Raible Designs

Doubling the size of our house

We love where we live in Denver right now. We originally bought this house because we wanted a rental property and it's close to the University of Denver (where I went to college). After living here for a couple of months, we discovered that the location absolutely rocks. It's 2 blocks from Safeway (grocery store), 2 blocks from Porter Hospital, 3 blocks from our bank. It has a couple liquor stores within a couple blocks and many restaurants within walking distance. The house is small, 675 square feet, but the lot is huge - 2.5 times the normal lot size. So we decided to investigate the idea of adding an addition onto the house. After talking with a few builders, we decided on one and the project starts one week from tomorrow. We're going to gut the current house and make it into 3 bedrooms. The new additional will be the same size as our current house and it's going to be one big open room - with a great room and kitchen. We're also tearing down our 1-car garage and building a 2-car garage in the alley. Exciting times - should be done by mid-summer next year. I'll make sure and take lots of pictures (and post them) as the project progresses.

User-Mode Linux ~ should I switch my ISP?

This User-Mode Linux sounds like a great opportunity for hosting this site. I currently pay around $50/month to host this site, and there's two things that are frustrating:

• I only get 5 GB of bandwidth, and I pay the same as my provider for any extra - I usually pay $30 extra per month for bandwidth.
• I get a max of 20 connections per mysql instance. While this should be plenty, it does seem to cause this site to crash, and I'm not motivated enough to dig into Roller/Tomcat and figure out why.

I do have a cable internet connection, so I could host this site myself, but my upload speed is only 241 KB. For you folks that do use UML, does anyone have experience with running Java (i.e. Tomcat or Roller) and MySQL?

First Snow in Denver

It's really coming down right now - I wouldn't be surprised if we had 6 inches by nightfall. Click on the images below to zoom in.

First Snow 2003

View down our Street (near DU)

RE: Compressing and Caching in your webapps

Jayson Falkner writes about two Filters everyone should have in their webapps: one for compression (via gzip) and one for caching. I try to add a CompressionFilter to all the apps I write, but I don't have a CacheFilter. So my question is: should I add Jayson's CacheFilter to AppFuse or should I use OSCache? I haven't got to Dave's chapter yet on performance and caching (in JSP 2.0), so I haven't read his opinion - what's your opinion? I like Jayson's solution because I can add 3 new classses with no additional JARs - AppFuse already has 21 jars (Struts, Hibernate, JSTL + a few other taglibs).

Setting up my Fedora box with Out-of-the-Box

Rather than spending hours trying to recover my Red Hat 9 disk, I built a new disk/box with Fedora. For all I know, the RH 9 one is still recoverable, but I'm an upgrade junkie so I couldn't help myself. Setting up DHCP with Dynamic DNS was a bit of a pain, even when I followed this howto. I believe I ended up re-installing bind and everything worked (this was a 2 a.m. last night, so my memory is a big foggy).

The only thing I haven't been able to get running (so far) is my USB Printer, details on hpoj mailing list. It was easy to setup my OfficeJet G85 on RH 9.

As for setting up my dev environment, it was a breeze using Out-of-the-Box. However, out of the box the installer didn't work. I had to install "gd-devel" (a dependency of viewcvs) and then everything installed just fine. Hat tip to Eric Weidner (of EJB Solutions) for the tip. I was able to select the applications I wanted and get all of the following installed and running: MySQL, PostgreSQL, Apache, Tomcat, mod_jk2 (to connect apache and tomcat), Roller, Scarab, CVS, Java, Ant and ViewCVS. I'm sure I installed more, but these are the mains ones I was looking for.

While the installer for OBox takes a while to run (on 1.5 GB RAM with 1.5 GHz = 30 minutes), the beauty of OBox is that it configures everything for you and starts all the services. The one thing that is disappointing (or maybe it's good) is that it didn't setup any environment variables - no $CATALINA_HOME, $ANT_HOME, etc. No biggie, I can set those up myself.

I might just have to burn a CD of OBox for future clients. It'd be nice to show up with my development environment on CD and ready to go. One bug I did find was that the mod_jk2 install configures mappings for all the struts example apps (which I didn't install).

Fedora Core 1 has killed my Red Hat 9 box

I don't know if it was Fedora or me, but it appears that my main hard drive on my Red Hat 9 box is hosed. Here's what I posted on Experts Exchange and the Fedora Mailing list:

Creating root device
mkrootdev: label / not found
Mounting root filesystem
mount: error 2 mounting ext3
pivotroot: pivot_root(/sysroot,/sysroot/initrd) failed: 2
umount /initrd/proc failed: 2
Freeing unused kernel memory: 132K freed
Kernel panic: No init found. Try passing init= option to kernel
_ <- Flashing cursor

I received a few responses from the mailing list, but my main hard drive appears to be hosed (unrecoverable). I tried doing a clean install, and Fedora again complained about not having enough disk space to copy the images over.

Finally, I took a break and thought of a workable solution while putting a turkey in the oven. I have another machine that has the exact same hardware as my Linux box - it has Windows XP on it, but I'm not using it. So I'm in the midst of installing Fedora on it, and then I'll move the hard drive. I lost all my configured stuff: Apache, CVS, Tomcat, DNS, DHCP, CUPS, but I was able to select most of it in the installation process. Let's hope all these packages are the latest and greatest - then I won't have much configuring to do.

Wanted: View Source with syntax highlighting

The Display Tag has a nice feature in it's documentation: the ability to view the source of a JSP [example]. This is done using a servlet, and works fairly well. However, as I write documentation for Struts Menu, I'm finding I need to view more than just the source of JSPs, but also the source of stylesheets, scripts and Velocity templates. So far, I've found that the view source protocol works fairly well for this.

Nice Tabs Menu Examples: generated HTML, its JavaScript file, its CSS file

Normally, I would be perfectly happy with this - except the view-source protocol doesn't seem to work in Safari (last time I checked). Secondly, I got to thinking - it sure would be nice to have a Servlet (or some other technology) that would read in a file and spit out it's contents with syntax highlighting. This is to say that you'd see in your browser what you see in your editor (i.e. BBEdit, HomeSite, Eclipse, etc.).

The ideal tool would allow me to pass in a URL to a file, and it would spit out an HTML version of that file, complete with syntax highlighting. It'd be similar to Java2HTML, but it would allow HTML, JavaScript, Java, CSS and JSP. I noticed that it might be possible to generate HTML from Java using Java2HTML on the fly, but that only covers one file type. Another option is to instruct documentation readers to change their view-source editor to be their favorite editor.

Has anyone seen such a tool? It sure would be sweet for writing better and more readable documentation for web developers.

Yet Another Web Application Framework: Shocks

From watching the struts-dev mailing list, I discovered a new Servlet Framework called Shocks. The thing that interests me about this framework is that the author looked extensively at Struts and WebWork both before creating it. It's feature-set sounds nice too:

It has an aspect-oriented workflow engine that can add crosscutting
system logic (like form processing, L10N, security, logging, etc) dynamically at
runtime (without having to mess around with the bytecode).  It can trade actions
across classloader boundaries, enabling web applications to span across multiple
.WAR files.  This allows users to drop in a new .WAR with new metadata and new
actions, which updates the application workflow at runtime across all modules in
the application namespace.  It handles workflow versioning and version rollback
(in case you make changes you come to regret).  It does instance pooling of all
components and sequences.  Every aspect of the system can be managed with JMX at
runtime.

Sounds like Spring, eh? Yes, says the author.

I think there are appreciable differences that have yet to be realized between 
the two (I haven't read their code at all), but definitely a lot of conceptual 
crossover.

I would think that introducing a new framework into the mix (and convincing folks to use it) must be pretty tough at this point, unless you create an IDE to go with it or introduce it in a book. BTW, did you know you can use Tiles with Spring.

Back from Missouri

We arrived back in Denver last night at midnight - after a blissful 4-day vacation in Clever, Missouri (near Springfield). Now I'm wading through the filth in my Inbox. 2100+ e-mails and I guarantee there's less than 10 that I'm interested in. It's fricken disgusting. Inbox Buddy caught about 1/3rd of them.

If you like my old theme...

For those of you who prefer my old theme, or are looking for my blogroll/bookmarks, I should point out that it's still available. I actually prefer the old "X2" theme (stands for XHTML, 2 Columns), so I view it more often than this new "sunsets" one. You can also get to it by clicking on the icon in the top left corner.