Raible Designs

The Ride to Work

It's supposed to be a beautiful week in Denver. This means that it's time to dust off the ol' Sugar Momma (Gary Fisher Sugar 3) and start my annual riding to work phase. I didn't get a chance to do it last year b/c I was working from home, and it was a little tough to motivate myself to ride a loop every morning. This year, I've got quite a challenge ahead of me. It's probably about an hour and a half ride to work, and approximately 20 miles. After a month or longer, I should be able to get that down to about an hour or 1:15.

The first year I did this was 2000 and I rode 55 out of the 60 possible days I could've ridden to work. That year, my ride was about an hour, and I got it down to 35-40 minutes by the end of the summer. Then again, it was only about 10 miles. There's really nothing like it - getting to work after watching the sun rise and working your ass off. I can't friggen wait - come on Spring - I'm ready!!

Russell: Here's your hookup

The Butt Ugly Weblog (Scaring little kids since 2003) has offered Russ some love. Since I like Russ, here's your hookup baby!

Russell Beattie wants to be #1 Russell.

Since he's a good guy and posts and discovers an insane amount of interesting stuff, I've gotta help him :-). Google, here you go!

To Janne Jalkanen: I dig the name of your blog, I LOL'ed when I first read the title. Also, you're Finnish, so that means you've got to be cool. My Grandparents (last name: Hill) were Finnish and I'm about 35%; the rest being German, Dutch and Irish.

MoPhoto'd

Well, I went ahead and ordered the Communicam from AT&T and it should be hear in 3 days or so. Julie thinks I'm crazy, and she's probably right that the camera sucks, but I want to be a moblogger. I want to post pictures and blog, in real time. My first adventure? I hope to mophoto Erik at the Denver JUG meeting a week from today. That is, if I get the camera and figure it out in time.

RE: Sony Ericsson Communicam

After a bit of research and a couple comments/e-mails, I've found that there's a few different models of Communicams. There's the MCA-25 ($100), the MC-68 ($70) and the MCA-10. What's the diff?

Sony Ericsson Communicam

I went looking for the T68i's Communicam today since I'd like to get this sucker for moblogging. On Amazon, I found the T300 for $-80. That's right folks - they'll pay you $80 for buying it! Of course, they get you with the "new service activation" clause - it's $250 otherwise. If anyone knows of good prices for the Communicam, let me know. The best price I found was $140 US.

Try this sucker out with an attachment.

Moblogger enabled for this blog

I enabled Russ's Mobblogger for this site this evening. In fact, I'm typing this post in an e-mail (complete with HTML). I found a couple of issues and I have a couple of questions:

Issue #1: The FTP doesn't seem to support symlinks. I wanted to create a symlink so the <ftpDir> would point to my /repository/images directory. No dice. It wouldn't recognize the symlink as a directory. As a workaround, I put a symlink in /repository to point to ~/moblog/media.

Issue #2: Moblogger uses a relative path for it's URLs in images and other media. Right now, it's hard-coded to do <img src="media/filename.ext" .../> I altered the MailProcessor.java class to use a path for my media assets of "/repository/media" so that the above symlink would work. Since Roller uses /page/username for its sites, a relative path wouldn't work. Maybe this could be a configuration parameter - hint, hint ;-)

Issue #3: The script to run mobblogger on *nix didn't have quartz.jar in the classpath. And for some reason, I had to remove "#!/bin/sh" from the top of the file in order for it to run on my RedHat 8 machine. And it also only runs while I'm logged in. Does anyone know how to set this up to run constantly? Should I do it as a cron job or something? It's just a java -cp ... command.

I might set this up on the server where this site is hosted, but it seems to work fine on my local machine right now, so I'll just leave it there. I doubt I'll even ever use it. For one, I don't have a camera for my phone, and that'd be the only really cool thing to use it for. Maybe I'll post an e-mail everyone once it awhile, but most of the posts I want to write are pretty long. That might take a while, even with T9. Oh well, it's still cool software and I dig it. Thanks Russ!

South Florida Job Market

I received the following e-mail from one of the JUG contacts I e-mailed this weekend. Yikes!

If you are moving to South Florida in hopes of finding a job ...well, this may the worst location in the county for that. I would say 1/3 of the user group is employed 1/3 are students and 1/3 or even more have been laid off and looking for other ways of making a living -- many hope through Java or some other technology. All in all, this is an incredibly tough tech market right now.

I'd be willing to bet that most of the folks that attend the Denver JUG are unemployed too. My highest attendence record was when I was looking for a new gig.

Struts Resume on Tomcat 4.1.18 LE

I discovered some issues with struts-resume 0.6. Thanks to Thomas Fabbricante for the tip. The first bug I found is that you need to change the following line in your database.properties file:

hibernate.connection.url = jdbc:mysql://localhost:3306/struts-resume?autoReconnect=true   

to:

hibernate.connection.url = jdbc:mysql://localhost:3306/resume?autoReconnect=true

As for running struts-resume on Tomcat LE, you'll first need to put mail.jar and activation.jar in $CATALINA_HOME/common/lib - or you can comment out the mail-related stuff. These files include metadata/web/struts-resume.xml (JNDI Mail Session) and web/WEB-INF/classes/log4j.properties (SMTPAppender configuration). Then it all seems to work great! Sweet - that was a lot easier than I thought it'd be. I'll release a 0.6.1 in order to update the database.properties.sample to have a valid db url.

Update: I've uploaded the files for 0.6.1, you can download them here. Alos, here's a demo and a project link for your clicking pleasure.

Validation - We need a common framework!

Jason doesn't like my Validator that matches two fields. I was just trying to help the Struts Community out by solving a problem that many have asked for. Oh well, I guess those WebWork folks will take any opportunity to bash on Struts ;-).

This is just another example of Struts making the common things hard. I'm more and more glad we went with Webwork, and once Xwork 1.0 / Webwork 2.0 are here, I'll be in nerdvana. [Jason Carreira]

Personally, I still think the Commons Validator is easier - you don't have to write any .java files in most cases (except for my extension, which will hopefully soon be added). I do like the ExpressionValidator - that looks cool. All in all, I think I'd bash on WebWork a little more - but I don't know enough about it. Where's the book ;-)

BTW, this post was sent (and edited!) via NetNewsWire. Very cool - but no titles.