Raible Designs

NBA All Star Jam, DU Hockey and Tubing at Copper

This weekend was another action-packed one. On Saturday, we went to the NBA All Star Jam at the Convention Center in downtown Denver. I expected some sort of practice session with the All Stars, but it was just a carnival-like event for grade-school age basketball fans and players. We went with "Uncle Justin" and had a great time riding the light rail down and playing with basketballs at the event. Saturday night, we went to the DU Hockey game and got to witness our first loss of the season. It was a bad game, but I think the Pioneers needed it to get their heads straight for the playoffs in two weeks.

Today, Abbie and I headed up to Copper to do some tubing. The drive up was great - no traffic and Abbie slept the whole way. We rode up the lift together and hopped on the tube for our first ride down. It was wicked fast, and I thought we were in over our heads for a minute. Abbie got scared and cold and that first run was our last. I put on her hat and gloves (she didn't want them before we started the run) and we marched back to the car. The drive back was traffic-less and Abbie kept me entertained with all her mountain-driving observations. I'm going to try to get back in the habit of taking pictures when we do this fun stuff. Click on any image below to see pictures from this weekend.

Late Night

I was up until 4:30 this morning working on Spring Live. There's nothing like sleeping 3 hours and then riding your bike to work. Must... find... coffee.

Why doesn't AppFuse use Maven?

My newest reply for why AppFuse doesn't use Maven is going to be this link. Ant rocks. I still need to update AppFuse's build.xml to use all the Ant 1.6 stuff - that's scheduled for next week's late nights.

Flights are booked!

I just booked our flights to California's wine country to spend our 5 year anniversary in April. I'm going to the MySQL Users Conference on Monday, and Julie is joining me on Friday. From there, we'll drive down to the Fog Catcher Inn for a romantic getaway and lots of wine tasting. We can't wait! Hard to believe it's been 5 years - Abbie and Jack are good reminders of how long it's been though. Kids rock.

Secure wireless email on Mac OS X

I don't have time right now, but this looks like a good read:

After more than a year of implementing my own measures, I think it's time to help raise awareness of email security. And in doing so, document the way I use SSH to secure email when I'm on a wireless network. If you're concerned about strangers having open access to your usernames and passwords, and all the email you send and receive while connected to a public wireless network - whether you use a Mac or not - you'll want to read this. [Read More]

DU Hockey #1 in the Nation

Yeah baby! Denver unbeaten in last nine games at 8-0-1. How good is DU? We've been to every Saturday game this year, and they've yet to lose when we're there. Must be Abbie, Jack and I's lucky shirts. Must be time to buy some playoff tickets!

The worst part of all this? DU's biggest rivalry is CC (Colorado College) and they play March 3rd and 4th - same time as TheServerSide Symposium. Damn, I guess I'll be watching (and betting if I can) from Vegas.

Microsoft Conference for Developer Community Leaders

I received the following e-mail in my inbox last night:

I'm thinking about doing it because it sounds like a heckuva opportunity with some pretty smart folks. Looks like March is shaping up to be a month of conferences, with TheServerSide Symposium starting two weeks from tomorrow.

Is Shale ready for primetime?

Is Shale ready for prime-time and use in production applications? David Geary seems to think so:

My consulting job is pretty exciting. I'm using Shale heavily now, especially for wizards. Our application has both static wizards, for creating a new account, for example, and dynamic wizards that are generated from a description of an online-document.

Not only that, but he's going to be talking about it on the No Fluff Just Stuff tour this year.

To start the year, I'm doing three new presentations: "Shale: the next Struts", "Felix: a bag of tricks for JSF", and "Design Patterns: Tales from the server-side". Later on, I'll add two more presentations: in the near term, Killer Web UIs with Tiles and SiteMesh and a little later, a session on Laszlo.

I'm a huge believer in Shale. I have no doubt it's destined for great things, so I'm super-excited about the Shale session.

Now that I've talked about this, I'll probably be accused of caring more about Struts than the other web frameworks I use. In reality, I prefer most of the other frameworks in AppFuse and Equinox to Struts. However, at my current gig we're afraid to move from Struts because we're the only development group that hasn't fallen victim to the Big Blue umbrella. They've tried to make us use WebSphere, but we fought that off and continue to use JBoss. The fear is that if we don't use Struts, and use some lesser-known framework, they'll use that against us. That's why I like Shale - because it might be a way for me to use a more WebWork/JSF-type framework.

Ruby on Rails vs. Struts

Brian McCallister has put together a nice tutorial titled "Rails for Struts-ters (Part 1)". In it, he compares a Struts Action to a Rails ActionController (I think that's the right link).

After looking at the various introductory tutorials for RubyOnRails, a lot of people seem to come away thinking it is a simple CRUD framework -- mostly because of Scaffolding. A common theme seems to be, "well, it looks fast for slapping together a prototype, but when you need control, you it ain't there." I can see why people think that way, after watching the 10-minute video, and the reading the ONLamp tutorial. So here is a stab at a guided tour, using Struts as a point of reference.

Good stuff Brian - can't wait for the next tutorial.

Good Saturday

Yesterday was quite possibly the most action-packed days of my life. It all started with going out to breakfast with the family. From there we went on a Hammond Candy factory tour with the Colorado Bus Club. Abbie had a great time and couldn't stop running around in circles. Here's some pictures from the event. After that, I headed to a local connectionless coffee shop and worked on Spring Live for two hours. From there, Jack and I headed to DU Basketball game with some free tickets I got from a friend. That game ended about an hour before the DU Hockey game. After the hockey game, I went and watched a friend's Jazz band play at The Hornet. Phew! It was a great day with a lot of family time. Being a Dad has got to be the coolest thing that's ever happened to me.