Raible Designs

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.

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.

Tomcat is the most popular app server?

That's what they're saying over at theserverside.com:

The most commonly used Java application server execution environment today is Apache Software Foundation's Tomcat, according to BZ Research's latest Java Awareness Study, conducted in August 2002. In the study, 52.2 percent of all respondents said Tomcat was currently in use at their companies.

"The app-server question response clustered into four groupings, with Tomcat standing alone. Next were the three major commercial Java app servers: IBM's WebSphere, at 29.0 percent; BEA's WebLogic, at 24.5 percent; and Oracle's Oracle9iAS, at 20.8 percent."

Read: http://www.sdtimes.com/news/063/story2.htm.

Installing Red Hat, Part 2.

As you might've guessed, the first 2 CD's installed in about a 1/2 hour and know I'm waiting for disc3 to complete. 200 MB left, ~50KB/s. The GUI interface for installing has smooth fonts like Quartz Extreme on OS X and Clear Type on Windows XP. It's interesting on these Red Hat downloads - this is my 3rd or 4th one and there's definitely an art to it. I usually surf through the mirrors list with SmartFTP open (on Windows) and copy the ftp urls. SmartFTP detects an FTP url on the clipboard, prompts you to connect, and away you go. Yesterday and today, I'm about 1 for 10 on those servers that actually let me get through. But you can't stop there, you have to find the fastest server you can. Last night, I had good luck with a couple servers from Australia. The fastest one I ever found was ftp.orst.edu - I downloaded one CD in less than a couple hours! I couldn't believe it - maybe someone forgot to turn on my bandwidth constrictor. 472 out of 646.

Installing Red Hat, Part 1.

I decided to start installing Red Hat 8.0 with disc's 1 and 2 - and hopefully 1) I won't need disc3, or 2) it'll be done downloading by the time I do. The coolest part so far - they actually have a test at the beginning so you can test your CDs. What a lifesaver - I've installed Linux many times and found out on disc2 that my CD or iso image was bad.

Jabber Weblog.

I found the weblog of the Executive Director of the Jabber Software Foundation. I'll be adding this to my daily-reads list.

Red Hat Download.

I began downloading the RedHat 8.0 ISO's last night at about 2 a.m. and woke up to find disc1 and disc2 finished! Took 5 hours for each - you gotta like high speed internet access! Companies that sell high speed internet should advertise this. For instance, my provider mho.net should have this on their hompage.

Too bad the disc3 download dropped it's connection and now I have to get that one today.

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.