Raible Designs

Done speaking for awhile

I'm sitting in Julie's mom's house in West Palm right now, trying to report a little about this past week before I go offline for the weekend. If you're interested, you can read about my talks on AppFuse on my SourceBeat blog. The next time I speak about AppFuse it'll be in Colorado in June. I'm scheduled for the Denver JUG that month, and I've been asked to do Boulder's JUG as well. I hope to use that week as a personal deadline for having Sitemesh and WebWork2 as options in AppFuse. I might not be able to pull it off though. I talked to the current owner of my new hobby and it sounds like I'll be driving the bus from San Diego to Denver in the near future. It's got a brand new engine with plenty of power - which is enough inspiration fo me. I've asked my Dad and he sounded interested in joining me for Raible Road Trip #8. The first part of June seems like a great time to embark on this trip. Maybe I'll do it the week after my DJUG preso.

I definitely enjoyed the MySQL Conference, but it wouldn't have been the same without Anthony and Mark. BTW Mark - you need to start a blog. Mark had one session where he told us about 10 or so parameters that you can use to print out debugging information for MySQL's JDBC Driver. I asked him to send me his presentation so I could document them here, but I'm still waiting. It might be a while though - the MySQL company meeting is in Cancun all next week. Mark gets to work full-time out of his house and then lives it up whenever he gets together with his co-workers. Rough life, eh?

Meeting Anthony was a real treat too. He's one of those no-computer-science-degree kind of guys (like Bruce and I), which always makes for fun conversation. The only problem was I couldn't get him to shut up about Python and scripting my Actions all week long. It's like he's in some sort of Python/Beanshell cult or something.

Today, I skipped all conference sessions and opted for a day at Sea World with Julie, Abbie and Julie's Mom Stephanie. It was a great time and Abbie was amazed by all the cool animals. Now I'm ready for a sunny, family-filled, relaxing weekend in West Palm. I'll try to post some pictures if I get around to it.

Shamu at Sea World

The Ladies by the pool in West Palm

[VW Bus] Could this be the one?

A 21-window Volkswagen Bus showed up on eBay this morning - and I could "buy it now" for $9,650. If you look at it, you'll think I'm crazy. $9000 for a old beater of a bus - let alone a VW?! The problem is that these things are pretty rare. The 23-windows are even harder to find. The last 23-window on eBay went for $32,000! Granted it was a bit older and a little better shape - but still, that's ridiculous. The difference between this one and previous ones is that you can "buy it now" for under $10,000. Julie is all for it and thinks it'd be a great 30th birthday present (my birthday is in July). Also, it's in San Diego - where her sister lives, so she'd love an excuse to go out there. If I do buy it, it sure would be fun to road trip across the country to bring it home!

Hmmm, if I could buy my dream car today and DU wins the National Championship tonight...

Update: Woooo HOOOOO - DU WON!!! I told myself earlier today that if they won, I'd buy the bus. So w/in 2 minutes of the win, I bought it! What a day. ;-)

You purchased the item using Buy It Now!

Update 2: On Sunday: it figures, buyer's remorse is starting to flood my brain. The good thing is that it's not because of my purchase. It's because a 1965 21-window showed up on eBay today for much less. It's got 6 more days until the auction ends, and it's at $360 right now. The nice thing about this newest one is that it's already been stripped for restoration. Oh well, I still think I made a good decision yesterday. And as long as Julie does too - I'm golden... ;0)

White Ranch Park

There's nothing like riding your bike up a mountain on a beautiful Spring day...

Carpal Tunnel

When I finished hacking away on Roller this past Saturday, my fingers hurt from typing so much. Who knows why, I didn't add that much code. Must've been all the keystrokes to run Ant, start Tomcat, and test stuff. Yeah, we need more tests - but those won't help tweak CSS. Yesterday, all I did was review Hibernate in Action, so no coding, but a fair amount of typing. By the time I went on a bike ride yesterday afternoon - my left hand's left-most fingers were curled up naturally and my forearm was aching. Carpal Tunnel has set in quite nicely in my left forearm. I can still type, as evidenced by this post - but it definitely hurts and it seems like I could do some serious damage if I keep it up.

Herein lies the problem. I took this week off from my regular gig to concentrate on the Spring book. So I need to be typing like a madman all week - but my body is not cooperating. Rather, it's trying to tell me something - "you're not cut out for this this much coding/typing." So what should I do? I've had these same symptoms before - and when I did, I got a massage and took a couple of days off. That's a bit difficult this week with my livelihood depending on a pain-free left arm/wrist/fingers. I've booked a 10:00 massage - let's hope that gets me through the week. I definitely need a longer-term solution though. It'd be nice to write this book w/o typing, just talking.

Related: Carpal Tunnel in March 2006.

Denver JUG and Rock Bottom Brewery

Last night was a fun night. First of all, Mike Clark spoke about TDD development at the DJUG and he wowed me with his presentation abilities. I think he could have presented on just about anything and it would've been entertaining. He had a fair amount of humor in his presentation and came off as a true Montanan (a.k.a. very cool guy). I talked with him after the meeting as a whole bunch of us were entering Rock Bottom Brewery and my suspicions where confirmed. I look forward to the next time I hang out with Mike.

At Rock Bottom, it was all about drinking beer and bullshitting about Java. I sat across from Rod Cope (Out of the Box) and next to Bruce Snyder (Geronimo/Castor). The topics ranged from Groovy (Rod is speaking about Groovy at the Denver NFJS) to Spring to Castor and Kids (Bruce has a little one that's a week and a half younger than Abbie). I had a great time talking to these guys and look forward to our next meeting. It won't be long until I see Bruce again - he's attending SD West next week. He reminded me that next Wednesday is St. Patty's day, so since I'm part Irish - it should be a fun night. St. Patty's day is also both my sister and Julie's sister's birthday - neat eh?

I didn't leave downtown until 1:00 a.m. - a great Java-infested night it was. Thanks for the conversations and the booze folks - I had a great time.

It's gonna be a good week

It's gonna be a good week. Yesterday, I gave a demo at my client and they loved it. Shortly after that, my sister (Kalin) flew in to town. She's here until Thursday and I'm taking today, tomorrow and Thursday off. Vacations during the week are very nice. We're babysitting Abbie today, so it should be a good day - especially with a stop at Chipotle for lunch.

In other news, construction on our house started yesterday. Here's a photo of part of the new foundation (for the master bath) getting dug. There's already been one casualty - our sewer line. Luckily, Bob the Builder was able to run to Home Depot and fix it for our house full of guests. We also talked to our new (temporary) landlord on Sunday. We got pretty lucky - our neighbors bought a new house and we're going to finish out their lease. So we're going to live next door to our house while it's being built. Pretty cool, huh?

In even bigger news, Julie submitted her resignation at Qwest last week and today is her last day. She got tired of Abbie getting sick at daycare and more so, she was bored out of her mind. Things will be a bit tight - COBRA is just over $1000/month and it's our only option since she's pregnant. Doh! At least we'll only need it until September/October (crosses fingers for a healthy baby).

No Fluff Just Stuff

I had lunch today with Jay Zimmerman of No Fluff Just Stuff. I always enjoy getting together with Jay because he's from Montana and Montanans are generally nice folks. Among other things, he asked if I would be interested in speaking at a NFJS event or two. I said I'd think about it. However, I'm strongly considering it since it would probably be a good marketing tool.

I probably wouldn't do any events until sometime this summer. Now I just have to figure out what I'd speak on...

NYC: DisplayTag and Struts Menu

At the NYC Conference, I'm going to be talking about The Display Tag and Struts Menu. I figure the best presentations are ones that cover new features or introduce something new. So I'm hoping to add the following features to the two libraries in the next month. Please let me know if there are other's you'd really like to see - or ones that'd make the audience go *wow*.

DisplayTag: I'd like to add this pagination enhancement so you can get easy interaction between the records displayed and the records fetched. I'd also like to see sorting by property, not be contents. Lastly, I hope to add an example that does CRUD on a table using JSTL and simple checkbox and input fields.

Struts Menu: A lot of users are interested in seeing a menu that's created from a database table. This shouldn't be too difficult because examples are out there. I was also thinking of adding support for the Joust Outliner, but it doesn't look like it's still developer or actively used. If there's interest, I'll add it.

If you think I'm blogging a lot today (don't you work Raible?), it's because I'm on babysitting duty. Abbie is sick with a fever and Julie had to go to work - so my work day starts when she gets home. I've got the little one tied up with a little Winnie the Pooh action right now...

Later: The DHTML Kitchen has some nice menus, but they're not free. Anyone know of open source menus like these?

Heading to Tucson

We're leaving in a few hours to go to Tucson, AZ for the weekend. We're flying to see my Great Aunt Mary and her friend Judy - and my Mom is going to meet us there as well. Hopefully it'll be a nice relaxing weekend since there will be 3 ladies fawning over Abbie. I'm also meeting up with Rick Hightower since he lives there. The snow is supposed to start in Denver this afternoon - good timing eh?

I've never been to Tucson, but here's a webcam so you can checkout the weather there while I'm gone. Have a great weekend, I'll be back on Monday night.

[DJUG] Hibernate and Jabber Tonight

Tonight's Denver JUG should be good. The basic concepts meeting is on Hibernate and the main show is on Jabber: XMPP and Jabber Streaming Objects library. Nice! It's snowing like the dickens right now so getting there might be tough. Good thing I live close to downtown! The meeting is actually located in the same building where Julie works.

Update: Tonight's meeting was pretty good, but kinda boring. I didn't learn anything new in the Hibernate session - but I did see Chris do a lot of stuff via command line (vs. Ant). I do everything in Ant, so I was again able to see the beauty of Ant and Hibernate's <schemaexport> task.

The Jabber talk was interesting but dry - probably because Peter and Matt didn't have a presentation or agenda for the meeting. Rather, they just stood up and talked about Jabber and its XMPP Protocol. From what they said, Jabber's streaming XML protocol is being used for a lot of things besides Instant Messaging. It's biggest feature seems to be presence - the ability to know when someone (or something) is online. For using Jabber in your Java applications, you might want to look at Matt's JSO Project. While I'm at it, I might as well mention my article describing how to setup a Jabber Server.