Raible Designs

Tomcat 5

It sure would be nice to have a binary version of Tomcat 5. I tried building it this morning, and the process is still going - you have to download about 5 different libraries (so far) just to get it to build! I find this is typical with Jakarta project. Hopefully there will be one soon. I'll try to document the process so others don't have to experience my pain.

Later: Lance provides a link to the nightly build - exactly what I was looking for!

1 Hour Later: Tomcat 5 throws all kinds of errors when starting and doesn't load jsp-examples or servlet-examples correctly. For error details, check out my posting to the tomcat-dev mailing list.

My First Bug

Remember when I told you that I had a hot pink bug in high school? In case you didn't believe me, I stumbled upon a picture of it this evening. I chuckled and could resist the urge to post it. It really was a fun car - and I can't wait to restore another one! Hopefully this will be happening shortly after we move to Florida.

Sun ONE Portal

I'm teaching a Sun ONE Portal/Directory Server class tomorrow night and Thursday at Sun in Broomfield. It should be a fun crowd to teach - a bunch of Sales Engineers from Sun - around 50 of them! Wow, that's a big class. Actually, there's going to be a Sun instructor co-teaching with me, and it'll be split between two classrooms - but still?!

The bad part, Julie has the flu and has had a fever for the better part of a week and my parents are flying in tomorrow afternoon. Since I'm teaching tomorrow night (5-10) and all day Thursday, that leaves less time to spend with them. Oh well, they're not coming to see me anyway. They're Grandma and Grandpa now and I'm willing to bet they won't even know I'm gone!

Beautiful Denver Sunset

As I coded past the light of day tonight - I looked out my office window and the front yard and neighbors house was glowing orange. So I leapt out of my chair and scrambled for the back yard. What I saw there was breathtaking. This is one of the best parts about living in Denver, the sunsets are amazing - and we get them a lot! I don't know if it's the pollution or the altitude, but they sure are impressive.

Good Job Mailing List

If you live in Colorado, or you want to move here, I suggest you subscribe to the rmiug-jobs mailing list. I subscribed about a week ago, and I've seen 1-2 good developer-type jobs in my Inbox per day! That's excellent during these times. The best part, they seem to come from actual employers more often than recruiters.

XDoclet and the Matrix

I got a list of the XDoclet Team Member's Weblogs this morning from the xdoclet-devel mailing list.

• Random thoughts (Rickard)
• Memory Dump (Ara)
• :: rinkrank :: (Aslak)
• :: mabo :: (Mathias)

So I visited them (first two I already knew about) and on Mathias's blog I found some interesting, and slightly disturbing stuff. There is a post from Tuesday, November 5th called Ara Again, that links to this article that Rickard wrote. Rickard's article points to this article about the movie Signs. Both of them discuss a theory of two races, which includes the presence of a "Matrix Control System" (MCS), not too different from the one found in the popular movie, which if true would provide us with a profoundly different take of what reality is and why it works the way it does.

Needless to say, I read them both, and it's a little heavy and disturbing for a Monday morning and a reader with a possible concussion (I've had a headache since yesterday morning).

UML and SVG in Eclipse

From jsurfer.org:

Omondo is proud of being the first software vendor who will include SVG export inside Eclipse. Omondo is also the first software vendor using GEF and EMF. Our EclipseUML Free Edition allows object-oriented modelling to become truly useful in complex technology domains such as transaction systems, messaging systems and web services. http://www.omondo.com

Cool - a free UML plugin for Eclipse. Don't get too excited though, on the download page, I found it's a beta and has only been qualified for Eclipse 2.0.1 running in Windows 2000/XP. Does that mean it's only been tested on that platform?

Jackpot!

A New project at Sun Labs promises to make programming tools more effective.

"There have been a lot of good ideas and interesting approaches that weren't being reflected in the commercially available tools, particularly the IDE interface."

...

In July 2000, Van De Vanter and Gosling decided to combine forces on a new project called Jackpot. The project is all about making programming tools more productive by making them easier to use and more effective at reducing code complexity. To this undertaking Van De Vanter and Gosling brought an intimate appreciation of how programmers actually work, along with new architectural approaches.

This was in the year 2000 - have IDEA and Eclipse already done this? Seems to me like they have certainly revelutionized IDE's and made them something we like to use again.

I might have a concussion

I played flag football today with some buddies in Denver's beautiful Washington Park. The game ended when I collided with a friend's shoulder at a pretty good clip. I got an instant headache as I crumpled to the ground wondering how bad I was hurt. So I think I might have a concussion, but don't really know. I felt fine about 3 minutes after it happened, although white t-shirts did have a shade of green to them. I was able to drive the 20 miles home, and I do feel a little out of it - but that could be from the 2 hours of football and late night coding last night. So if I start to make off-the-wall comments and such, you'll know why!

Kurt reveals some Dirt

Kurt finally fessed up and told us a little about himself. Thanks Kurt! He also does a little nudging for us to tell about our first job out of school. I already did one post on this and how I worked for MCI Systemhouse out of school, but I didn't tell you about the project. I started with SHL (another name for Systemhouse, now owned by EDS) on August 4th, 1997. I had a two week project in Fort Collins (75 miles north of Denver) creating a Microsoft Access client to talk to an Oracle backend for Larimer County. I didn't mind the commute and the long hours, but the project was certainly stressfull for it being my first. I was working with one other guy from SHL who didn't know squat and was later canned. After that project, I started on a Y2K inventory and assessment at StorageTek. While this project was a little more fun, and the people were great, SHL had a ridiculous methodology for doing Y2K assessments. So we ended up re-writing most of their methodology and used it pretty successfully. It was a cool project because I was doing presentations to all the head honchos at StorageTek and I felt like I was rubbing shoulders with the elite crowd. I met Julie at MCI new-hire training in January 1998, and doubled my salary in March 1998 by becoming a contractor with IBM. The rest of the story can be found in how I started Raible Designs.