Raible Designs

Built-in Blog.

I found this treat on Robert Scoble's site this evening:

Steven Vore points out that TopStyle is one of the first products he's seen that has a weblog built into it. Here's the Weblog. Update: here's a picture of how it looks inside TopStyle.

Cool - I own TopStyle 3.0 - guess I have a new blog to read now!

Who Am I?

Russ says:

Raible - you need an "about" page. I have no idea if Raible is your first name or your last name or a nick name or what. Your contact page is a bit generic... I wasn't really sure if you were going to get the email right away since it goes to "info"... Also a comments feature would be very nice. Are you using Roller? Dave! Get on it! ;-)

I do have an about page, but it's more company specific than me-specific. I'll change it a bit to mention this site is mostly tech thoughts of mine. This is my company site and I try to keep it somewhat PC and professional in case a potential client ever looks at it. I have to say, it's a big improvement (in both content and design) over my last site. Currently, I'm developing an eLearning web application for OnPoint Digital, Inc. out of my home office, where I rarely get to talk to another person (I love reading everyone blogs because it gives me that water-cooler feeling). I'm writing it using Struts (including Tiles and Validator) and DAO's/JDBC on the backend - and has heavy Javascript and CSS on the front end. The app runs on Tomcat/MySQL and all OS's we can think that a customer might want (gotta love Java). Here is a screenshot of the main interface. It's not my design, I just took it from a Photoshop image to a working application.

My name? It's something I've lived with all my life - funny that it's even happened here on the 'Net. My full name is Matt Raible - my friends call me "Raible" and I actually prefer that over "Matt." Through high school, college and now the "real world," many people actually think my first name is Raible because that's what everyone calls me. So, to answer your question, it's all of the above ;)

I'll change my contact page to be [email protected] and see how much spam I get - I haven't been getting too much from [email protected], so why not?

Also, I tried the Eclipse thing on Windows (works fine), but on the Mac, the title bars don't appear to be draggable.

Eclipse Tabs?

OK Russ - I give up. How did you create tabbed bookmarks (Mozilla style eh?) in Eclipse? Is it a Windows only thing? I can't seem to figure it out on my Mac.

iSynch has arrived!

Tame your lists.

In Issue No. 151 of A List Apart: CSS Design: Taming Lists. This article will show you how to do cool lists like the one below with CSS.

• Item 1
• Item 2
• Item 3

For you impatient readers, here's the code used to render the list above:

ul.glassList {
    list-style: url(../images/aquadot.jpg) disc outside;
    line-height: 1.5;
    vertical-align: top;
}
...
<ul class="glassList">
    <li>Item 1</li>
    <li>Item 2</li>
    <li>Item 3</li>
</ul>

Have a great Saturday!

Updated Tomcat+Apache and Apache+SSL HOWTO

I spent the last couple of days struggling with setting up Apache 2.0.42 and Tomcat 4.0.5 on both Windows and Linux. I've updated an article I found on this matter and published it (with permission from the original author) at:

http://www.raibledesigns.com/tomcat/index.html

I also setup SSL on Apache with the above configuration and learned a lot in that process too. Once again, I found an article, updated it and have published it (with permission from the original author) at:

http://www.raibledesigns.com/tomcat/ssl-howto.html

I hope by updating these articles I've made it easier for anyone else to do the same. My Configuration? Windows XP (SP1) / Red Hat Linux 7.3 with J2SE 1.4.1, Apache 2.0.42 and Tomcat 4.0.5.

I attempted to set these up on Mac OS X, but found no binary version of mod_jk.so on Jakarta's site. I also tried to build it from source, but no dice there either. Enjoy!

Red Hat 8.0 Coming Monday

From LinuxPlanet:

Red Hat 8.0 is scheduled to be formally released on Sept. 30 and many in the Linux user community are watching the development of the new "Bluecurve" desktop design very closely.

In the retail edition of Red Hat that's coming out this Monday, the Linux vendor is replacing the traditional GNOME interface with Bluecurve, a Red Hat-created GUI theme combining elements of both GNOME and KDE, the major rival to GNOME. [ Full Article, Screenshot 1 and Screenshot 2 ].

Look cool - and since I love to upgrade, I'll probably be installing this next week. That is, if I can download the binaries. I have a 1MB wireless connection, but that doesn't do any good if the servers are clogged. I just hope I can upgrade from 7.3 rather than install from scratch. I'll keep you posted

Tomcat load-balancing or private instances?

Did you know you can (1) create load-balanced instances of Tomcat and (2) create multiple (private) instances of Tomcat? All you need is Apache HTTP Server and some know-how. I updated this article for Apache 2.x, Tomcat 4.x, and private JVMs and published it to http://raibledesigns.com/tomcat. With permission of the original author, Pascal Forget.

Cool Roller Theme.

I spotted a new Roller theme this morning at PSQuad's Corner. I found this via Dave's post, whic mentions that some people are not happy with Roller. For not liking Roller, it seems that Pat has put some time into customizing it - or is this a theme that freeroller.net provides? The CSS even validates! Too bad the html doesn't.

Jabber Love. I've been installing and playing with Jabber since yesterday afternoon. If you don't know what Jabber is - it's an open, XML-based protocol for instant messaging and presence. So it's basically an open-source instant messaging server. It takes about 10 minutes to setup and get running, and I've installed it successfully on both Red Hat 7.3 and Windows XP. Easy as pie - that's how open source should be!