Raible Designs

Display Tag: Static Headers

One of the requests we get over on the display tag project is a way to have static headers. Basically, this means that a user could scroll down through all the records on a page and the header would stay in place. The next generation of the tag library has a <thead> and <tbody> that makes this fairly easy to do. For instance, just by adding style="height: 400px; overflow: auto" to the <tbody> tag - you get the desired effect. Cool stuff - only seems to work in Mozilla though. Any IE/CSS experts out there that can explain why it doesn't work in IE?

See Also: Display Tag: Static Headers - Revisited

RE: Which new laptop would you buy?

Thanks to all who left comments about my (possible) new laptop purchase. I did some more tests today, and I'm going to have to go with a Windows machine, especially since I hope to replicate the performance I get from my machine at work (Dell Optiplex GX260: 2 GHz, 512 MB RAM, Windows 2000 SP4):

• Opening Photoshop (7.0): 3 seconds
• Starting Eclipse (3.0 M2): 6 seconds
• Running "ant clean package-web" on AppFuse: 18 seconds
• Running "ant rebuild" on Roller: 36 seconds

Yep, that's right, my (work) desktop is twice as fast when opening Eclipse and 4 times faster opening Photoshop (than the Powerbook). So if I get a 3 GHz laptop with 1 GB RAM, it should be even faster than that right?

Right now, I'm looking at the Alienware Area-51m or the Hibersonic Aviator ZX7. At first glance, I'm leaning towards Area-51m, although the Bluetooth USB Adapter (vs. integrated Bluetooth) is disappointing. The Hibersonice has a 17" screen, but that doesn't seem to be that big of deal (after hearing y'all speak up). Also the Hibersonic has a 802.11b NIC, where the Alienware one has a 802.11g.

A Remote Desktop using XUL

From the xul-announce mailing list:

Randall Knutson has released the first prototype for a remote desktop using XUL. Point your Mozilla XUL browser (e.g. Firebird) @ http://robin.sourceforge.net to call up a fresh desktop with a startup menu and play XulMine, Mozteroids, Pagman, Snake, Xultris, MozInvaders and more.

What is Robin? Here's the "official" blurb from the sourceforge project site:

Remote Operating System Build in Netscape (Robin) is a window manager using DHTML, Javascript, XUL and some crazy hacks.

Full story @ http://sourceforge.net/projects/robin

This is pretty fricken cool...

Sending POJOs to the UI instead of ActionForms

I'm starting to think that my Struts-based apps could be simplified if I didn't convert POJOs to Action Forms when retrieving them from the database. By this, I mean to say that I'd like to retrieve and display POJOs on the UI, and then capture their information (as Action Forms) when saving the form. The reason I want to do this is because of Hibernate's Lazy Loading feature and formatting Dates. Basically, Hibernate allows you to load children of an object lazily (i.e. resumes of a User), when the getResumes() method is called. I've created [a page|POJOsToForms] on my wiki to explain further and continue this discussion. Of course, you can always leave comments here if you'd rather - they cross-reference each other. The [RollingWiki|http://www.rollerweblogger.org/wiki/Wiki.jsp?page=RollerWikiPlugin] rocks!

Apple G5s - 1.8 MHz

From Slashdot (via Erik of course):

Apple Insider is reporting that Apple will announce computers based on IBM's 64 bit PPC 970 processor in the upcomming WWDC and will market them as G5. The new Power Mac G5s will sport a completely new motherboard design utilizing DDR 400 RAM as well as AGP 8x graphics, FireWire 800, and USB 2.0, sources said. "In the box" connectivity among the news systems is based on Hypertransport which provides 64-bit addressing and will replace Apple's multilevel bus architecture found in current systems. Initial offerings of the Power Mac G5 are said to boast 1.4 to 1.8GHz, single core PPC 970 processors, with the possibility of a dual 1.8GHz chips shortly thereafter.

Sounds good, but how long will those processors take to put in the PowerBooks? My advise - just go Intel - you'll get more customers and it'll be faster! How sweet would it be to buy a new Dell laptop and be able to run Windows, Linux and OS X on the same machine?! That would rock - and I'm willing to bet you'd get a lot of folks buying OS X. But then again, OS X is cheap - it's Apple's hardware that's spendy and it's probably a good revenue driver for them.

Draggable IFRAMEs

Matt Kruse's JavaScript Toolbox is awesome. So good, in fact, that I've actually made a donation (small, but nevertheless, a donation). Today, I noticed a new script: Draggable IFRAMEs. I dig it. Don't know that I'll ever use it, but I've always liked drag n' drop examples for the web. While they are cool, I've found that sometimes a true popup window is much easier.

Anthill and Maven

I did a little more research this morning - this time trying to find out if Anthill could play nicely with Maven. Here is the answer I received from the anthill mailing list:

We've recently implemented a Maven builder for Anthill Pro -- it's not 
released yet but will be part of version 2.1.

We will probably implement a Maven builder for Anthill OS sometime soon 
as well.

In the meantime, check out how some people have gotten Maven builds to 
work with Anthill in the past -- 

http://lists.urbancode.com/pipermail/anthill/2002-December/000543.html

Cool! Thanks Maciej!

At the game

Nice seats eh?!

Server move should be completed

If you're seeing this post, then chances are that www.raibledesigns.com is resolving correctly for you. It's still not working for me from work, but that could be a proxy server / local DNS server issue. I've moved from the server that crashed all the time to a new one that is hopefully more stable. Thanks Keith!

Also, thanks to the folks that have e-mailed me offering their hosting services - it's greatly appreciated. Hopefully, things will run smoothly on this server and I won't have to move anywhere else. I installed JRockit at work today on both Windows and Linux, and it works so well (not to mention awesome monitoring tools), that I'm going to try to use it on this site. It's a 40MB download (same as Sun's JDK ??), but installs in under a minute.

The only error messages polluting my log file these days is the following. It seems harmless, but that means that we should probably not even be logging it. Anyone know of a solution?

2003-05-07 16:00:10,244 SimpleLog4JLogSystem.logVelocityMessage(181) | 
    VelocimacroProxy.render() : exception VM = #refererDisplayUrl() : 
    ClientAbortException:  java.net.SocketException: Broken pipe

iPod: Glad I waited

Thanks to Kurt, I decided to wait on my purchase of an iPod. And boy am I glad I did - I was going to get a 5 giger for $299 and now I can get a 15 giger for $299! Sweeeet! Now I just have to figure out how I can use the shared drive on my XP machine as a music repository for iTunes. Importing songs across my network takes waaayyy too long.