Raible Designs

Formatting Comments Correctly

You can see from Matt's comments on my last post that my handy-dandy comments feature is not formatting comments correctly. Basically, if you put a line break in the textarea below (by pressing return), there should be a line break (<br />) in the rendered comment. The reason this is broken seems to be because the following Velocity code doesn't seem to be functioning correctly:

#set($content = $comment.content)
#if($escapeHtml)
    #set($content = $utilities.escapeHTML($content))
#end
#if($autoformat) 
    #set($content = $stringUtils.replace($content,"\n","<br />"))
#end

You'll notice that it's not working on my in-page comments either. But it is working for the pop-up comments. However, the pop-up one is doing the StringUtils.replace in Java code, rather than Velocity. Hopefully someone will have a tip for me to fix this.

How to control access with Jabber?

So know that I've got a password-embedding scheme worked out for e-mail and moblogger, I have to figure out a way to do something similar with Jabber. Currently, in what I have working, there is no password verification, but it is needed. It's necessary to prevent just any-old-Joe from posting to your weblog. Of course, they'd have to know the username for your blog IM user (this listens for new posts), but it probably wouldn't be hard to figure out. My first thought is to have the password as the first part of the message, and then the message after that. For instance:

mypassword / Here is the rest of my post

I'd suggest doing this in the subject, but the problem with this is that you can send an IM without a subject, and I still want posts to succeed even if there's no subject (a.k.a. title). So whaddya think - would you be willing to type "password / rest of your IM" everytime to wanted to post to your weblog via IM?

BTW, the new server seems to be holding up quite nicely, eh?

Comments Fix

I committed a small enhancement to Roller's CVS tonight. Twisty Comments should now be FIFO instead of LIFO. Most commenting features are designed this way, including Roller's other two options (popup and single-page). Thanks to Keith for testing out twisty comments and inspiring me to fix this bug.

Running a process from a servlet

Note to self: This may help you in running moblogger from a servlet:

Process p = Runtime.getRuntime().exec("/bin/chmod 700 /path/to/myfile");

I found this nugget on the tomcat-user mailing list - and I'm assuming it can be used to run any command-line process.

Hibernate's Query by Criteria (What I'd like to see)

After trying to work with Hibernate's new Query by Criteria feature in version 2.0, I've come up with a page detailing what I'd like to see. Basically, this page results from the API not working for my needs - and since it's still in its infancy, hopefully this document will help shape it future. I'll add a comments link on the document (to this post) for any feedback or comments.

Snookered at the Apple Store

They got me tonight... those bastards. I walked in and handed over MiniMe. They're sending him off and will call me in a few days to tell me if the damage is covered by my AppleCare Warranty. It damn well better be ;-) If any of you have ever been to the Apple stores, and had them do anything, you'll know it takes forever for them to complete the paperwork. The last time, I went in to get a new powercord, and it took them 20 minutes to type everything in. I have a sneaky suspicion that they're doing this all on a webapp that is slow like molasses.

So while waiting for them to complete the paperwork, I went to buy an iPod. I wanted the cheapest one - $299 for 10 Gigs. 2500 songs is plenty when I only have around 700. But the salesman sneakingly let me know that the $399 model came with over $150 in accessories (Wired remote, Carrying case w/ belt clip, New iPod Dock). I knew the dock was good from reading James's new iPod experience. So I asked, "How much is the dock?" The swindler told me, "60 or 70 bucks, something like that." I fell for it, and now I'm the proud (and poor with a pissed off wife) owner of the 15 GB (3700 song) iPod. I'll be stuffing this sucker in my pocket and riding to work as long as I'm in Colorado this summer - shouldn't take me long to scratch it up real nice.

First impression: it sucks - I was stuck trying to do stuff in German for the first couple of minutes. :-) I had to reset it to get back to English. All my downloaded songs have many different names for the same artist, so I have 3 different "Eminem" and 4 different "Greatful Dead" artists. Only 1 Garth Brooks though. From these artists, you can see I like it all - music is one of my favorite things in this world.

I'm guessing I'll get used to my iPod (reminder to self: name it) after a few days/weeks of using it. As most things Apple makes - it takes me a while to fall in love with their toys.

[Request] Moblogger on Sourceforge

Hey Russ, what do you think about putting Moblogger on SourceForge? If you have something against SourceForge, that's fine, how about putting it on a publicly accessible CVS server so folks can contribute?

I have a few reasons for wanting this:

• I want to see title support - maybe signified by a space in the subject after the password.
• I'd like to see the ability to specify multiple blogs/e-mail boxes in the config file (agentsettings.xml).
• A sample web interface would be awesome. For instance, the ability to edit the config file via a JSP and start/stop the agent through this same interface. Maybe even use Betwixt for writing/reading the config file.
• Use Velocity or XSL for templates - rather than hardcoding it in the Java code.
• This seems like a great project to integrate Jabber-blogging into.

If you give the OK, I can request the project be setup - but I thought you'd like to be the admin on it.

Jabber and Roller

This would be a much better post if I'd already developed the software, and this was an announcement. But I don't want to develop the software per se, I just want to use it. So I'm putting this idea out there in hopes that someone has already developed the software. My e-mail to the jabber-dev mailing list pretty much sums it all up.

Hello,

My name is Matt Raible and I am a contributor on the Roller Weblogger
project (http://rollerweblogger.org).  I'm looking to add support for 
Jabber as a blogging client.  Currently, we support the BloggerApi and 
MetaWeblogApi.  What I'd like to know is if there is a project already 
that converts Jabber's XML files to XML-RPC calls - or if I could simply 
use an XSL stylesheet to transform and resend to my blog.

Thanks,

Matt

I'd love to add a Jabber Powered logo to my About page. I did some work with Jabber last year, basically just installing and configuring it - both very simple. The project I was on was also planning on adding support for creating new jabber accounts on-the-fly when a new user was created in our database. It's all XML, so it's probably all pretty easy. Anyway, I bought a Programming Jabber book and it's been collecting dust ever since. The cool thing about Jabber is if we setup a Jabber server (i.e. jabber.freeroller.net), then I think it'd be possible to blog via your favorite IM client. Please leave your thoughts and comments - and any links to anything that might already exists.

Dr.'s Appointment for Mini-Me

I'm taking my laptop (mini-me) to my local Apple Store today. I've got a couple of hardware issues that I'm hoping they'll fix.

• When I press on the bottom right corner of the keyboard (near the corner of the panel), there's a clicking and I can press down about 1/8th of an inch.
• I tripped while carrying mini-me a couple of nights ago and broke one of the hinges to the screen.

I hope they'll fix these issues as it's still under warranty, but don't know if they will. Has anyone else had similar hardware problems that they've gotten fixed (through Apple or via other means)?

I hope I can beat the crowd and maybe even get an iPod.

Braindump: Roller, Hosting and Wrox

I have a lot of things I want to mention, so let's just get right to it.

Roller should bundle Moblogger
It'd be cool if Roller bundled Russ's Moblogger as part of the application. It'd be pretty easy, all we'd need to do is slap a UI on it's config file - possibly put the config into a database, and maybe even use Roller's "page" feature for the e-mail templates. Then we'd have to figure out a way to start Moblogger's thread in the background and possibly do one thread for each user.

Roller Plugins
Should Roller add a Plugins feature like Blojsom has? Why should we? If we should, maybe we should just re-use an existing plug-in API - i.e. Struts' or Blojsom's. What would make a good plugin? Is this just a fancy name for a feature that can be turned on/off (i.e. comments).

Struts Menu for the Editor
I hope to add the ability to choose different menu types in Roller's Editor UI. First, I'll have to integrate Roller's tabbed menu as a displayer for struts-menu [demo]. The CoolMenu's displayer will work great (and require less mouse clicks). I mention this in hopes of making Lance and Dave aware of any schema changes that need to be made to support a user-selectable menu type. I'll also need to add the ability to specify struts-forwards in the menu-config.xml (not implemented yet in struts-menu).

This site and my provider
This site was down a lot today - probably because of all the hits from javablogs.com (just put Hibernate in your title). I noticed that Simon and Sam's sites were down as well. This leads me to believe that my kgbinternet.com is not up to snuff. Dave and Lance seem to never have issues with Roller crashing - so why am I? Please recommend any hosting providers that offer private Tomcat instances (preferrably with lots of RAM and disk space).

What's up with Wrox and Professional JSP 2.0
Who knows... I haven't heard a thing, from anyone. Think I'd get anyone's attention if I slapped both of my chapters on this site - free of charge? I doubt it. I might just do that if I don't get any feedback in the next week or so. Are they gonna sue me for the pocket change they paid me to write the chapters?

Now I'm going to assign this to my Java category and see if all you java.bloggers can crash this site again. ;-)