Raible Designs

OS X and Wireless Printer Server Problems [SOLVED]

It was a good night, I solved all my computer problems in the last hour! I hope this continues tomorrow when I go into the office - I'd love to figure out all the Hibernate issues I'm having. If I can pull this off (which I think I can), I should be finished with all the architectural hurdles on the project, and the rest will be easy and fun. I'll get to tweak JavaScript and CSS for a better UI, and later tweak Hibernate for a better Session management architecture. I'm hoping for a good week. Now onto how I fixed my issues, in case anyone else has these problems.

To fix my OS X problems, I used Jaguar Cache Cleaner (JCC). This fixed my Finder and Mail problems. After that, I deleted some Safari-related files in my ~/Library directory and now everything is back to normal. Hallelujah!

My wireless printer server problem was much easier to fix. All I needed to do was leave the ethernet in the little box, set an IP address on the box, and then access it through a browser to configure the wireless stuff. Unplug, shut off the printer, restart everything and I'm feeling the love...

New Themes for Roller?

I like Bryan Bell's new theme, and I really dig this aqua theme. Think I can do this in Roller? Of course, it's just HTML and CSS. Do you think it's possible to fix the theme's problems in IE6? I do - anything is possible. Sure would be cool - new themes for Roller that you can install in seconds. Sometimes it's more fun to think of new ideas for Roller than to actually implement them. However, the satisfaction of implementing dreams is awesome - and something that I strive to enjoy every week. I have Julie and Abbie - a dream I had as a kid - and now I'm loving life...

Struts and XHTML

There's an interesting thread over on the struts-dev mailing list. It started out debating whether to use comments (<!-- -->) or CDATA (<![CDATA[ ]]>) to hide Javascript code. I think this discussion was started by something I suggested yesterday on the struts-user list. Craig McClanahan had this to say:

What I also don't understand is why anybody is worried about generating XHTML markup for the current generation of popular browsers, none of which implement it correctly ... but that's a different issue.

What do you think? I think the best reason for generating XHTML (at this point) is that adding an XHTML doctype at the top of a page makes IE and Mozilla "snap" to standards-compliant mode. Rather than writing tweeks for each browser - the same code works in both. This is a real lifesaver when doing CSS positioning and DOM-based Javascript in pages. It's also really nice to be able to validate code.

Apple's New Safari Browser

It's cool because its fast, and it's got the slick aqua-class buttons like Chimera. But Steve - where's my tabbed browsing!? You forgot the best part of the modern browser phenomenon. I bet M$ has it in IE 7 - or at least they should. I did download Safari and I do like it's bookmarks and nice icon - but it's not doing it for me w/o tabs. Good effort though - too bad it doesn't implement the CSS border-style: dotted correctly. Check out freeroller.net using Mozilla, and then look at in in IE 6. Safari renders dashes just like IE. The other thing that sucks is that the text in this blog is super small. I mean it's small as it is - but it's tiny in Safari. Normally, it actually is larger on OS X than on Windows. If it's too small for you right now - use your browser to make it bigger.

I am looking forward to new iTunes and iPhoto - I love those apps!

CSS and border-collapse property

I can't seem to get the border-collapse property to work on my tables. Basically, I should be able to specify a border and border-collapse: collapse on a table and this border will be applied to all cells. But I can't get it to work - any ideas? Here's an example:

<table width="300" 
  style="border: 1px solid black; border-collapse: collapse">
  <tr>
    <th>&nbsp;</th>
  </tr>
  <tr> 
    <td>this cell should have a top border<td>
  </tr>
</table>

And here's that same table without the HTML escaped:

A Christmas Tree

I've added a Christmas Tree to this site to decorate a little for the holidays. Hope you don't mind. Like all new additions, I had to make room for it and adjust some margins so it didn't hide behind anything. Feel free to steal it if you like. The CSS to make it a background is available with a good ol' Ctrl+U. You should be glad this is all I did - the first one I tried was animated... Happy Holidaze!

Struts Menu - Improved!

Well after working until 4 in the morning last night and most of the day today - I'm happy to say that I've completed my desired changes on Struts Menu. I've been talking with the inventor, Scott Sayles, and hopefully I can get these changes committed in the next day or so. The biggest improvements I made were adding new Displayers - one for CoolMenus (CoolMenu4) and one for DHTML Lists (ListMenu). I also added support for a roles attribute (comma-delimited) that will hide menus when users are not in that role. Of course, you will have to use container-managed security for that to work, but it's easy - right? I'm thinking we should probably add a denyRoles attribute as well, as its a pain to add 5 roles just to exclude 1.

The problems I ran into with CoolMenus4 seem to be CSS related, and the Dropdown DHTML List is a little funky when you have too many nested items. Please feel free to dig in and fix these -> should be easy using good ol' view-source copying some files locally if you like. I can also post the source if you'd like, but I think you're more interested in just a demo.

Click here for a demo (expires on 12-15-02), or download the source.

The coolest thing about this bad-ass menuing system is that you can choose a new type of menu just by changing your JSP. Of course, a little magic and you can do it based on request variables or something of the sort. Check out the permissions page for an example.

The sweetest improvement I can think of is to now make the menu-config.xml file editable through a browser - and it'll save the results for you. Even sweeter - if you're really nuts - have this UI talk to struts-config and allow you to select forwards for locations! I could dig in and work on this thing for a week - but alas, I have a chapter to write! Too bad I'm only halfway done and it's due tomorrow :-( Oh well, at least the chapter will demonstrate some good code!

validator.w3.org

The W3C has revamped it's HTML Validation service and it shall be known as the MarkUp Validation Service from now on. I stumbled upon is when validating this site. It's now got a tip-of-the-day and links to all the different specs and associated services (i.e. CSS Validation). For you reading pleasure, here's a complete list of what's new.

Missing Valid CSS Icon

The W3C's Valid CSS icon (and server) seemed to disappear over the weekend - forcing me to install a local copy of the image, and to quit relying on their servers. If any of you are having a similar issue, feel free to download it (right click -> Save Image As...) from here, and change your img's src attribute to reference a local copy.

Flexible CSS Layouts

I feel like I quote Zeldman a lot, but he always has such good things to share that I can't help it! This time it's Issue 155 of A List Apart, for people who make websites: “Flexible Layouts with CSS Positioning.” He also suggests that we read “Accountability of Accessibility and Usability” by Anitra Pavka. The title’s a mouthful but the content is easy to digest. Pavka examines web accessibility in the light of recent legal challenges and invites our industry to create guidelines instead of waiting for Big Brother to tell us what to do.

BTW, anyone know why he uses target="eljefe" in his <a href>'s? I always end up removing them in my source. I say let the user do what they want - if they want to open the link in a new window, right click -> open in new tab. Notice I said tab, not window - who uses IE anymore when Phoenix has it all and more!