Raible Designs

Two Finger Right Click

I just discovered that two finger right click has been added for 15" MacBook Pro machines. To enable it, go to System Preferences > Keyboard & Mouse > Trackpad. Check "Place two fingers on trackpad and click button for secondary click". Sweet - I dig this feature. Hat tip to the Parallels web site.

Now onto seeing if I can the free VMWare server to run Ubuntu side-by-side Windows XP on my HP box. If not, I'll drag out an old server and install it on there. It seems I'm in need of a build server since my other one is already being taxed by AppFuse's CruiseControl.

Raible Road Trip #10

Raible Road Trip #9 was to the cabin last year for the 4th of July. This year, we're taking it a whole new level. Going to the cabin for the 4th is a good time, but the huckleberries aren't ripe yet. This year, we've decided to go the first week in August instead.

OSCON is at the end of July and visiting Portland in late July is awesome. My parents have agreed to watch the kids during OSCON, and July doesn't want to travel to Oregon (she's rather enjoy some "down time"). Because of all this, I've come up with quite the travel plan for Raible Road Trip #10.

On Saturday, July 22nd, James Goodwill and I leave from Denver and drive to Salem, Oregon - where my parents live.

According to Google Maps, this trip should take about 21 hours. We expect to arrive in Salem sometime Sunday night. We'll hang out in Oregon until Tuesday morning. Then I'm flying back to Denver to pick up the kids and return to Portland the same day. On Wednesday and Thursday, I'll hit up OSCON and its festivities. Thursday's Geronimo Live event followed by the Oregon Brewers Festival on Friday should be a lot of fun.

On Sunday, my parents, the kids and I will be heading to The Cabin.

Julie's flying into Spokane, WA that Sunday, so we'll pick her up on our way and hopefully arrive at the cabin sometime Sunday afternoon. From there, we'll all enjoy a week of relaxing, huckleberry picking and good family fun. We'll head back to Denver late that week, spending a night in Yellowstone Park along the way.

Julie thinks I'm nuts for all the driving I'll be doing on this trip. She calculated it up tonight and it's something like 46 hours. I'm pumped about the whole idea and can't wait for it to begin. I love road trips, especially when doing them with family and friends.

Update: As Sanjiv mentions in the comments, Yahoo Maps has a much better representation of this trip.

Total Distance: 2920.6 miles, Total Travel Time: 48 hours 8 mins

Funny Video

This is too good not to post. Received from Emily of virtuastravels.com.

[ANN] AppFuse 1.9.2 RC1 Released

The primary reason for this release is to integrate Mike Stenhouse's CSS Framework. Since this involves many UI changes, we're publishing a release candidate that uses Herryanto Siatono's "simplicity" theme. For the final 1.9.2 release, we hope to offer themes from all the CSS Framework Design Contest Winners.

To install and configure AppFuse for development, see the QuickStart Guide. Thanks to all the sponsors who have contributed products and free hosting to the AppFuse project.

• Download (now points to 1.9.2 final)
• Release Notes
• Learn more about AppFuse

To see how AppFuse in action, please see the following demos (username: mraible, password: tomcat):

• Struts + Spring + Hibernate
• Spring + iBATIS
• WebWork + Spring + Hibernate
• JSF + Spring + Hibernate
• Tapestry + Spring + Hibernate

Comments and issues can be sent to the mailing list or posted to JIRA (please use version 1.9.2). Hopefully we can release 1.9.2 final in the next week or so.

Update: I've finished a first stab at integrating the puzzlewithstyle and andreas01 themes. I've only tested these in Firefox so far, but you can see them in action on the demo site using the webwork and jsf flavors.

Update 2: 1.9.2 Final has been released.

CSS Framework Design Contest: Final Results

20 people voted for the css design contest runoff. Of those, 3 people voted after the Tuesday midnight deadline. Here's the final winners of this contest:

• 1st place: puzzlewithstyle by Mattias Fjellström
• 2nd place: andreas01 by me (the question is: should I win or Andreas Viklund - the original designer?)
• 3rd place: simplicity by Herryanto Siatono

The 3rd place winner was a close call: deliciouslyblue tied with simplicity, but 2 votes came in after the deadline. Congratulations to all the winners - and thanks for helping out with this contest.

Since I'm traveling in San Francisco this week and next, it'll probably take me a couple weeks to send out the prizes (iPods) to the winners.

Now for hard part: integrating the entries into AppFuse for 1.9.2. I hope to make all the winners AppFuse-compatible and ship them (or make them downloadable) as part of the release.

Integrating Google Maps, Mule and ActiveMQ with AppFuse

Stephen Pasco has written a nice tutorial on how to integrate Google Maps, Mule and ActiveMQ with AppFuse.

Here's the scenario: Upon opening a Google map client, within a web browser, the user clicks on the map creating points (Figure 1). With each point created, a message is immediately sent to the ESB containing the point's longitude and latitude. A second, remote client instantly receives the sent longitude and latitude coordinates and displays them on a separate Google map (Figure 2). [Read More »]

Good stuff - thanks for the writeup Stephen!

Gas Prices

Apparently gas prices are way up. I wouldn't have known this, but the lady cutting my hair the other night mentioned it. I think I've filled up my car 5 times this year. The only thing I use it for now is Ski Trips and Airport Runs. Ahhhh, the joys of a bicycle commute and living in the center of town. Of course, on days like today (when it's starting to snow), it's nice to be able to work from home.

Back from Vegas

This weekend was one of my smoothest returns from Vegas in my life. It probably helped that Julie joined me there on Friday and we flew back together on Saturday. My BOF on Friday night was very well received and I heard a lot of positive comments about it afterwards. What do you expect when you give people free beer.

After the BOF, the Virtuas Crew had a kick-ass dinner at BOA Steakhouse in Caesar's. Before we were done, a college buddy of mine arrived in Vegas, so Julie and I met him at Harrah's for some blackjack and craps. We had an fun night of gambling with my buddy, who started with $5K at the first blackjack table. Apparently, Julie brought him luck and he ended up winning a few grand by the time the night was over. We had breakfast and walked back to Caesar's as the sun was coming up. We saw Gier and Hani catching cabs as we were walking in. 5 hours later, we'd had a good night's sleep and headed to the airport. We got sidetracked at Emeril's for lunch and enjoyed some good laughs with a couple friends before leaving.

When we got home last night, both kids had just fallen asleep. Of course, we wanted to wake them up, but also realized that sleeping children is quite a blessing. They were tickled to death when they woke up this morning and we were home. Today was a great day, and a big reason why it was so easy to transition from Vegas to Denver. The kids and I let Julie sleep in a little and took a stroller ride to the local bagel shop (a mere 3 blocks away) for a couple hours. It was a windy walk and we arrived home motivated to do some kite-flying at the park. We had fun at the park and it was super cute watching Abbie fly her first kite. After that, we headed to Dave & Buster's for lunch. Abbie never let me sit down because she wanted to play games the whole time. 2 hours later, we were on our way back home.

The day ended with Jack and I running errands. I needed to buy a new laptop backpack since mine got shredded in the wash a couple of weeks ago. We headed to Gart Sports, where I shopped and Jack stabbed stuff with a tent stake he found. He was like a hunter on the loose, crouching, jumping and yelling at stuff throughout the corner of the store we were in. It's a good thing no one else was around.

I ended up with the only backpack that could fit my laptop, which seems quite strange. I've been to the Apple Store, REI and Gart Sports and I've found the laptop backpack situation is abysmal. A couple of years ago, the selection was quite good. Oh well, I only paid $35 and I'll probably look for one online this week. The ideal backpack would have a built-in camelback and laptop holder (since I use it primarily when commuting on my bike).

After Garts, we headed to the Apple Store in Cherry Creek. I had to buy a new power cord for my MacBook Pro. I left mine in Vegas, possibly at the BOF. The Apple Store is pretty close to the "breakfast playground" - so I had to let Jack play in it. 15 minutes of jumping on eggs, waffles, climbing on bananas and sliding down bacon made Jack a very happy camper.

It's great to be home. AFAIK, I'm not travelling for a couple weeks, possibly more than a month. My next big trip is to The Ajax Experience and JavaOne in May. This week is supposed to be in the 60s, so I'm looking forward to a nice week of Colorado spring weather. With any luck, I'll get a signification amount done on both AppFuse and Spring Live this week. It might take a couple of late nights to make it happen, but I feel pretty motivated right now.

CSS Framework Design Contest

Over the past 2 weeks, I've managed to raise $900 for the CSS Framework Design Contest. Thanks to friends, AppFuse users and SourceBeat their donations. You guys rock!

With this cash, I hope to give away 3 prizes: an iPod (60GB), an iPod (30GB) and a 2GB Nano. Of course, if the winners decide they'd rather donate the money to charity, that's cool too. Any additional donations I receive I'm going to send to the Elena Steinberg Memorial Fund.

Here's the rules of the contest: Create a theme (mostly CSS, images allowed) that makes the CSS Framework look good (download source files). This framework is simply a structured bit of XHTML for page layout, and a number of CSS files for positioning. What's missing is a number of good-looking themes to make this framework look even better. I have aspirations of creating something like CSS Zen Garden - but with more of a web-application flavor.

I'll use the same submission guidelines as the CSS Zen Garder, but add that your themes should be Apache licensed. In my mind, this simply means that anyone can use your theme - they simply have to retain your contact information in a comment w/in the stylesheet itself. I'd like to distribute (or at least make available) the top themes to AppFuse users - so they aren't stuck with a single theme. In addition, it probably wouldn't be too hard to make these into Roller themes.

The CSS themes from this contest should be usable in corporate intranets, as well as customer facing applications. Sure, wacky designs are cool, but sharp and clean are better. Extra points will likely be given for themes that pretty up how forms are laid out and displayed. Ajaxian.com links to some good examples, particularly Wufoo.

I've created a CSS Design Contest project in AppFuse's JIRA - so please submit your entries there. The contest ends on March 31st, 2006 at midnight MST. After that, the winners will be decided using some sort of voting mechanism. I hope to create an application to showcase all the entries in the next week or two.

For inspiration, you might checkout Open Web Design and Open Source Web Design.

Good luck folks - may the best design win!

DbUnit Tip: Turn off foreign key constraints when importing into MySQL

One of the issues I've had with using DbUnit is getting tables to load in the proper order from XML. The XML datasets I use to load table data are flat and don't really have any notion of foreign keys and such. Therefore, when you get into a situation where tables have a circular reference, using DbUnit can be a real bitch. I ran into this situation yesterday.

Luckily, I was able to figure out a solution thanks to the help of Mark Matthews. Just add "sessionVariables=FOREIGN_KEY_CHECKS=0" to your JDBC URL. Here's how the "db-load" target in AppFuse looks with this in place:

    <target name="db-load" depends="prepare"
        description="Loads the database with sample data">
        <property name="operation" value="CLEAN_INSERT"/>
        <property name="file" value="metadata/sql/sample-data.xml"/>
        <dbunit driver="${database.driver_class}"
            supportBatchStatement="false" 
            url="${database.url}&amp;sessionVariables=FOREIGN_KEY_CHECKS=0"
            userid="${database.username}" password="${database.password}">
            <operation type="${operation}" src="${file}" format="xml" transaction="true"/>
        </dbunit>

    </target>

Does your preferred database have a similar mechanism for turning off foreign key checks using the connection URL?