Raible Designs

XDoclet 1.2 and Roller

I made some more progress yesterday on the XDoclet 1.2 upgrade. Aslak fixed the bug with classes extending DispatchAction, and all the action-mappings now generate correctly. However, now I'm getting a new, seemingly Castor-related issue. I probably need to update some XDoclet tags for Castor, but I haven't done any research there yet. Here's the error I'm getting:

java.lang.IllegalArgumentException: Type conversion error: 
  could not set value of weblogDayPageId(java.lang.String) with  
  value of type org.roller.model.PageData
    at org.exolab.castor.mapping.loader.FieldHandlerImpl.setValue(Unknown Source)
    at org.exolab.castor.xml.UnmarshalHandler.resolveReferences(Unknown Source)
    at org.exolab.castor.xml.UnmarshalHandler.processAttribute(Unknown Source)
    at org.exolab.castor.xml.UnmarshalHandler.processAttributes(Unknown Source)
    at org.exolab.castor.xml.UnmarshalHandler.startElement(Unknown Source)
    at org.apache.xerces.parsers.SAXParser.startElement(SAXParser.java:1340)

I tried upgrading Castor to version 0.9.4.1 and I get the same error regardless of version. Roller currently uses version 0.9.3.21.

My Journey into Accessibility

I got a wild itch tonight and decided to make this site Section 508 Approved. All I really needed to do what do a little code alteration within the forms (search and theme switcher) in the menu. I had to add <label> tags around the search box and the theme drop down. I then used the labels.js javascript file from this demo to put the search's label inside the <input> tag. The labels.js script doesn's seem to work on IE5/Mac. Also, since I didn't really want to see the "Theme" label for the drop-down, I added style="display:none" - and that worked in all browsers except Chimera. Maybe I could just have a blank label, but what good is that? The validators also didn't like the onchange event for the theme drop-down and so I opted to add a go button as a workaround.

As for validators, I found that Bobby works pretty well, but only allows a certain number of requests per hour. What kind of validation site is that?! That's not very accessible in my book. You can try to validate this site using Bobby, and you might see this inaccessible error yourself. Rick Salsa pointed out a much better validator last week on the roller-dev mailing list. You can validate this site using it if you'd like.

I went ahead and created a new icon similar to Antipixel's icons. Boy, can the 508 badges get any uglier?! Now I have to find a good place to put it on this site, maybe down in the bottom right by the java.blog icon.

Denver JUG Meeting and Struts

I managed to attend the DJUG meeting tonight (as I wrote this, time slid past midnight - oh well, it looks better on a new day). I arrived early for the Basic Concepts meeting and stayed for the Main Event. Both sessions were focused on Struts - the first being a very basic overview of MVC and Struts, and the second highlighted the newest features (i.e. Declarative Exception Handling, Validator, DynaActionForms). Like I said earlier, I wanted to meet Sue in person, so that's why I got there early. I introduced myself and she actually seemed to remember me (from the e-mails). I confirmed that she really did remember me (or she faked it quite well) at the end when she signed a copy of her book (that I won) - she asked me if I spelled my name with one "t" or two? Cool! BTW - do you know anybody named "Mat?"

When the DJUG Prez asked if anyone was looking for work, I raised my hand and said a few words about this site and Roller. I doubt anyone will find this site though; I didn't see anyone writing my domain name down, and how the heck do you spell "Raible?" So to offer a little Google love, here are a few different versions: Rabel, Riable, Raibel, Raybel, Rable, Raybell. If I was really bold, I guess I could send an e-mail to the DJUG Mailing List. I think I'll have to pass though, I'm just not that forward of a guy.

The meeting was packed, probably a 100 people showed up - most they've had in long time from the way they were talkin'. It was at DU, my Alma Mater, so it was fun to visit the ol' stompin' grounds. I had Mini-Me with me and found the DU Wireless network, but it required VPN software to get in (and my old id/pass didn't work to d/l the software).

Sue was a good speaker and did manage to impress me with her Struts knowledge. I didn't know that she is a contributing author of the JSP and Servlets column at O'Reilly's OnJava.com, nor that she's got a list of seemingly great publications. I tried to give her a tip about XDoclet, but she said she already knew about it and was planning on mentioning it in her preso. Doh! She really put me in my place. The best part of her presentation (for me) was the declarative exception handling, which I tried to implement on my current project, but it was too immature and buggy at the time. I think it's time to re-examine and refactor.

As a service to my readers, and possibly to readers from the meeting, here is a whole posse of good Struts links:

• XDoclet Struts Tags (see Tag Reference for @struts)
• Struts Mailing List and Archive
• Struts Newsgroup (duplicates mailing list)
• About Struts at husted.com, Tips, Catalog
• Learning Struts 1.1
• Struts 1.1 (PDF) by Chuck Cavaness Atlanta JUG
• Display Tag Library - awesome for pageable or sortable lists

I'd love to see some weblogs published by Sue or Chuck (Cavaness) - it'd be great to see more Struts Evangelists in the blogging community. The next meeting should be good. Marc Fleury, founder of JBoss fame is going to be speaking.

Picture of Me

Russell linked to a picture of me this morning. I don't think it does me any justice since I'm run ragged from Abbie's birth and I'm sitting there with 15 pregnancy-pounds. So, in hopes of improving my image (nudge, nudge), here is a picture of Julie and I from March of this year.

Mini-Me is Hosed

I tried Kurt's suggestion (booting into OS 9) to get rid of the phantom file in my Trash. I couldn't see a Trash (.Trash) folder in /Users/matt, so I tried clicking on and using the iClean app that was sitting on my desktop. I guess I installed it at some point. Anyway, it fixed a bunch of my aliases, cleaned up my internet cache and such. When I rebooted into OS X, I get the Mac equivalent of the BSOD. It says You need to restart your computer. Hold down the Power button for several seconds or press the Restart button. I tried using the Disk Utility on Jaguar Disc 1 with no luck (errors abound when trying to repair the disk), and I am unable to re-install OS X because there is no destination drive to install to. So in other words, I've completely f****ed up my Mac again - with little hope for fixing it. I thought this was supposed to be the "friendly OS?"

This is what usually happens when I spend all day on the computer goofing off - I shoulda done some actual work.

Update: I found the problem is a good ol' Kernel Panic. I'll be testing out Apple's tech support folks tomorrow.

Photo Albums Redux

Remember this post? I wrote about how much I liked Michael's photo album software. Well, lo and behold, he heard me and sent this e-mail:

Matt,

Hi, and thanks for the mention on your site. =)

My photo album stuff was a reworking in PHP of some other photo album/gallery things I'd seen. Of course everyone is looking for something specific, and I was no different, so I decided I needed to make one with what I wanted. That meant it also had to be XHTML and CSS compliant, and I decided on an all CSS layout for ease of updating (that, and I love CSS, heh).

It's basically a three-tiered approach, with thumbnails, medium-sized images and hi-res versions. It's just one main file in a root directory, and a CSS file, title file, and optional pic info/annotation file in each photo directory. Since the program uses the CSS file in each directory, I can create a different layout for each album. I did a couple of minor changes in some of them just to show that they don't all have to look the same.

What it doesn't do:

Currently it does not do any real image handling such as creating thumbnails. I do all the image editing manually and compile a directory of photos (with their respective subdirectories) and just upload it. The program sees the directory automatically.

Also currently, you have to have all 3 versions of photos. I haven't incorporated an option to replace thumnails with text links, or to use/not use hi-res images.

I plan on putting some of these things in before making the whole thing freely available for public consumption, but if you'd like a copy of it as it is, I'd be happy to send it along with a brief intro on how to use it.

Again, thanks for the mention and the kind words.

Take care.

--michael

I responded to his e-mail and I now have this software in my Inbox - what a guy, eh? Thanks Michael! Now if I can only find the time to experiment and (possibly) implement.

kdub's log

There's a blog over at freeroller.net that is using a slightly altered x2 theme. X stands for XHTML and 2 stands for 2 columns (I contributed this theme to Roller, so that's how I know). Anyway, the writer, kdub, seems to like what I'm serving.

Great stuff from Raible Matt Raible is a great guy. I have been reading his weblog for a few months and he has been covering OS X, Roller, Struts, HTML/CSS, and Java which works well with my tastes. I need to congradulate him on his new daughter!

Thanks for the Abbie love - now it's your turn kdub - tell us about yourself. We want to hear about you, the person, not just your interests.

Can't get rid of folders

I'm having the same problem on Windows XP that I am on my Mac. On the Mac, I have a folder ASD in my Trash that won't delete. When I try to Empty Trash from the Dock, I get an error stating that the item "ASD" is in use. When I look at the folder and try to remove stuff, nothing is there:

[minime:~] matt% rm -r .Trash/*
rm: .Trash/ASD: Directory not empty
[minime:~] matt% rm -r .Trash/ASD/*
rm: No match.

On XP, I have a similar issue. There is a found.000 folder on my C: drive. In this folder, there is a hidden folder (or at least it has a folder icon) named file0009.chk. When I try to delete it, I get the following error:

Cannot delete file0009.chk: The file or directory is corrupted and unreadable.

Both of these have been bugging me for quite some time - hopefully I can put the comments feature to work for me now!

Thanks to Everyone

The blogging community is great, or at least the guy's blogs that I read. You know who you are. To everyone who's offered congratulations and given our daughter compliments (are you hitting on her already?!) - your thoughts and words are much appreciated. It's always fun to see your name in lights. Here's your names right back at ya (in no particular order) - you guys are great: Dave, Lance, Russell, Greg, Jeff, Rick, Anthony, Dominic, and Erik.

If I missed your name, let me know, because I might not be reading your blog, and I certainly should be. Kudos go to Russell for the first post and my friend Brian Burke (no blog yet), both who guessed that we were giving birth from the lack of a Monday posting.

Our Little Girl has Arrived!

Proud parents Matt and Julie are doing great and loving life! Abbie is an awesome little girl and is making this parenting stuff look easy. Of course, we've only had one night so far - so I'm sure she'll get rowdy here pretty soon.