Raible Designs

Java Persistence Frameworks.

The Blogging Roller has posted a nice chart comparing some of the most popular persistence frameworks. The chart makes Castor look pretty good. I wish one of these frameworks had the same popularity as Struts, then I could just learn it and use it. As it is, it doesn't seem that one stands out above the other. However, I bet one could become the "market leader" by simply putting together a good set of documentation and how-to's. That seems to be the biggest problem with open-source solutions - lack of documentation that works. However, at the same time, a mailing list with lots of subscribers can solve most documentation issues.

Starting your own business.

A List Apart, Issue No. 152, has an article explaining business entity options. If you're thinking about starting your own business, this is a good read. My advice, get a good accountant - they'll make your life much easier. Raible Designs started as an LLC in 1999 and became an S Corporation last year. It was easy to be an LLC without anyone's help; I paid my own taxes, did my own state registration, and handled my own finances. But when I upgraded to an S Corp., my accountant made my life much easier by doing my payroll, quarterly taxes, unemployment insurance, etc. I definitely recommend starting your own business if you can - just remember the most important things are 1) to get customers and 2) keep them happy.

Which digital camera to buy?

I'm lucky enough to have talked my wife into accepting a digital camera as a birth gift, now to decide which one? BTW, did you guys buy your wives a "birth gift" or am I getting hoodwinked? Anyway, I've read the reviews on pcmag.com and cnet.com and have come to the conclusion that the Canon PowerShot G2 is the one for us. Why? It seems to be getting rave reviews, it's the most popular and the prices I'm finding seem to be a bargain compared to what it's suggested retail price is ($900). And the sample photos are exactly the quality I'm looking for. One issue is that it seems to be discontinued. My problem now? Julie doesn't want me to spend $500 on a camera, especially when we're about to downgrade to a one-income household. Is there a solution - should I buy one off eBay?

Photoshop Certification and others.

I did a little more digging and found that Adobe has a path to become an Adobe Certified Expert (ACE). I discovered that you must pass an Adobe Product Proficiency Exam for the product for which you want to be certified. Then, I found the exam bulletin (PDF) and I think I'm going to go for it. The only bad part is they recommend Adobe Photoshop 7.0 Classroom in a Book which only got 3 stars on Amazon.com. Oh well, it was only reviewed by one person and they seemed to be upset about the lack of colors in the book. Since I'll be reading it to learn and not to gawk at pretty pictures, I'll probably buy it. It can't hurt to buy the Photoshop 7 Bible along with it - never hurts to have a dual reference.

So you might ask, why the hell is Raible so into Photoshop lately? I thought he coded Java all the time? Truth is, I'm getting geared up for my next project: snapping pictures of my daughter and sharing them with my family. After Photoshop Certification, I'll probably upgrade my Java Programmer certification to 1.4, upgrade my Weblogic certification to 7.0 and possibly tackle OS X and Red Hat certifications. I really love learning new things, especially in a structured environment (i.e. a classroom). With certifications, I've found the structured set of objectives has helped me to focus, and therefore, I learn faster. Kinda like a good set of requirements for a project. Of course, if our little girl is born next week (due Nov. 7th), I will focus on becoming certified as a good Dad, which only comes from experience ;)

This post written originally with Dreamweaver MX, copied and pasted into Roller, and edited over 8 times to correct spelling mistakes. Sheez!

How to become a Photoshop Expert?

I'm looking to become a Photoshop expert in the next couple of months. I think I know it pretty well, but nothing compared to the guys who presented at the Web Builder Conference in September. So my plan is to buy a digital camera, read a book or two, do some tutorials and hopefully I'll become an expert. However, one thing I've found is that there's almost too much information on Photoshop. For example, check out how many 5-star rated books there are on Amazon. Look how many tutorials there are on adobeevangelists.com. This is an example of where a Photoshop Certification might be nice - then there would be recommended study guides, practice tests, etc. - and my path might be a little more defined. A quick search on Google shows that there is a Photoshop Certification, but apparently, not for the lastest and greatest version.

JDK 1.4 Keeps Crashing.

Have you been trying to view this site and received timeouts or 500 Internal Server Errors? If so, I apologize and hopefully we've found a remedy for it. I found that this site seems to crash at least once a day, and sometimes several times a day. When it does, I've found the following error in my logs.

#
# HotSpot Virtual Machine Error : 11
# Error ID : 4F530E43505002D5
# Please report this error at
# http://java.sun.com/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi
#
# Java VM: Java HotSpot(TM) Client VM (1.4.0_01-b03 mixed mode)
#
# An error report file has been saved as hs_err_pid3103.log.
# Please refer to the file for further information.
#

The admin, Keith, at my hosting company first suggested that we downgrade from JDK 1.4.0 -> 1.3.1. I've had no problems with 1.4 on other projects, so I didn't want to do that. So Keith has been nice enough to schedule a cron job that checks the status of this site every minute, and if it can't load a JSP, then it restarts everything. Hopefully this helps. I hope this isn't related to Roller, and I doubt it is as everyone else seems to be running fine.

Run Ricky Run.

The Broncos are playing the Dolphins this weekend, and that's all they're talking about in the papers. I read an article yesterday on Ricky Williams, and found they he has his own website: run-ricky-run.com. It doesn't seem to be powered by any weblogging software, but it's definitely a weblog in my opinion. Kinda cool to get inside the head of a NFL player.

Aqua Text - How to Scale Down.

I sent an e-mail to the author (Rick Yaeger) of the aqua-text tutorial last night asking how to scale down my text and reduce the fuzziness (or as Lance called it, "the gel toothpaste look"). Here is Rick's response:

There is an easy way to scale the effects of the style in Photoshop 7. In fact, that's what the command is called "Scale Effects..." and it is found under the Layers menu under the Layer Style submenu. Select the layer that has the effects you wish to scale and use this command to adjust those effects on a percentage scale with preview.

Another method is to create your type at 72pt and then flatten the image and scale it down 25%.

So I tried this, and it definitely helped. Here is the old one, and the new one. I've noticed that I do lack one thing as a Blogger - and that is following up on my previous posts, so here goes...

PDF Searching. Thanks to Vince Mastrantoni (no blog) and Greg Klebus for their e-mails. These will help me find my solution I'm sure. Thanks Guys.

The obvious answer would be Adobe Acrobat. But, this is not open source and if you have many files to search through, would be cumbersome. I tried to do a batch search using it, but was unable to. It appears as though this may not be supported or an option.

Another alternative is the Lucene search engine available at:

http://jakarta.apache.org/lucene/docs/index.html

Now, this by itself doesn't search PDFs. However, you can add a plug-in to do this. See here:

http://www.i2a.com/websearch/

Other stuff that might help is here:

http://www.etymon.com/

Also, the Google internet search engine searches and indexes PDFs and allows them to be displayed in text format. I'm not sure how or if this might help but I wanted to point this out to you.

Lastly, there is a PDF filter that Adobe provides that can be plugged into IIS index server. Tried looking for it but couldn't find it. Maybe you'll have better luck.

Vince

---
Found that filter. Gave up too soon:

http://www.adobe.com/support/downloads/product.jsp?product=1&platform=Windows

Vince

---
Raible, (I seem to have read your explanation about the name :)

pdftotext (forgot the source, you need to google it yourself). The name says it all -- convert your PDF to text and do the search.

It's a default viewer under Midnight Commander on my linux box, so I can view PDF's as text easily.

Open source, and probably cross-platform.

You can also try Ghostscript, it probably has something similar (but it's big, and you'd need to go through Postscript files anyway).

I hope I could help.

Regards,
-Greg

Also, I mentioned a while back that I didn't use Mail for OS X, but instead I use Entourage. Truth is, I've started using Mail (over Entourage) for a very simple reason, it's faster. When I click on the icon, it opens faster. I'm easy that way.

To follow up on my iSync post, I can't wait for the actual release. When I import all my vCards from Outlook XP, it changes the "mobile" phone number to "main" in my Address Book. Because of this, my contacts' mobile numbers never make it to my phone - doh! This same import works fine in Entourage. Also, I can't seem to 1) sync with .Mac or 2) publish my iCal to my webdav-enabled Tomcat server. Not that I really need to, but I like to experiment and see if it's possible. Manually changing my contacts' numbers from "main" to "mobile" in Address Book fixes the problem, but what a pain. And my phone seems to end up with a bunch of contacts I never put in there - iSync definitely has room for improvement. I'm looking forward to this update.

Last, but certainly not least, to follow up on where is Russ - it's great to have you back Russ, you were missed. You update your blog more frequently than any others I read - thanks.

In other news, I can see Phoenix being my default browser very soon. It's Mozilla without the extra stuff (i.e. Mail) that I don't use.

Aqua Text.

I figured out how to make Aqua-style text this evening via this tutorial. Pretty cool stuff, but the Photoshop style that you download with the tutorial is designed for huge text and that's why my title on the aqua theme looks a little faded. It really looks excellent at 72pt font!

You might wonder why I've been working on this site and Roller so much lately? I've recently finished a 1.0 release of the software I've been working on the for the past 9 months. My client is now making a big push to sell it and I'm moving into maintenance mode for the next couple months (10-15 hours per week). A good idea on their part - to see what people like and don't like before adding new features. So I'm looking to pick up another 15-20 hours per week if anyone knows of anything.

In other site-enhancement news, I found that my contact form was not working to send me e-mail. So I fixed the JSP to work properly and added a sweet (I think) enhancement to the Contact page. Now when you submit the form, it submits it to an iframe that is 25px high and you never leave the page - you just get a success message. Try it, you might like it. BTW, for the JSP that sends e-mail, I use the mailer tag library - which makes it really easy.

JUnit Doclet and Code that documents itself.

JUnitDoclet looks kinda cool - found via James Strachan. It generates skeletons of TestCases based on your application source code. And it supports you to reorganize tests during refactoring. Nice - maybe we should use this on Roller and see if we can learn anything.

One thing we were discussing on the roller-development list today was if it's possible to generate generate documentation straight from our javadocs. I'd like to see something similar to javadocs, but easier for the non-programmer types to use and understand.