida! Oh wait - it is a perfect time - it's dumping snow in the mountains and I don't have to go to work!!

Gone Skiing

With 11" of new snow at Breckenridge and the family out of town - where else would I be? ;-)

Vail	10"	55"
Beaver Creek	6"	48"
Breckenridge	11"	58"
Keystone	4.5"	43"
Heavenly	0"	56"

Test your Java Knowledge

Did you know you can test your Java knowledge over at java.sun.com? They have all kinds of quizzes, most of them from books. They seems to be similar to certification exams to me - read the book and you'll ace it - otherwise, you have a decent chance of passing based on your knowledge. Can make you feel good or humble you, it's your choice. I was humbled...

Disabled Text Resizing

I disabled the text-resizing feature this morning as I've received more complaints than praise. If you're still getting it, Shift+Reload. I may add it back in someday, but only with a little more testing first. I apologize for the inconvenience some users experienced.

Microsoft acquires Virtual PC software from Connectix

Windows on Mac hardware?! I think this is the best thing that could have happened to Connextix. IMO, Virtual PC was an unusable slow ass dinosaur. Hopefull M$ can improve it - I'd love to have a fast Windows XP window on my Mac. Why not have the best of everything? Throw a little Red Hat on there, and give me 2GHz and I'll be Apple's biggest fan.

RE: The Rocky Mountain Software Symposium

The Rocky Mountain Software Symposium definitely looks like a good time. I'll be attending with bells on. Any other bloggers making the trip? It's about a 10 minute drive for me. ;-) Gordon writes:

The Rocky Mountain Software Symposium not only looks like an awesome speaker lineup, it looks like a large number of bloggers are speaking: Ted Neward, James Duncan Davidson, Erik Hatcher, and Bob Lee. I've submitted my training req!

The sessions look awesome, should be a good time.

Java powers ready.gov!

I'm sure you've heard of the new ready.gov website by now. I found out on one of the first pages that it's written using JSPs. I like the site design too - looks good. I don't know that I'll read it, but it's good to see such a professional looking site.

JSP 1.2 <-> JSP 2.0

Here's something that I need: A way to convert JSP 1.2 pages to JSP 2.0 pages. Basically, this only really involves changing all the <c:out value="${...}" /> tags to be simply ${...}. I have a couple motivations for this. The first is that Wrox wants struts-resume and security-example to be written using JSP 2.0 (it is a JSP 2.0 book after all). However, I'm afraid that most developers won't be able to use 2.0 for quite some time, considering that the J2EE 1.4 (with JSP 2.0) won't be released until this summer. So I'd like a way to create a JSP 1.2 version and a JSP 2.0 version of my these applications from the same source code. What would be best - to write the source in JSP 1.2 and then parse it for <c:out /> tags and strip them accordingly? I'd rather write the source in JSP 2.0 and then add in the <c:out /> tags using Ant, since it'd be much simpler. Then again, I've already written a fair amount using JSTL with 1.2. Comments and suggestions are encouraged!

Finishing Chapters: Almost Lost It

In the course of the past week, while editing my chapters, Word (XP) has crashed on me a number of times. Every time I've been able to get my work back and lost nothing more than a few minutes. I'm very impressed as I once lost 10 pages in college. As I was finishing up - running spellchecker at 1:00 this morning - I received the following error and I almost lost it. I had to click OK a number of times before it finally recognized it. Picture me sitting here going "no, No, NO!!" ;-)