Raible Designs

More RAM, almost.

I got a 1 Ghz worth of new RAM today to upgrade my XP box from 512 MB -> 1 Ghz and my RedHat box from 256 MB -> 768 MB. But, when I tried to install it, my motherboard starting beeping at me loudly. So I guess it doesn't work :-(. Now I'll have to wait another week while I mail it back to the folks I bought it from and hopefully they can send me some that works. For the record, I tried to install Samsung RAM into Dell Dimension 8100s.

My New Editor?

The Mozilla Composite Editor is a LOT better than I originally thought - check this out. On your Mozilla browser, go to Preferences -> Composer and check the box at the bottom that says Use CSS styles instead of HTMLelements and attributes. Yeah baby! If you look at the source for this post (written with the Editor), you can see that there's a bunch of CSS to mark everything up rather than <b> and <i> tags. Install it here. NOTE: You will have to close your browser and re-start if you change this setting.

On second thought (after cleaning up the HTML in this post) it does enter <br> tags at the end of every line and screws up the spacing a bit. But it's definitely still very cool - it'll be great when it evolves into my full time Roller editor. Of course, that might take a few more releases.

HTML Editor as a Plug-In?

Found via Be Blogging, the Mozilla Composite Editor. Here's the scoop:

ComposIte is a chrome overlay which enables a streamlined Mozilla Editor for html composition in textareas. To use the editor, hit ctrl-e in a textarea. Alternately, you can turn on an 'Edit with Composite' button in the Composite prefs (v0.0.5 and higher).

The bad part, as Ugo notes, is that it does not generate XHTML. I haven't tried it, but it does come from Mozilla.org, so there's definite hope.

XDoclet 1.2 Beta 1 Released.

I saw this a couple of days ago when I did a cvs checkout of xdoclet, but never mentioned it. Found via the rebelutionary:

Kevin beat me to the news that xDoclet 1.2.0 (beta 1) has hit the street. And yes, they're using JIRA now! *cheer* [kev's catalogue of this and that.]

We'd love to use XDoclet 1.2 in Roller, but I'm stumped on this issue. Any hints or tips are much appreciated.

It's almost that time of year in Colorado.

It's shaping up to be a helluva ski season this year. I can't wait! My wife can't wait to move to Florida next spring. The little one (due November 7th) should keep us both happy until then.

The question is "should I get a ski pass or not?" I've had one for the last 5 years, but last year sucked and I had only one 9" day at work. The year before, I had over ten! With snow already resting beatifully on our mountain tops, this year is lookin' good.

New Blog to Read.

I found this gem off scripting.com a few minutes ago:

Apple VP Ken Bereskin explains a new Mac OS X feature every day on his Radio weblog. #

The worst feeling.

Oh man, I feel for poor ol' Russ.

I forgot to swap my hard-drives before installing Redhat.

It's gone. Everything. Gone. For some reason, a couple weeks ago I bought a 25-pack of CDRWs ready to go... and haven't used any of them except to back up some pics and Ana's file (during her original move). All my emails for the past 8 months (since my last backup) gone. Dev work? Pretty much gone. Graphics? Passwords? Documents? Software keys? Any digital photos from the past several weeks? Gone, gone, gone.

I've been there before, and I can't tell you how many times I've "rescued" my Windows box from sure death (well over 20 times). My advice - a six pack will ease your pain. The last time I hosed my machine I waited for a full 2 days to try to fix it, and whalla - I actually fixed it in under an hour! About 2 months ago I made it a lot simpler for myself and only do one OS per machine. My condolences - here's to finding your backup.

Loading Context's in 4.1.12.

I was digging around in 4.1.12 and found that there's a whole new way to specify your context. You can now do it in a context.xml file in your webapps directory. Here's the manager.xml that ships with Tomcat.

<Context path="/manager" docBase="../server/webapps/manager"
         debug="0" privileged="true">

    <!-- Link to the user database we will get roles from -->
    <ResourceLink name="users" global="UserDatabase"
    type="org.apache.catalina.UserDatabase"/>

</Context>

Cool! That'll make Tomcat much easier to configure.

Upgrading to Tomcat 4.1.12.

I attempted to upgrade this site to use Tomcat 4.1.12 a couple hours ago, but had to back it out when I found that it doesn't follow symlinks by default. I've been trying to figure out a way to turn it on, but I haven't figured it out yet. I did find this e-mail, which made me think I could just add allowLinking="true" to my roller context. I was about to jump in and try it out, and then I thought - maybe I should see if anyone is on the site. I found 400+ active sessions! Yikes... I doubt that many folks have visited today - have they? I just restarted Tomcat a couple of hours ago. Here's what I saw in the manager application.

Installing Red Hat, Part 3.

And just like that, I'm finished - in approx. 21 hours and 30 minutes from when I decided to start downloading. The smoothest upgrade of any operating system I've ever seen. I really like the new desktop UI - but I've always been a sucker for eye candy.