Raible Designs

Spring Break in Florida: Golf, Beaches and Boats!

Florida is a beautiful state, with sandy beaches, excellent fishing, fun people and a great enthusiasm for golf. When I dreamed up Trish, I knew she'd have an awesome family, but I never expected her parents to have a house on a golf course. Trish's grandma, Claire Stanley, is a legend in her own right. I've never met her, but I knew I loved her when Trish's dad first told me about her "layered shots". When I saw Claire's name listed several times on the walls of the The Country Club of Naples, a deep respect came over me. Claire picked out her house on the 17th hole (Trish's favorite number) of the Country Club in 1966, when the establishment was founded. My bus was born in 1966.

Today, Trish's parents have turned it into a golf and relaxation oasis, complete with beautiful orchid gardens, a sweet pool and Japanese decorations from the country where they first met.

As a golf enthusiast, I'm embarrassed that we've only visited her parents in Naples once before. We bought Abbie and Jack golf clubs last year for Jack's birthday, and they both like to play the game. To make up for our lack of visiting family in Florida, we took our kids on a golf vacation for this year's Spring Break.

10 years ago today, I bought a VW Bus

10 years ago today, I bought a 1966 21-Window Volkswagen Bus. Restoring a VW Bus had been a dream of mine since high school, when I attempted to restore a '69 VW Bug. In October 2005, the restoration project began. Since then, it's been through many shops and had quite a few folks work on it. You can read all about it in When is the bus gonna be done?

Since many long-time readers of this blog are familiar with The Bus Project, it seems fitting to give y'all a detailed update on where things sit today.

This site now powered by Java 8, Tomcat 7 and Wufoo Forms

I recently upgraded this site to use the latest version of Apache Roller. It was a minor release (5.0.3), but I figured I'd document the steps in case "early onset" comes soon. First of all, to download raibledesigns.com and get it running locally, I perform the following steps:

1. Backup everything using ~/bin/backup.sh on raibledesigns.com
2. scp backup file to local hard drive and expand
3. Copy ROOT, skins and repository directories to local webapps
4. Make sure activation, mail, mysql and jta JARs are in $CATALINA_HOME/lib
5. Copy roller-custom.properties from raibledesigns.com's $CATALINA_HOME/lib
6. Copy context files from hosted $CATALINA_HOME/conf/Catalina to local directory
7. Import database and change roller-custom.properties to match local credentials

Next, to upgrade to the latest Roller release, I do the following:

1. Download latest Roller release and expand
2. Copy JARs (from WEB-INF/lib) to existing install (to upgrade dependencies)
3. Delete any lower-versioned JARS from WEB-INF/lib directory
4. Copy JSPs (from WEB-INF/jsps) to existing install
5. Run database migration scripts from WEB-INF/classes/dbscripts
6. Use a diff tool (like SmartSynchronize) to compare new vs. existing
7. Test and troubleshoot (if there's startup errors)

This process has worked well for the last 10 years, and it's been in my head the whole time. It's bound to escape someday.

Contact Form Enhancements
In addition to upgrading Roller, I also upgraded Tomcat 6 to Tomcat 7.0.52. In doing so, I found Jakarta's Mailer Taglib doesn't work with Tomcat 7. As you can tell from the aforementioned thread, I've known this for several years. That's the only thing that's stopped me from upgrading Tomcat the past couple years.

Devoxx4Kids - Denver Chapter Begins!

I'm happy to announce the first meeting of the Denver Chapter of Devoxx4Kids is now open for registration. It's a two hour class titled Introduction to Server-Side Minecraft Programming and will be taught by Denver's own Scott Davis. The class will be held on May 3rd, from 10am - 12pm at Thrive's Cherry Creek location, where we can comfortably fit 20 students. Cost is $10, but you'll get that back in the form of a t-shirt. Age requirement is 9-18 and kids should have basic computer skills (copy/paste, opening applications, etc.). Minecraft experience will certainly help too.

I'd like to thank Daniel De Luca for his initial assistance with getting Devoxx4Kids setup in Denver and Arun Gupta for starting Devoxx4Kids USA. Arun has been a great help in getting things going and answering my questions over the last few months. Of course, none of it would be happening without Scott Davis or Thrive. If you join us on May 3rd, you'll see that Scott is an awesome teacher and Thrive has some incredible facilities.

My initial goal with Devoxx4Kids in Denver is to host a class or two this year. If there's enough demand, we can expand. For now, we're starting small and seeing where it takes us. If you're interested in teaching a future class, please let me know. We'd love to teach the kids a number of skills, from Scratch to NAO Humanoid Robot programming to building things with Arduino and Raspberry Pi.