Raible Designs

RSS to iCal Converter

The RSSiCal converter appears to be what I've been looking for. I'd like to duplicate Roller's Big Calendar feature, but give it the look and feel of an iCal. When I run my rss feed through this tool, I get a bunch of text output (using IE 5.0/Win). I'd love a way to convert to the Aqua-fied look and feel on the fly.

Dream Job in Carribean.

I got this e-mail yesterday for an Oracle Certified Trainer in the Carribean. How sweet would that be?! If any of you are qualified for this position, I encourage you to apply. I've provided this nice picture for you to gaze at and dream about.

James Duncan Davidson has a blog.

I found James Duncan Davidson's blog tonight. For those of you who didn't know, James is the original author of both Tomcat and Ant. Now he appears to be caught up in Mac OS X goodness, and is having fun with the T68i and iSync. Powered by blosxom, motivated by simplicity, driven by perl.

Ant and JUnit.

I reduced the build.xml file on my project drastically this morning (more than 900 lines). I used to have a task per testcase and was able to consolidate from this:

<!-- =================================================================== -->
<!--            Run the UserDAO test                                     -->
<!-- =================================================================== -->
<target name="test.userDAO" depends="compile">
  <echo message="Running UserDAO Test -------------------"/>
  <junit printsummary="yes" haltonfailure="yes" 
    haltonerror="yes" fork="yes">
      <jvmarg value="-Djunit.conf=./src/onpoint/PersistenceTestValues.ini"/>
      <classpath>
          <pathelement path="${webapp.target}/WEB-INF/classes"/>
      </classpath>
      <classpath refid="classpath"/>
      <formatter type="plain" usefile="false"/>
      <test name="com.onpoint.webapp.persistence.UserDAOTest"/>
  </junit>
</target>

To this:

<!-- =================================================================== -->
<!--            Run all the Persistence tests                            -->
<!-- =================================================================== -->
<target name="test.persistence" depends="compile">
    <echo message="Running Persistence Tests -------------------"/>
    <junit printsummary="yes" haltonfailure="yes" 
	  haltonerror="yes" fork="yes">
      <jvmarg value="-Djunit.conf=./src/onpoint/PersistenceTestValues.ini"/>
      <classpath>
          <path refid="classpath"/>
          <pathelement path="${webapp.target}/WEB-INF/classes"/>
      </classpath>
      <formatter type="plain" usefile="false"/>
      <test name="com.onpoint.webapp.persistence.${testcase}" if="testcase"/>
      <batchtest unless="testcase">
          <fileset dir="${webapp.target}/WEB-INF/classes" 
              includes="**/persistence/*Test.class"/>
      </batchtest>
  </junit>
</target>

And I got to remove the AllTests.java file in the persistence package! You probably knew this already, but just in case...

Thanks to Erik Hatcher for Java Development with Ant. I studied this book for three hours yesterday and it's already increasing my productivity! I hope to finish it by tomorrow afternoon - only 300 pages to go. It's pretty cool when you're reading someone's book and getting e-mails from them at the same time.

XDoclet 1.2 and Roller.

I was able to get Roller to compile last night with only a few changes. I tested it on Tomcat this morning and after logging in, I'm getting Invalid path /weblog was requested. After looking at the struts-config.xml, I can see that there are no <action-mappings> in my struts-config.xml file.

Dave, I enjoyed your install-blogging last night. Particularly since I was working on Roller and interested in your progress. By hitting F5 (refresh) every 20 minutes, I received an update on your progress - quite nifty.

The picture on the right was taken at Washington Park in central Denver. If you're from Denver, or have visited, you'll know that this is a very beautiful park. I thought this site needed a little sprucing up today, so here you go.

In other news, I've been looking for a new project in both Denver and Florida (since we're moving there next spring). No calls from Denver, but I'm getting a call or an e-mail per day from Florida. I thought we had more jobs here, guess not.

P.S. Are any of you Java/Struts developers in Cincinnati looking for a job?

Mac User Group Meeting.

I think I'll attend the COMUG meeting tomorrow night. Here are the details:

• Location: COMUG usually meets in the main meeting room at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) 1850 Table Mesa Drive, Boulder
• Time: 7PM to 10PM
• Photoshop Tips by Ben Willmore. Once again, we will be treated to Ben's amazing ability to teach us how to use Photoshop's most useful (and sometimes obscure) features. Every time Ben visits us, our members praise his session, and ask for more. Here's more! (For more about Ben and his Photoshop seminars and books, visit http://www.digitalmastery.com)
• Anyone with an Airport-enabled PowerBook or iBook can browse the Internet, send email, or share files during the meeting.

The Photoshop Tips is the primary reason I'm thinking of attending. The only bad part seems to be that they charge $25 to attend (a.k.a be a member), see the membership application (PDF) for proof.

Which digital camera to buy?

I'm lucky enough to have talked my wife into accepting a digital camera as a birth gift, now to decide which one? BTW, did you guys buy your wives a "birth gift" or am I getting hoodwinked? Anyway, I've read the reviews on pcmag.com and cnet.com and have come to the conclusion that the Canon PowerShot G2 is the one for us. Why? It seems to be getting rave reviews, it's the most popular and the prices I'm finding seem to be a bargain compared to what it's suggested retail price is ($900). And the sample photos are exactly the quality I'm looking for. One issue is that it seems to be discontinued. My problem now? Julie doesn't want me to spend $500 on a camera, especially when we're about to downgrade to a one-income household. Is there a solution - should I buy one off eBay?

Aqua Text - How to Scale Down.

I sent an e-mail to the author (Rick Yaeger) of the aqua-text tutorial last night asking how to scale down my text and reduce the fuzziness (or as Lance called it, "the gel toothpaste look"). Here is Rick's response:

There is an easy way to scale the effects of the style in Photoshop 7. In fact, that's what the command is called "Scale Effects..." and it is found under the Layers menu under the Layer Style submenu. Select the layer that has the effects you wish to scale and use this command to adjust those effects on a percentage scale with preview.

Another method is to create your type at 72pt and then flatten the image and scale it down 25%.

So I tried this, and it definitely helped. Here is the old one, and the new one. I've noticed that I do lack one thing as a Blogger - and that is following up on my previous posts, so here goes...

PDF Searching. Thanks to Vince Mastrantoni (no blog) and Greg Klebus for their e-mails. These will help me find my solution I'm sure. Thanks Guys.

The obvious answer would be Adobe Acrobat. But, this is not open source and if you have many files to search through, would be cumbersome. I tried to do a batch search using it, but was unable to. It appears as though this may not be supported or an option.

Another alternative is the Lucene search engine available at:

http://jakarta.apache.org/lucene/docs/index.html

Now, this by itself doesn't search PDFs. However, you can add a plug-in to do this. See here:

http://www.i2a.com/websearch/

Other stuff that might help is here:

http://www.etymon.com/

Also, the Google internet search engine searches and indexes PDFs and allows them to be displayed in text format. I'm not sure how or if this might help but I wanted to point this out to you.

Lastly, there is a PDF filter that Adobe provides that can be plugged into IIS index server. Tried looking for it but couldn't find it. Maybe you'll have better luck.

Vince

---
Found that filter. Gave up too soon:

http://www.adobe.com/support/downloads/product.jsp?product=1&platform=Windows

Vince

---
Raible, (I seem to have read your explanation about the name :)

pdftotext (forgot the source, you need to google it yourself). The name says it all -- convert your PDF to text and do the search.

It's a default viewer under Midnight Commander on my linux box, so I can view PDF's as text easily.

Open source, and probably cross-platform.

You can also try Ghostscript, it probably has something similar (but it's big, and you'd need to go through Postscript files anyway).

I hope I could help.

Regards,
-Greg

Also, I mentioned a while back that I didn't use Mail for OS X, but instead I use Entourage. Truth is, I've started using Mail (over Entourage) for a very simple reason, it's faster. When I click on the icon, it opens faster. I'm easy that way.

To follow up on my iSync post, I can't wait for the actual release. When I import all my vCards from Outlook XP, it changes the "mobile" phone number to "main" in my Address Book. Because of this, my contacts' mobile numbers never make it to my phone - doh! This same import works fine in Entourage. Also, I can't seem to 1) sync with .Mac or 2) publish my iCal to my webdav-enabled Tomcat server. Not that I really need to, but I like to experiment and see if it's possible. Manually changing my contacts' numbers from "main" to "mobile" in Address Book fixes the problem, but what a pain. And my phone seems to end up with a bunch of contacts I never put in there - iSync definitely has room for improvement. I'm looking forward to this update.

Last, but certainly not least, to follow up on where is Russ - it's great to have you back Russ, you were missed. You update your blog more frequently than any others I read - thanks.

In other news, I can see Phoenix being my default browser very soon. It's Mozilla without the extra stuff (i.e. Mail) that I don't use.

Struts and XDoclet.

The last release of XDoclet has many more Struts-related features; such as building your validator.xml file and support for adding plug-ins to your struts-config.xml. It seems that a lot of work has been done by Erik Hatcher to make this happen. Is this the same Erik Hatcher that wrote the Ant book I'm reading? I think so. Erik sent this e-mail to the struts-dev mailing list this morning with a brief how-to on integrating XDoclet and Struts.

Ant 1.5.1 Released!

It doesn't appear like there are too many changes, but there's a new version nevertheless. As most of you open source developers know, it's much easier to keep up with the lastest version (or nightly builds) than to try to migrate when a new version comes out. If you don't, you mind end up with a XDoclet nightmare similar to the one I'm having with Roller.