Raible Designs

How to get it all done?

Reading Russell's post tonight about "that middle place" makes me feel good - there are others with brains that work too much.

I have too many options. I have too many things to learn/do/create.

This is how I feel about getting my Photoshop certification, upgrading my other certifications, adding search features to roller, raking the leaves, selling my car and being prepared to drop it all at a moments notice when Julie goes into labor. I often find that when I give myself a list of tasks like this, it's out of boredom rather than necessity. None of these are necessary (except for the last), but they are things that I'd like to do to accomplish before the end of the year. My best luck with studying for certifications has been: wake up early, usually at 4 or 5 and go to work early to study. This is tough when you work at home like me. There are too many distractions at home, or anywhere in the vicinity of a computer. Best to go to a library or conference room and study for an hour or two each day. So what I'm advocating is: 1) put yourself on a studying schedule, and 2) make time to study away from home.

I've got all this stuff I want to do and learn, and there's only 24 hours in the day and I've got to sleep for what, 3 of them at least (hahaha. Oh how I WISH I could function on 3 hours sleep). I really need to learn to UNPLUG the internet and sometimes UNPLUG the computer so I can get the stuff I need to done...

So true, I'm really looking forward to UNPLUGGING in the coming weeks.

A Very Hot Blog.

I have to agree with Dave...

Mr. Inluminent certainly has a winning approach to the "is my blog hot or not" competition.

BEA, JAAS and JRockit.

The BEA meeting tonight was good - I saw a couple old friends and enjoyed the good microbrews they had on tap during the meeting. The first presentation (PPT) was on JAAS, was presented by Rich Helton and gave a good overview of what JAAS is. I realized that I will probably never use it directly because I specialize in writing web applications, and the servlet API uses JAAS under the covers (via JDBCRealms, etc.). Not a very exciting presentation, but neither is the topic.

The second presentation was on JRockit, which is BEA's JVM. It's basically a BEA version of the JDK, but supposedly 4 times faster than Sun's Hotspot. The best part about it (to me) is that it has a "Management Console." This allows you to control the garbage collection algorithm, trace performance on methods, and setup notifications for events. You can find more documentation on this here. A very cool app to say the least. BEA's goal with JRockit is to fill the gap that Microsoft left when it quit creating the JVM for Intel platforms.

So to say the least, I was sold leaving the meeting - I could solve my JDK 1.4 problems, increase the speed of my applications by 4 times, and all would be groovy. I rushed home, installed JRockit and found the following (testing the current application I'm working on):

Needless to say, I wasn't too impressed. Will I use it - sure, it seemed to be faster and my benchmarks above are simply me counting "1 1-thousand, 2 1-thousand..." The one thing I found disappointing was I couldn't get the jrockit.managementserver to start--even by adding -Djrockit.managementserver=true when starting Tomcat.

BEA User's Group Meeting tonight.

I'm going to make an attempt to attend the BEA User's Group Meeting tonight. My reasons: 1) it's the first meeting; 2) it's a good primer for upgrading my WebLogic certification; and 3) it's at a brewery!

Time: Monday October 14th 2002, 5:30 PM to 8:00 PM
Location: Wynkoop Brewing Company

Agenda:
5:30 - 6:00 Registration and Networking (snacks)
6:00 - 6:15 Introductions and overview of the Group (Scott Ryan and Board)
6:15 - 6:45 BEA JRockit Presentation (John Funk , BEA)
6:45 - 7:45 Security, JAAS and BEA Application Server (Rich Helton, Richware)
7:45 - 8:00 Prize Drawing

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.

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.

What's your largest attachment?

This story over at The FuzzyBlog! reminds of a story from a couple of years ago. A friend of mine, who lived and worked in San Francisco at the time, was writing an e-mail engine. He called it "the spam engine" but it was probably just used to send out mass e-mails to customers. Anyway, he decided to test it on me, so I received something like 1000 e-mails from him in one day. You can imagine my annoyance - and I thought to myself "that bastard - I'll get him!" So I zipped up a bunch of large files on my hard drive - including a JDK (40MB) and some other stuff. The final size of the zip was ~79MB. I attached and hit send. You can imagine how tickled I was when he called me to say, "What the hell did you send me? My Outlook froze up and it crashed my computer!" Needless to say, he quit testing his spam engine out on me ;-)

Tomcat 4.0.6 - another security release.

So the folks that develop tomcat have released another version - and it seems to be for the same reasons they released the last one. It's only been two weeks! I know the feeling when you think you've fixed a bug, you release, and you find it's still there. I just hope Tomcat doesn't start getting a bad reputation with all of these vulnerabilities.