Raible Designs

DHCP and Dynamic DNS on Red Hat

I found a great howto today for setting up DHCP and Dynamic DNS server on Red Hat 8.0. It literally took me about 5 minutes to get it installed and running. 5 minutes later, I had all my machines (WinXP, Win2K, OS X, Linksys Print Server) connected and working. Very slick!

Even better is I did it with Red Hat 9, which I downloaded last weekend and installed lazily over a few days. The upgrade from 8.0 was like butter. I like Void Main's Red Hat Tips so much, I'm tempted to mirror them in hopes this URL won't go away. But for now, I'll have faith and hope it's a true permalink. Hope you don't mind that I've stuffed this under my Java category - just doesn't seem fit for General.

[Request] Moblogger on Sourceforge

Hey Russ, what do you think about putting Moblogger on SourceForge? If you have something against SourceForge, that's fine, how about putting it on a publicly accessible CVS server so folks can contribute?

I have a few reasons for wanting this:

• I want to see title support - maybe signified by a space in the subject after the password.
• I'd like to see the ability to specify multiple blogs/e-mail boxes in the config file (agentsettings.xml).
• A sample web interface would be awesome. For instance, the ability to edit the config file via a JSP and start/stop the agent through this same interface. Maybe even use Betwixt for writing/reading the config file.
• Use Velocity or XSL for templates - rather than hardcoding it in the Java code.
• This seems like a great project to integrate Jabber-blogging into.

If you give the OK, I can request the project be setup - but I thought you'd like to be the admin on it.

target="_blank" in XHTML 1.0 Strict

I've always wondered how to add a target="_blank" to my XHTML 1.0 Strict pages. Thanks to this article, I now know a nice workaround.

Much to the chagrin of Web designers everywhere, the HTML 4.0 Strict and XHTML 1.0 Strict recommendations of the W3C no longer include the target attribute of the <a> tag. The Transitional versions of the specifications still include it, but by definition, these specs are on the way out.

The short and sweet version is to use the "rel" attribute to your advantage.

<a href="document.html" rel="external">external link</a>

And then use this short script to key off this attribute for adding a target="_blank" (using the DOM).

function externalLinks() {
 if (!document.getElementsByTagName) return;
 var anchors = document.getElementsByTagName("a");
 for (var i=0; i<anchors.length; i++) {
   var anchor = anchors[i];
   if (anchor.getAttribute("href") &&
       anchor.getAttribute("rel") == "external")
     anchor.target = "_blank";
 }
}
window.onload = externalLinks;

Throw this in an "external.js" file and add it to whatever pages you need it in.

<script type="text/javascript" src="/external.js"></script>

This LOT more work than I expected, but since it's written up in an actual article, I tend to believe that this is probably the shortest path to making this happen.

CSS Tabs and Cool Designs

I found some great stuff over at Zeldman's place this evening. First of all, I'm definitely going to bookmark this page at Webgraphics. It has a bunch of tabbed interface experiments using CSS - which will be very handy when integrating Roller's tab-based menu into struts-menu.

The second ultra-cool item of business is the very cool sites Zeldman lists in the following quote. If any of you Roller users are looking to design a new theme - I'd love to see any of these integrated into Roller.

Repeating background patterns, once the shame of web design, have recently made a tasteful comeback. (Background patterns are new grey.) If you can't design your own patterns, Squidfingers offers over 120 lovely background patterns you can use on your site. Go get 'em. If you can design your own backgrounds, K10k has launched a Pixel Pattern Exhibition and invites you to submit your designs.

Jabber and Roller

This would be a much better post if I'd already developed the software, and this was an announcement. But I don't want to develop the software per se, I just want to use it. So I'm putting this idea out there in hopes that someone has already developed the software. My e-mail to the jabber-dev mailing list pretty much sums it all up.

Hello,

My name is Matt Raible and I am a contributor on the Roller Weblogger
project (http://rollerweblogger.org).  I'm looking to add support for 
Jabber as a blogging client.  Currently, we support the BloggerApi and 
MetaWeblogApi.  What I'd like to know is if there is a project already 
that converts Jabber's XML files to XML-RPC calls - or if I could simply 
use an XSL stylesheet to transform and resend to my blog.

Thanks,

Matt

I'd love to add a Jabber Powered logo to my About page. I did some work with Jabber last year, basically just installing and configuring it - both very simple. The project I was on was also planning on adding support for creating new jabber accounts on-the-fly when a new user was created in our database. It's all XML, so it's probably all pretty easy. Anyway, I bought a Programming Jabber book and it's been collecting dust ever since. The cool thing about Jabber is if we setup a Jabber server (i.e. jabber.freeroller.net), then I think it'd be possible to blog via your favorite IM client. Please leave your thoughts and comments - and any links to anything that might already exists.

Sun Makes Java Simpler, May Call Upon Developers to Help

Sun Microsystems wants to simplify Java for developers and get more of them involved in its evolution. "We as a community -- not just Sun -- need to make Java easier to develop to and get it out to the masses of developers to make Java successful long term," said Ingrid Van den Hoogen, director of Java marketing, during a recent interview with DevX. "Ease of development is always an issue that comes up, and we want to address that head-on." [DevX.com]

Hmmm, took them 8 years to figure that out, eh?

The Galapagos Islands

A Fraternity brother and good friend of mine is sailing the south seas with his family right now. Today, he sent some pictures of the their stop in the Galapagos Islands. These pictures are awesome - made me sad to be at work today - and I thought I'd share the love...

I was able to quickly (think batch mode) resize these images using the image resizer I found at www.imageresizer.com.

Tivo and a DVD Burner?

Like James, there's probably a Tivo Series 2 in my future. However, we've also looked at buying a DVD Recorder. So my question is: Is there a DVD Recorder that is Tivo-enabled? It'd be awesome if there were - two birds with one stone.

Dr.'s Appointment for Mini-Me

I'm taking my laptop (mini-me) to my local Apple Store today. I've got a couple of hardware issues that I'm hoping they'll fix.

• When I press on the bottom right corner of the keyboard (near the corner of the panel), there's a clicking and I can press down about 1/8th of an inch.
• I tripped while carrying mini-me a couple of nights ago and broke one of the hinges to the screen.

I hope they'll fix these issues as it's still under warranty, but don't know if they will. Has anyone else had similar hardware problems that they've gotten fixed (through Apple or via other means)?

I hope I can beat the crowd and maybe even get an iPod.

RE: And the winner of the WROX lottery is .... Apress???

If Norman Richards is correct, and Apress has bought the remaining Wrox books - I'll be pumped! I just hope they've purchases Professional JSP 2.0 and they're going to publish it. If so, my next question is when? We'd still love to have a book-signing party at our house! And since we're putting it on the market next week - it better be soon.

Although Wiley got the Wrox name and first pick at books, it looks like the remaining books (and books in progress) were bought by Apress. (according to a post on the java-writers mailing list) Wow! I guess it's a good fit content wise as Apress seemed to want to be in a lot of the space that Wrox was, but emphasizing on quality over quantity.

I've never actually heard of Apress, but it's good to see that Normal likes them and compares them to Manning (one of my favorite publishers).