Raible Designs

iChat AV can now talk to Windows users!

I've been waiting for this for quite some time now.

iChat AV v2.1 Public Beta adds support for video conferencing with the AOL Instant Messenger 5.5 for Microsoft Windows.

I've been waiting for Windows <-> Mac video-conferencing so Abbie can talk/see her grandparents all the time. My dad has been video-conferencing with my uncle for years - it's about time I got up to snuff and started using this stuff. Sweet - too bad I'm leaving for Vegas tonight and my dad is leaving for Africa tomorrow! Maybe I should buy an iSight tonight so I can talk to Julie over the weekend. Is there an Apple Store in Vegas?

What's new in Tomcat 5

Want to know what's different between Tomcat 4 and Tomcat 5? If so, you should check out this article. I haven't read it (yet), but I hope to soon. Today, I was planning on working from home, plowing through my stuffed head and headache with the power of DayQuil. However, Julie had to run into work (she stayed home with Abbie yesterday, who is also sick). So Abbie and I are going to be sickos together all morning. The problem is that Abbie doesn't know she's sick - she's still happy as a pig in sh*t and wrecking the place. I'd better go and stop her...

Oh wait - Telletubbies just came on - she's mesmerized, that gives me a half hour. I'd love to work on AppFuse, there's never been more stuff I'd like to integrate. Here's a list of stuff waiting for SF's CVS to get it's act together:

• Start integrating Spring.
• Various bug fixes as reported by users.
• Charles' persistent cookie strategy.
• WebTest patch to work with Ant 1.6.0.
• Figure out how to run AppFuse on JBoss - thanks to Rick Hightower and Brian Topping (on the roller-user mailing list) this should be pretty easy.
• Figure out how to run AppFuse on Orion - I got an e-mail yesterday with some hints, so this shouldn't be too hard either.

As far as SourceForge's CVS, if you were to checkout AppFuse right now, you'd get the latest code, but you'd also get a bunch of files I deleted ages ago. I submitted a bug - here is the response I received:

This issue (file present both Attic and non-Attic) would have been caused by a file removal between the time of our full repository sync and the update sync; or by outdated data being present after our initial sync (due to a sync bug) -- both possible cases with our recent systems upgrade. We are presently in the process of generating a list of such duplicates (using a set of scripts we wrote) and will perform a clean-up of this issue once the script run completes. Additional information will be posted to this request no later than 2004-01-30. Your patience is appreciated.

Back to babysitting, Abbie's getting bored with Telletubbies.

Daisy the Cat, R.I.P.

Most of you won't care about this, but I need to write it down so I know the day that Daisy died.

Today was one of the first days we had a to make a real sacrifice as parents. Daisy was a cat that Julie had when I first met her. When Julie got Daisy, she was so small she could fit in the palm of her hand. Daisy was weaned too early from her mother (who was killed by a snake), so she had a personality disorder. Basically, she was mean and hated other cats. Daisy hated all the guys that Julie had ever dated (in college), until she met me. Julie knew it was special when she saw Daisy didn't hate me. Daisy traveled with us from Florida to Colorado when Julie moved here. She lived with us in our one-bedroom apartment, moved with us to our first house, and was a great cat for Abbie's first year.

Even though Daisy was mean, she was also the nicest cat I'd ever met. She'd always cuddle up on my lap when I watched TV or when I was working on the computer. You just had to watch out when you walked - she was an ankle biter. For the last year, she's been a pretty good cat with Abbie - just sitting there when Abbie poked and prodded. However, in the last month, she's started to fight back and has bitten and scratched Abbie quite a few times. My take on it was "good - Abbie should learn not to mess with the cat." Besides, Abbie wasn't crying - so it couldn't hurt too bad. Julie had a different take on it - especially since the folks at day care asked where the scratches came from.

When I got home tonight, Julie was in bed with Abbie at 7:00. "7:00!?" I thought, "that's a bit early." Then Julie told me "today was a very bad day" and she proceeded to tell me that they took Daisy in to the pound. Damn - my favorite cat. Ever. Gone. They got a new one, but it won't be ready until tomorrow. I want Daisy back, she was the bomb.

My Best Christmas Present

My best Christmas present was finding out that Baby Raible #2 is on the way! The only bad part about Julie's 2nd pregnancy is we didn't have to try very hard. Last time it took 6 months, and a great 6 months that was...

Back in Denver

We arrived back in Denver last night after a nice winter-weather week at the cabin. It's nice to be home and sleep in our own bed. Julie agrees and would add that it's nice to have indoor plumbing again. I hate the fact that I have all this e-mail to plow through and respond to. I like the fact that I'm super motivated to learn new stuff. So motivated that I ordered a few books from Amazon. I hope I can suppress my desire to play on the computer (i.e. blogging, open source) and just learn for the next month or so. On my agenda: Spring, WebWork and a Java 1.4 Programmer Certification. 1 month, 2000 pages - if I can restrain my internet addiction, it should be a breeze.

In other news, I'm pumped to see that IDEA is available for $249. My question is - does that give me a license for both a Windows and OS X install?

We're off to the Cabin for Christmas

We're heading to Montana this afternoon. Thanks God United now flies directly to Missoula from Denver. It used to be a real fiasco - Denver to Salt Lake (1 hour), two hour layover and then another hour to Missoula. Now it's an easy 1 1/2 hour flight.

It's been a long time since I visited the cabin during the Winter (1996) and even longer since I spent Christmas there (more than 10 years ago). I can't fricken wait. We might have to hike in because my parent's Subaru won't be able to make it all the way (they left it at the airport for us). Julie is terrified. I talked to my parents last night and my Dad broke trail in his '65 Ford, so at least they made it all the way up the road. When we were kids, we had a '73 Toyota Landcruiser that would go through almost any amount of snow. We rarely had enough money to get our 3 mile road plowed out, so it was always a gamble on whether we could drive in or not. The road was usually drivable until about mid-December, and then the snow accumulated too much for the poor ol' Landcruiser.

Up until we could no longer drive, my Dad used to wind that thing up like you wouldn't believe. The Landcruiser, as we affectionately called it, would easily get up around 9000 RPM. All four tires would have chains on them and snow would be flying 10 feet high off all four tires. My sister would be sitting in the middle of the front seats, and I'd be sitting on my Mom's lap. The Landcruiser was a soft top, so it was pretty damn cold and the heater sucked, but that used to be the best carnival ride there was. We were all terrified we wouldn't make it and my Dad was determined to get home, even if it killed the Landcruiser. He wasn't gonna let some piddly little 2 feet of snow keep him from driving home.

We all hated the 1 1/2 mile walk to "the Bus Stop," but when the snow got to be too much, we had walk or ski it. This lasted most of the Winter. This was a real pain when we'd just returned from Missoula and we had to pack all the groceries in on backpacks. But there were times when this walk was truly majestic. When there was a full moon and enough snow to ski. It is truly one of the most beautiful sites - snow everywhere and beautiful fields and trees basked in the warm brilliant light of the moon. All you can hear is the swish-swish of your cross-country skis. It is then that all your worries subside and the world become a perfect place - even if only for the 30 minutes you're on the trail.

RE: About having babies

I was going to leave a comment on Chris's site about his About having babies post, but I'm afraid I'll probably ramble on about this, so I might as well put it here.

I am a proud father of Abbie Loo, now 13 months old. I should probably preface this post with the fact that I've always wanted kids since I was one myself. I always had a knack for entertaining them and being their friend. Even in high school and college if there was a kid (under 5) at a party, I ended up playing with them over any adults. So when I met Julie, it was definitely something we discussed in the first few weeks of dating (we knew we would get married w/in two weeks of meeting). We both knew we wanted them, so it was just a matter of time after we got married.

Let's get to Chris's questions and my answers:

Would my spare time be so drastically reduced that I would no longer be able to work on open source?

I think it depends. Before Abbie was born, the earliest I ever got up was 6 a.m. Now I get up at 4 a.m. and sometimes stay up until 6 a.m. When I do this, it's always to code and it's about 50/50 open source vs. paid stuff. So, you'll still be able to work on open source, but you will have to sacrifice sleeping hours. In the first month that Abbie was born, I worked from home and got the Wrox deal - so I really had no concept of night or day. That's what got me on the 4 a.m. kick - and now I've found it works awesome for productivity-addiction.

Julie does yell at me a lot to "get off the computer" and "take care of your daughter!" She definitely does most of the work, and I feel my computer time is justified because I'm improving my skills to bring home more bacon. I'm not allowed to ever say I'm the one who pays for everything though, so I've never explained my justification. I guess I feel like Abbie won't remember this part of her life, so I can get away with it, but I'd better quit working so much in the next couple of years - it's not healthy.

Would we be able to travel?

This depends on you and your wife. Are you willing and ready to travel with a small child? Julie and I take Abbie everywhere and I think she's better behaved because of it. During the first year, Julie took her on an airplane every month and now she's an angel on the plane. If you're willing to put up with a crabby kid every once in a while on a plane, of course you can travel. They're not like dogs. ;-)

Do we really need any more babies?

No, but we do need more smart babies. Wouldn't you rather have your genes around to shape tomorrow rather than someone else's? Kids are the most rewarding thing in the world - some folks are addicted to it, which probably takes the coolness out of it. Two is good, if you have older friends without kids - they're the ones helping the problem. I know LOTS of folks without kids.

But then again there's the whole area of taking care of children with disabilities.

You sound like a chick - do you fear getting in your car because you might get in a car accident? ;-) I think depends a lot on your family history. If you have a history of disabled kids, you might want to think twice. Adopting is an excellent option - I've thought about doing it simply because I feel sorry for kids w/o parents.

Kids rock, no matter what anyone says. I've never laughed or smiled so much in my entire life before Abbie. We certainly don't have the night (drunk) life like we used to, but we certainly feel better about ourselves and the world. The coolest part is how close it brings your family together (husband/wife, parents, siblings).

And then you have Julie's Aunt and Uncle's opinion - party like a rock start until your late 30s, and then have kids. I prefer to party with my kids and I'd like to retire at 50, shortly after they leave. ;-D

Weekend Update

After talking with Apple's Tech Support for an hour today, the verdict is in: my PowerBook's hard drive is hosed. They're sending out a dispatch from Airborne Express, should be here on Tuesday. I package it up and send it back, should take around 5 business days to fix. I like Dell's Support better, they send someone to your house to fix the problem the next day. Since this is my primary development machine at my current client, it should make for an interesting week.

This site was down for most of the night last night - this time due to a core dump from the JVM. At least I'm more attentive to this site than the folks at javablogs, which has been down all weekend. I think it's time to quit hosting so many demos on this site. Currently there are 5, and they can't be helping my memory issues. I'll leave Roller and the Wiki on this site, and moving the others to my home server. I wonder if I can use the balancer in Tomcat 5.0.16 to redirect traffic to my demo server. My upload speed is only 200K, but that's probably enough for these small and simple demo apps (i.e. struts-resume, displaytag editable table, struts-menu, strutscx and my quick-n-dirty training app. I don't know if this will help, 54,000 hits/day (3000 visits) probably doesn't help much (I wonder how many of those are real people).

My PowerBook dying sucks, but hopefully it will get me off the computer at night, and I can enjoy more time with my family. Yesterday, I spent most of the day working for an old client, but I did get everything done I hoped to, so that's a nice feeling. Julie, Abbie and I went to Kiddie Kandids to get Holiday Pictures taken - 5 hours later (3 hour wait), we had them in our hands and it was well worth the wait. I'll scan one and post it soon. Today, we're getting/assembling our tree, and I'll snap a pic for Russ. This year, Christmas will be spent at the cabin, but a tree (and lights) is still essential in my book.

Happy Thanksgiving Y'all

Happy Thanksgiving to everyone! This year I'm thankful for continued employment, a thriving Java community and an awesome family. Abbie and Julie are the most incredible women I've ever met. My parents, sister, and in-laws deserve a "Thank You" as well - you all rock. Here's a smile from Abbie to brighten your Turkey Day.

eBay hooks me up with a new computer

One good quality of a company - they keep your computer up to date. The company I work for bought me a new computer today. Dell Dimension 8300 P4 2.6 HT 80G. This will replace my 1.5 Dell Dimension 8100 - XP Pro, which (with cygwin) continues to me my favorite development environment. We're giving my Dell and Julie's Dell (that I bought for $200 from eDeploy) to charity. I also have an old 300 MHz Compaq Presario that's slow as slugs - I'm going to throw it away and not place that burden on someone else (it serves as a patio umbrella stand right now).