Raible Designs

A Good Job vs. Good Pay

I did the interview with the University of Miami this morning. I was interviewed by a roundtable of folks and the questions weren't too bad - there were some fun ones and some technical ones (i.e. the classic, "what's the difference b/w an interface and an abstract class"). The people sounded very cool and it'd probably be a great team to work on. The pay, however, is not very good at all. However, they said they'd try to work on that. The itneresting thing I've learned is that the best paying jobs are usually the worst jobs. At least that's how it's been for me. I don't know if people just expect more from you, and portray this in the form of micro-management or what, but it sucks to have a job you don't like.

My current job? I love it. Not only because we're using all the cool technologies I like (Ant, Struts, Hibernate, XDoclet, etc.), but also because the people are very cool. Our 8:30 a.m. meetings are actually fun to attend. We poke fun at each other and there's lots of laughter in the room. Today has been an especially good day - I got club level seats to the Rockies Game (baseball) tonight, and also got invited to a pre-release viewing of Matrix Reloaded. Now those are what I call benefits! And, unfortunately, I'm also making the same rate I made six months after I graduated from college. Back then, I couldn't believe how much I was making, and now it's enough to support Julie, Abbie and I (and I'm the only one who works), so it's not too bad.

The problem is the gig at U of M pays around 1/2 of what I'm making now. It'd be an awesome job though. It sounds like they have great people and I'm sure the perks are good (maybe free tuition for my masters?). Look at me talking like I already got the job - I probably just jinxed myself - especially since I gave them the URL to this site. Oh well, if you guys are reading - it sounds like an awesome position, but I don't know if I can support my family on that salary. In fact, I've had such little luck finding a decent paying job in Florida, Julie has started considering a non-move. That is, we might stay in Denver. Jobs here seem to be picking up, and my current contract doesn't seem to have any end in site. They're even talking about putting us on a project developing mobile apps in Java.

Miami is calling though, especially on this cold April afternoon. Now I'm off to freeze my ass off at the Rockies' game. Good thing they're club level seats so we can just sit inside if it's too cold.

Posted in General at Apr 18 2003, 04:35:00 PM MDT 2 Comments

Joe Hewitt Comments

I did a bit of research today and it looks fairly simple to incorporate Joe Hewitt-style comments into Roller. The hard part will be figuring out a way to convert an entry's comments into XML. For instance, Joe loads an XML document (sample) that contains all the comments for a given post. This document has a DTD which will hopefully make things easier. Here's what a sample XML-based comment entry looks like:

<comment id="000178">
  <author>Joe Hewitt</author> 
  <email />
  <url />
  <timestamp>April 3, 2003 04:14 PM</timestamp>
  <body>
  <p>I have readers??</p>
  </body>
</comment>

Looks pretty simple eh? So how do we convert comments to XML? Since they're already (or supposed to be) XHTML, should we just use a JSP and JSTL's "x" tag to do a little XSL? That sounds like an easy solution. Or should we figure out a way that we can hit the RSS feed (which could be enhanced to include comments)? Once we've done this, there's some JavaScript to load this document.

  // Make url unique to prevent loading it from cache
  var cacheKiller = new Date().getTime(); 
  // replace this with a link to a JSP or something
  var url = "/content/blog/comments/" + aEntryId + ".xml?" + cacheKiller; 
  loadXMLDocument(url, onCommentsLoaded);

Please comment with any ideas for the comments-to-XML conversion.

Posted in Roller at Apr 17 2003, 01:00:34 PM MDT 3 Comments

Cool Customer Service from AT&T

I have AT&T Wireless for my cell phone service. I was surprised tonight when I dialed 411. I asked the lady for the number to Brook's Steak House, which is a privately owned (non-corporate) steak house in Denver. We've always seen it advertised in airline's magazine, so we thought it'd be fun for our 3rd anniversary. The lady said to me, "would you like me to make a reservation for you?" "Sure!" I said. She took down my name and the time I'd like for my reservation and said she'd call me back in a half hour. It took an hour, but she called me back and we're booked for Saturday night. I even asked and it's part of my plan - no charge. Swwweeeeetttt!

Posted in General at Apr 16 2003, 07:50:29 PM MDT Add a Comment

What I learned from this weekend's re-design

This past weekend, I re-designed the Content Viewer's interface I wrote for OnPoint Digital. The major motivation behind the mini-project was to make the CV compatible with IE 5.5 and Opera 6 on Linux. It was a nightmare because of the lack of DHTML support in Opera, and also because of IE. So I came to the conclusion that I hate IE, Opera and Safari. My main reason is because they do everything so different - why don't they adhere to standards (Mozilla does)?! It makes web development so much harder when you have to test 5 browsers on 3 platforms. Hopefully I'm a better developer from the experience, and here's a short list of things I learned.

The CSS rule "position: fixed" doesn't work in IE, but works in all other browsers. This is a great rule, allowing you to pin an element to a location in a page. For instance, you can have a floating menu or footer using this. You can achieve similar functionality in IE using CSS Expressions (a non-standard extension). For instance, to keep a footer at the bottom of a page, you could use something like this:

div#footer {
  position: absolute;
  top: expression(document.body.scrollTop + document.body.clientHeight - offsetHeight);
  left: expression(document.body.scrollLeft + document.body.clientWidth - offsetWidth);
}
If you're using standards-compliant mode in IE 6, you have to use document.documentElement in place of document.body above.
Using standards-compliant mode in IE with frames will just create headaches for you and you'll end up with a horizontal scrollbar unless you make the body's width 95%. An easier way is to remove the doctype and not go with standards-compliant mode.
If you're supporting IE 6 and IE 5.5, remove the XHTML doctype (which makes IE 6 standards compliant) - this will make the two browser's behavior more consistent.
Opera 6 doesn't recognize the "background: transparent" css rule for <button>'s.
Opera 7 doesn't recognize the "width: 65px" css rule for buttons. Maybe this is only when you have an image on the button. I found that my buttons in Opera 7 were only as wide as the images on them.
In Opera 6, you can't copy the contents of one <div> to another <div>. With all the other browsers, it's easy using document.getElementById('divId').innerHTML. This does not exist in Opera - I'm still hoping to find a similar way of doing this.
Opera 7 and Safari have strange position bugs or maybe they're more standards-compliant than the other browsers, but I doubt it. In Opera 7, I have a buttons div that ends up at the top left corner of the header, when they should be aligned more in the middle and 100px from the left. In Safari, this same buttons <div> stacks the <button>'s on top of each other, rather than side-by-side, like you'd expect a row of buttons to look.

I'm glad I don't need to support Opera 7 or Safari for the app, but it's annoying that they behave so differently. Camino, of course, works great, and so does Mozilla. You write your JavaScript or CSS according to the standards, and it works in Mozilla, perfectly. What a beautiful browser.

Posted in The Web at Apr 16 2003, 08:31:31 AM MDT 2 Comments

Blogging from Starbucks

I finally finished the re-design for OnPoint Digital and now I'm at Starbuck's, uploading the release. My dad bought a subscription to T-Mobile's wireless network - and this is the first time he's had an opportunity to use it. He gets 24 hours free, and then $3/hour after that. Not a bad deal. It sucked that I had to put in 40 hours during my vacation, while my parents where in town - but oh well, it's good to be done. Our ISP is sending someone out on Thursday, so hopefully they'll fix everything at that time - and I can start blogging more - or maybe I'll be lucky enough to find satisfaction in being non-productive for awhile. ;-)

Posted in Roller at Apr 14 2003, 01:52:22 PM MDT 3 Comments

What's up Raible?

Paul Rivers wrote a comment about yesterday's post; guessing as to why I haven't been posting much lately. There are two reasons. The first is that I firmly believe that blogging is motivated by broadband and I don't have it. Secondly, I'm on vacation. The worst part is that I'm on vacation and I've been working the whole fricken time! My parents are in town and no one has to work but me. Do I really have to work? Probably not, but one of my clients wants a re-design done by Monday - and I've known about it for a month. So I put it off and put it off, and now the deadline is here - and it's not going nearly as fast or smooth as I though it would. The major motivation for the re-design is to make the webapp work in older browsers, namely Opera 6/Linux and IE 5.5/Windows. So just as I get it working in one, it breaks in the next. I'm learning way more about Opera than I ever wanted to know. It's no fun, I want to give up and quit - but something inside me still drives me to work away and neglect my vacation. This sucks...

Posted in General at Apr 11 2003, 12:14:23 PM MDT 2 Comments

America's obsession with Productivity

My family and I had a great time last night. I picked my Dad up from the airport and we hit a local microbrewery on the way home so I could school him at a couple of games of pool. He's usually pretty good, but the more beer I drank, the better I got, while it was the opposite for him. He'll blame it on his age.

One of the hot topics of the night was American's obsession with Productivity. We've talked about this topic many times; we used to call it American males are defined by their jobs. It's sad really, but if you're an American, you know what I'm talking about. If you've ever been out of work, chances are you felt less of yourself for it. The problem my Dad and I were discussing was what happens when you retire? And how do you enjoy your life now when you're so obessesed with productivity?

Russ is experiencing it. He's killing himself being so productive. I do the same thing, staying up late working on an open source project. Where my productivity does nothing more than get my name out there so someone can hire me to be more productive. Why can't we be satisfied with being un-productive? I need to find a middle-ground; a way to be satisfied with spending the entire night away from the computer. I've found that a good hard bike ride or basketball game after work will motivate me to NOT work on the computer - and that's what I'm looking for. I want to be unproductive and satisfied with it. Can you do that - or is it to un-American for you? ;-)

Posted in General at Apr 10 2003, 08:33:30 AM MDT 4 Comments

Blogging motivated by Broadband?

It is my personal little theory that most bloggers have high-bandwidth internet connections. I am seriously de-motivated from surfing and blogging on a dial-up connection. Even worse, our dial-up connection has been on the fritz, and with no connection - I don't even try. I don't even care to read anyone's blogs and I'm starting to wonder if blogging is all that it's cracked up to be. java.blogs is not even interesting to me anymore. I've got to get my internet connection fixed! I'm talking like a crazy man! ;-)

The good news is our ISP called Julie this morning and we're scheduled for an upgrade on the 14th. They also (finally) admitted that there have been sporadic internet connection issues in our area. They've been so damn arrogant this whole time that it "wasn't their problem" - it's nice to see them admit fault. My mom is in town all week at a conference and my dad is flying in on Wednesday, so I'd expect a pretty light week of blogging until next Monday (the 14th).

Posted in Roller at Apr 07 2003, 11:25:33 AM MDT 1 Comment

Hibern8 IDE

Max Andersen created a quick'n'dirty Hibern8 IDE in less than 3 hours tonight. For your viewing pleasure, he also created a viewlet. Very cool Max!

Posted in Java at Mar 29 2003, 11:58:47 PM MST 4 Comments

[ANNOUNCE] Eclipse 2.1 Released!

Sweeettt!!! Hopefully the release cycle will now slow down a bit so I don't have to keep installing Release Candidates every week. If you're a enthusiastic Eclipse user like me, be sure and read what's New and Noteworthy in 2.1. [Download Now]

Thanks to Andres Bonifacio for the tip.

Posted in Java at Mar 28 2003, 08:19:26 PM MST Add a Comment

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