Raible Designs

Passport Expired

It figures. I'm supposed to leave on Friday for Norway and I waited until today to check the expiration date on my Passport. It expired in January of this year. That gives me 3 days to try to get it renewed before my flight takes off. This site makes it look like it ain't gonna happen, but I'm hopeful. There's a fair amount of walk-in places in Denver that do on-site photos.

Let me know if you have any tips or have been through this process yourself.

Update: Thanks to David Carter's suggestion, I found American Passport and should have a new passport on my doorstep Thursday morning.

Update 2: Passport has arrived!

Sunset from the Sailfish Marina

Better JUnit Assertions

Joe Walnes has an interesting post on Flexible JUnit assertions with assertThat(). In this post, he shows the power of using some of jMock's features. Since jMock is included in AppFuse (sample test), using Joe's assertThat() is certainly a possibility. Let me know if adding this is something you'd like to see. The nice thing is adding it won't take any features away - it'll only add new ones.

Spring Training in Norway

A week from today, I'm heading to Norway to do some training on Spring. It's going to be a good trip and I have my work cut out for me. I'll be talking about Spring, Hibernate, AppFuse, Acegi Security as well as Ajax and Spring Web Flow. I'll also be presenting at the two JUGs in Norway:

• Stavanger JUG, May 25th: Test-Driven Developing with Spring and Hibernate. I also plan on talking about Spring Web Flow for a good portion of this meeting.
• Oslo JUG, May 26th: Advanced Spring MVC, Spring Web Flow and Acegi Security.

I'll try to post outlines for my presentations in the next week or so.

Tutorial: Date Handling with AppFuse and Struts

An AppFuse user known as "thogau" has taken the time to create a very nice looking tutorial titled Handling dates with AppFuse and Struts. Great stuff thogau!

Happy Birthday Julie!

Happy Birthday Julie! Today we're loving life: Julie got to sleep 'til noon and now everyone is relaxing in the pool. Tonight the party starts at 7:00. Florida is beautiful this time of year.

Short Week

There's nothing like trying to get a bunch of hours in on a short week. I thought I would be able to get in a full week, by working 13-hour days. We leave on Thursday for West Palm Beach (Julie's birthday present) - so I'm trying to avoid the opportunity cost of missing 2 days this week. I managed to get in 13 yesterday by riding to work at 4:30 and starting the day early. Today, my luck hasn't been so good. It's 1:20 p.m. and I still haven't made it into the office. Julie had Jury Duty this morning and she's still downtown getting interviewed. Oh well, the kids and I had fun this morning: a stroller ride to the bagel store, riding the swings at Wash Park and a picnic in the park for lunch. Now they're both sleeping and as frustrated as I am that I'm not getting my hours in - I realize that this is probably as good as a day gets. I might as well have a beer during their naps!

A weekend of fun

After working long hours last week, it was nice to have a weekend of relaxing and playing with the kids. Julie to Vegas on Friday night and returned Saturday night - so I had the kids solo for 24 hours. Saturday morning, I took them to Tiny Town where fun was had by all. Today, we took Jack on his first bike ride. Below are some pics from the events.

[Colorado Software Summit] Spring and Comparing Web Frameworks

I'm pleased to announce that I'll be speaking at the Colorado Software Summit in October. I'll be doing a presentation on Spring and one on Comparing Web Frameworks. The abstracts are on my very own speaker page. I've never been to this conference, so I'm definitely looking forward to it - especially since it's only an hour away from my house. The only downside to the conference (for speakers) is you have to deliver each presentation 3 times. Of course, this is great if you're an attendee. Now I just need to figure out a way to get SourceBeat to sponsor my condo for the week.

I originally did my Web Frameworks Comparison (PDF) last year at ApacheCon. I'm looking to revamp it this year - so please let me know if have any suggestions for improvements.

[OSCON] AppFuse Tutorial and Spring MVC vs. WebWork

Now that the OSCON 2005 site is up, I might as well advertise the two things I'm doing: an AppFuse Tutorial and a session titled WebWork vs. Spring MVC Smackdown with Matthew Porter. I wasn't planning on doing the AppFuse Tutorial, but I was asked to do it - so what the heck. The title has "Struts" in it, but I'm willing to do whichever one (JSF, Struts, Spring MVC, Tapestry or WebWork) the audience chooses. If we're good, maybe we'll have an Eclipse Plugin done by this conference to simplify the new project and code generation process.