Raible Designs

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.

Gen Xers are setup for failure.

Found via The FuzzyBlog!:

A few years later the core of Generation X--the 40 million Americans born between 1966 and 1975--found themselves riding the wildest economic bull ever. Salesclerks became programmers; coffee slingers morphed into experts in Java (computerese, that is)--all flush with stock options and eye-popping salaries. Now that the thrill ride is over, Gen X's plight seems particularly bruising. No generation since the Depression has been set up for failure like this. Everything the dot-com boom delivered has been taken away--and then some. Real wages are falling, wealth continues to shift from younger to older, and education costs are surging. Worse yet, for some Gen Xers, their peak earning years are behind them. Buried in college and credit card debt, a lot of them won't be able to catch up as they approach their prime spending years.

(Scott added the bold). This very much rings true for many folks I know. My wife and I (as Gen Xers) have gotten lucky since we've maintained employment, for the most part, through the last couple of years. I did have a couple months last year without a client, but I used this time to get my MCSE/MCDBA 2000, SCWCD and WebLogic certifications - so it was probably better than having a client.

How did I get started in this wacky industry? I'm glad you asked. I graduated from DU--with three degrees (Russian, International Business and Finance)--had created many web pages in college, and found that there weren't many jobs in my degree's industries. So I audited some computer classes my senior year - and whalla - got a job with MCI Systemhouse. That's where I met my wife and the rest is history. To peak your interest for my next background story - didja know I grew up in a log cabin in Montana with no electricity and no running water? For the first 16 years of my life...

Looks like Russell's almost back.

From http://www.beattie.info/notebook/:

Calling the blog-support Hotline.

I have a bunch of PDF's that I need to search for text values. Does anyone know of a package or set of utilities that will do this? Preferably open-source and cross-platform. However, I will accept any and all suggestions.

New Roller Client. I found that BlogApp works to post to Roller. Very cool! The software seems to support titles - meaning you can specify html to go around the title, but it doesn't post it to the "title" field in the roller database.

Sun is spewing knowledge again.

For those that aren't up to speed on JSTL, here's a new tutorial: Faster Development with JavaServer Pages^TM Standard Tag Library (JSTL 1.0). Also, this Tuesday, Craig McClanahan and Amy Fowler, Spec leads of JSF, will host a live chat on JSF. The bad part, it's at 8:00 AM Eastern time which means that I'll have to get up at 6:00 to catch it. I'm a pretty good morning person, so shouldn't be too hard. I've been practicing for the little one lately by going to bed between midnight and 2:00 AM and then waking up again at 6:00 AM. Hope it works.

Ant 1.5.1 Released!

It doesn't appear like there are too many changes, but there's a new version nevertheless. As most of you open source developers know, it's much easier to keep up with the lastest version (or nightly builds) than to try to migrate when a new version comes out. If you don't, you mind end up with a XDoclet nightmare similar to the one I'm having with Roller.

PayPal has (free) BillPay.

I logged into PayPal tonight to pay my Web Hosting provider - and found they now have a FREE BillPay Service. Best of all - they actually had a list of Vendors that I've payed recently. I guess they get this from my bank account. Pretty cool though - I'll be using it shortly and I'll eliminate the last three bills I have to write checks for.