Raible Designs

Upgrading Roller and Happiness

I've been meaning to upgrade this site to use the latest Roller CVS source for quite some time (about a month), but haven't got around to it. However, Dave and Lance have been checking in enhancements like mad lately, so I don't know if it's such a good idea. It would be nice to push out a 0.9.7 release in order to add comments to freeroller.net. Things I would like to see in the comments feature are: 1) remembering a user's information, 2) the ability for the site owner to receive comments as e-mails (I currently have this hacked into this site), and 3) the ability for commenters to receive comment replies (if they entered an e-mail address). A super slick feature would be to allow sending of e-mails to an address (i.e. [email protected]) with something that indicates the post - and whalla, it shows up as a comment! That would be cool (so would posting via e-mail eh?). This will be wanted as users start replying to e-mails, rather than posting comments. Of course, this feature might just be too much work. BTW - what do we need to do to push out a 1.0 Release?

Secondly, I'd like to discuss how I intend on fulfilling my New Years Resolution (To Be Happy). I plan on doing some of the following things:

• Spending more time with my family - both immediate (Julie and Abbie) and distant (my parents, Julie's parents, aunts/uncles, grandparents). These people are the most important in my life, and why wouldn't you spend more time with folks that love you?
• Learn more about Java so I feel more confident in my job. This happens no matter what I do - it comes from working with the technology.
• Being a good Dad - both in Julie's eyes and Abbie's. I'm doing good so far - but I know I can do better. The rewards are endless from doing this.
• Getting a new laptop. I have a business philosophy that fast machines == fast development. Of course, it depends on the developer, but it certainly can't hurt. I hope to get a new PowerBook, and I really hope they put out a 2 GHz version so I can quit bitching about how slow Macs are. I'll compliment this with a 23" Apple Cinema Display just for kicks - if my checkbook can rationalize the purchase. This is sure to keep me happy for a week or two.
• Smiling more - this does wonders for your mood. Having a cheerful attitude and a positive perspective on the world makes things much better.
• Hitting the gym. I haven't been to the gym in months, and I really do need to go as my pants are getting painful to wear. I used to go 4-5 times a week, so I need to get back in the groove. I prefer competition-related exercise such as basketball and raquetball - so I'll definitely try to play those more. It's much more fun to go to the gym and kick a friend's ass at raquetball than to just go and lift weights. Hopefully, I'll begin this next week.
• Worrying less. Not that I do it much right now - that's Julie's job and she does it well ;-). I do worry about work-related stuff a lot though, and do have trouble sleeping some nights because I'm debugging code in my head.
• Get off the computer and get outside more. It's amazing how much more I enjoy the days that I never touch the computer. Also, camping and hiking can do wonders for the soul.

Fighting Technology and Fatherhood

Today was one of those days I hate. I've been struggling with Hibernate for what seems like weeks now. Today was a day that almost convinced me to quit trying. I seem to be fighting with XDoclet and Hibernate all day, every day. I don't seem to be getting anything done on my AppFuse project, nor at my new on-site project.

I am getting things done, but if I'd just done JDBC, I'd probably much further ahead than I am right now. Such is the life of someone that tries to learn the latest technologies. I remember doing this with Struts and now I'm grateful that I did. Hopefully, using/learning/struggling with XDoclet and Hibernate will soon get better. The Hibernate and XDoclet developers have been great in dealing with my learning curve - thanks guys.

I predict my learning curve will be similar as that with Struts. This means that I will write all kinds of code as workarounds for problems I'm having - since I have ridiculous deadlines and I need to get it working. The sad part is that I'm willing to bet that I'll delete a whole bunch of this code when I finally figure out how to work with Hibernate, rather than against it. I think it's a great framework, but I'm trying to do too much from examples, rather than digging in and actually learning the framework. This is the hard way, but alas - I will learn it well - through my own mistakes.

I got a nice break from Technology tonight as Julie and I went to pick up our new car. We drove the long way home - through Red Rocks. We enjoyed the smooth ride, bright lights, and nice stereo. The bug had all of this, but the Accord is newer, and therefore, more fun. We stopped and bought a bottle of wine at one of my favorite liquor stores in Morrison and had a nice little celebration. I was planning on finishing up my struts-resume sample application tonight, but instead decided to play with Abbie. We gurgled and had some "tummy time" - and I definitely feel like I did the right thing.

I think I really need to stop working so much, and start being a Dad more. I've worked every weekend since she was born, and I feel like an Ass for it. Hopefully, the Wrox gig will be over soon, and I'll be able to catch up on my work for OnPoint and relax a little more. All this extra work is wearing me thin, especially when it's been dumping in the mountains lately - I don't know how many more "8 inches at Vail" e-mails I can take!!

The encouraging news (for you, the reader) is that I (with the help of Keith) upgraded this site to use a 100MB connection tonight. Hopefully the site will be a bit faster, but you know how bandwidth works - you pay for more and never seem to get it.

Will this be an all-nighter?

I'm making a big push to finish the Struts Chapter tonight. Moreover - to finish the sample application. Things are going well so far. I hope it's not an all nighter, but as soon as I'm satisfied with the application, I'll have to deal with proof-reading the chapter, which could be a real headache. On the last chapter, the proof-reading took me an entire day. Ugh.

I just wanna get this darn thing done so I can spend some time with my family again, so I don't have to work weekends, and I can quit (pretty much) working for free. I think the time spent on the sample app will pay off in the long run, as it's already making it easier to develop the application at my new job. I was able to install, compile, deploy and start authenticating/pulling information from Oracle in a matter of hours. That's taken weeks in previous gigs. Of course, if you count the slow machine I had, the meetings and the installation of new software (trying to get the machine setup), then it probably took a week.

I took my home-built machine into work this morning - and all was peachy until I asked the help desk to add my computer to the domain. Politics came into play and I was told that the technicians have to build the machines, not some dev-head. No biggie, just get me a faster machine I said. I argued with the guy for a bit as I tried to explain that a 700 Mhz, 128 MB RAM machine was too slow for Java Development. When he said that was one of the fastest machines they had, I almost choked. Luckily, they found a 2 Ghz machine that I get to start using tomorrow - this'll be the 3rd machine I've built since I started last week. Damn. Sure is nice working from home when you have everything setup already. Do you think that tele-commuting will be the wave of the future? The clients that've paid me to work from home are getting a heckuva better deal than the ones that require an on-site consultant.

Eclipse Plugins and Hibernate

I found a new site with a list of Eclipse plugins tonight. I was hoping that the Ant View plugin could solve my Ant problems in Eclipse, but I can't seem to figure out what it does. I gave it the ol' 30 seconds of investigation - maybe I should read the documentation. The problem I'm having now is (after swapping Ant 1.4 jars for 1.5.1) is:

Unable to find a javac compiler;
com.sun.tools.javac.Main is not on the classpath.

Hmmm, works fine from Cygwin, and Eclipse (2.0.2) has tools.jar and rt.jar in the classpath. Must be time to download a nightly build.

There was a lot of talk today in the java.blogs community about Hibernate. I'm happy to see this as it feels like I just bought a new car and everyone is saying it's the best car on the road. I decided to use Hibernate based on Dave's implementation in Ag. It looked easy enough, so I figured - why not?! It turns out, at the same time, that the XDoclet folks were in the midst of creating a new hibernate module in CVS. In fact, I got the hibernate module from Joel Rosi-Schwartz (I'm assuming a hibernate developer) before it was even in the XDoclet source tree.

I got to be a guinea pig in making hibernate tags work with XDoclet. I have to say that with Dave's working example, I was able to markup a POJO with hibernate/xdoclet tags and generate my persistence layer in a matter of minutes. It just worked. Kinda like Tomcat IMHO. That's how software should be. Check out my security-example if you're interested in using Hibernate with XDoclet. The readme in the source will explain how to run initial generation and tests. Currently, it generates a Struts Validator Form and VO from an Entity bean (located at src/ejb/org/apache/template/User.java). Why? Because Struts Forms can only be generated from Entity Beans. This needs to change IMO. But at the same time, the EJB architecture is already in place, I just need to execute the ejb-related tasks, and I'm in business.

In other news, a couple of Struts related goodies:

• ONJava.com has an introduction to the Validator Framework by Chuck Cavanass, an Introduction to Eclipse and Creating Reports with FOP. I used FOP on a project last year around this time and it's super slick. It's basically using XSL to generate PDF and RTF from an XML file. I highly recommend using something like RTF2FO to generate an XSL Template from a Word document.
• Struts Kick Start is now shipping from Amazon. I'd buy all the Struts books just to say you have them. I've got three ;) Haven't read any. Damn, I wish I had the time! Reading Erik Hatcher's Java Development with Ant was one of the smartest things I did this year. Actually, the smartest thing I did was get my wife pregnant
• I downloaded TogetherSoft's Control Center to do some UML Modeling for the Struts Chapter, and found that they use Struts on their site. Nice...

Make your Flash HTML Standards Compliant

I initially found that the latest issue of A List Apart was published via web-graphics.com and then got this tidbit from Zeldman:

In Issue 154 of A List Apart, for people who make websites: “Flash Satay” by Drew McLellan. "This site uses Flash. This site validates as XHTML. They said it couldn’t be done. Now it can be. Have your Flash and standards, too." Please note, the ALA server may be slower than normal due to heavy traffic.

The technique involves using the following code:

<object type="application/x-shockwave-flash" data="c.swf?path=movie.swf" 
	width="400" height="300">
	<param name="movie" value="c.swf?path=movie.swf" />
	<img src="noflash.gif" width="200" height="100" alt="" />
</object>

Where c.swf is a container movie to workaround the fact that IE/Windows doesn’t stream the movie with this code.

Drew McLellan is the author of Dreamweaver MX Web Development and a member of The Web Standards Project’s Dreamweaver Task Force. You can follow the progress of this technique on his site.

WebGraphics also has an interesting post with a list of reasons why ease of use doesn't happen on engineering projects - uiweb.com

Upgrading to Struts 1.1?

My opinion is "of course!" But that's party due to the fact that I'm an upgrade-happy developer. I'll upgrade just to be on the bleeding edge and know that I'm not missing anything. However, I do end up "backing out" of some upgrades. It's fun though, how else are you going to learn? TheServerSide.com has a new article discussing if you should upgrade to Struts 1.1 - check it out. I'm on the nightly build.

Java Server Faces Public Draft and EA download is available. I saw this last night, but Rick Salsa beat me to the punch on weblogging it. I was hoping to download and play around with it today, and give my opinion, but alas, the release I'm doing is taking a bit longer than expected.

Web Builder Conference 2002. Is anyone else going? We're having a Annual Shareholders Meeting in Vegas the weekend before, and I'm going to attend the conference the following week (Sept. 9 - 11). It'll be my first "reporting" experience, so watch this site for updates/reviews. I was one of the first to register so I'll have wireless internet access throughout the conference. My 3 goals for the experience are (1) win, (2) have fun, and (3) get some roller development done. Of course, if I'm accomplishing #1, then #2 is taken care of and #3 might slip a little.

Update on Netscape 7. It sucks worse than I originally thought - it installed on my WinXP box, but won't run - similar to OS X 10.2. The one successfull install? On Red Hat 7.3.

Mornings are great again.

The station I found yesterday DOES broadcast Mark and Brian - awesome! It's actually one of the best internet radio broadcasts I've ever heard (besides the network drops), they play music during the commercials to get around the internet radio issue.

Please oh please let it be true.

I found a station that might play Mark and Brian (don't knock it 'till you try it) - we'll see tomorrow morning! It's been SOOOO long since I've heard them... please oh please let it be true! [ Listen Now ]